skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My progression has been PaaS -> AWS -> Digital Ocean -> Dedicated and I strongly feel that if you're going to make the leap from PaaS to VPS, it's not a whole lot harder to go dedicated and there you'll find much sweeter value. I'm currently on an OVH SP2 (Xeon + SSD + 32GB ram in a data center in Quebec so not terrible latency to where I am in the northeast US) that I pay $90/mo for (http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp2.xml) and it's just jaw-droppingly powerful. If you're going to go through the trouble of migrating your app anyway, it's worth taking a good look at dedicated offerings like that as well.
Kudos to the author for including their code. Too many benchmarks don't. And it is amazing that JS is even in the same ballpark as Java.

That said, like all benchmarks, there are systematic biases. I looked at the binary trees benchmark. The obvious problem is that it uses far too few iterations (100), so the runtime was 60 milliseconds (on my laptop). That's really not enough time for JIT to kick in, although probably JS does JIT more eagerly than Java. I upped it to 10000 iterations: (OpenJDK) Java took 3.3s, JS (with node) took 7.8s, C++ took 15s. (C++ is really hurt by garbage collection vs alloc/free.) Switching C++ to use Google's TCMalloc brought it down to 10s.

When you see a benchmark that says that X is faster than Java, and X does not include the letter C, take it with a pinch of salt!
The venture is putting amazon in the news so it also has PR implications for the rest of their business. It isn't clear yet if it will be a positive or negative impact on their reputation, but perhaps they are using this as an icebreaker into other luxury markets.
I wonder about the idea that Twitter will fill the role of something like Slashdot/HN/&c. At my Peak Twitter, I followed a couple hundred people, but the stream is so full of noise that the work of picking out the signal began to drown out any possible benefit. Retweets, for instance, I see as 99.99% noise. The ads are annoying, but ads are annoying everywhere.
I'm not sure why, but the word rubyist always irks me. It strikes me as pompous and egotistical. And I've been a ruby developer for 7 years.
Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages (1996) [pdf]
Agreed. The screen my girlfriends iPad broke edge to edge, so I decided to bite the bullet and go pay to have it replaced. Took it to the Apple store, he looks at it for a second and runs into the back. Hands me a new one(refurb?) and (after verifying that I backed up already) says "You're all set! Have a good day". I was pleasantly surprised, and looked like an awesome boyfriend.
Looking Back at the 1950s, Looking Ahead to a Polio-Free World
Neither party cares about the issue because the people don't care, and your conclusion is that the system is broken? As far as I can tell, the system is working fine. Polls of the public at large show mixed results, but I bet if you polled actual voters (skewing older) you'd find comfortable support for the status quo. Essentially, the privacy issues don't affect people's quality of life but people worry that terrorism will. Who are you to say that the system is broken because it reflects the priorities of the majority of voters, just because you disagree with those priorities?

If you had to personify the American polity, they'd be my mom, not you or me. She supports aggressive policing to keep drugs illegal (she'd probably vote to make alcohol illegal if that were on the ballot). She's pretty skeptical of Snowden, and would say "what do you have to hide?" but also thinks the government holds up her check deposits because she's got a foreign last name. She might argue with the details, but she supports the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA, etc. She's a little skeptical of unions. She supported Hilary Clinton.

She's a bright woman. She works as an interior designer, but has a masters degree in chemistry from her home country.

My mom votes, in every election. I don't vote regularly, nor (statistically) do other people in my age group, but my mom does. I can't look at her, and at the status quo, and say: "the government does not represent the views of Americans."
LiveScript looks amazing. I love how much F#-y looks. I'm definitely going to start using it for personal projects.
Any successor will, by necessity, be named something else, so... Yeah, I agree, there can never be another "Hacker News."
How does this app make money? And why is it getting so much attention now even though the same idea's been done before?
Fiddler on your desktop machine - http://fiddler2.com/documentation/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Co...
I doubt Apple shares this info with the Telcos or why this is even useful to the Telcos. They already know the cell tower you are in. Granted they don't know the exact coordinates but for the most part that should be enough for the NSA. The telcos already know your home address and in some cases where you work as well.
Beta list - list of upcoming apps
Heh, just saw this. Brian is my fiance and I run a funded startup here in Austin (see my profile, although we're about to rebrand.) So it's not a fair fight. ;)
From Idea to MVP: Design Series On Building a Start-Up From Sratch
Not really a Show HN since I'm still working on it. It's not great, but I hope it's helpful?
I aggressively mark people as "do not show retweets from this person", and it makes a huge difference for cutting down on the noise.
I had no trouble using the mouse+kb with the rift. Also, the Razer Hydra seems to be the controller people are converging on. I believe Carmack will have a huge impact on getting other developers to adopt the Oculus VR tech. It's one thing for Palmer Luckey to get the support of Valve, Carmack, and others, but it's a whole different world when Carmack can spend his productive time improving the product, getting other developers to adopt it, and bringing it to market.
Ask HN: Why are some of the most downloaded iOS apps so poorly designed?
Check out the top independently made apps in the iTunes store. Look at the Health & Fitness category, for example. You'll notice a trend: most of them are horribly designed. Just plain ugly. If branding and UX matter, than why is the top of the app charts not filled with beautiful, easy to use apps?
Seeking Work - Remote (based in San Francisco)

Background: thoughtbot, ZURB, Coveo, Atlassian, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont McKenna College

Things I do: Back end dev, front end dev, Full stack dev, Design (I have a partner who designs)

My usual stack includes: Ruby on Rails, HTML, HAML, CSS, SASS, Heroku, Angular.js, Javascript, jQuery, Postgres, Photoshop, git, Ruby, ZURB Foundation, Responsive design

I can also do: Backbone.js, PSD to HTML, Bootstrap, PHP, MySQL

I've worked with over 25 clients in 4 countries and am always on the look out for interesting new projects. I won't belabor an explanation of my philosophy and experience on this thread, but please visit http://nealke.mp or email me if you are interested in learning more. You can contact me at me(at)nealke(.)mp
This is a horrible article, nothing but fear mongering.

There's no bug, this is just how it was designed.

Elliott Kember, the supposed discoverer, is way behind and is stupid, mostly for taking credit for this "discovery". I was using this feature to find forgotten passwords months and months ago.
I thought this only happens with your permission. I remember this is in the first few screens after you update. Also in the screen shot of his it clearly shows he gave permission to remember location. Why is this news? What am I not seeing?
Dealing with academic rejection
If only Twitter weren't so restrictive with their API, there would probably be a solution for Twitter spam by now.
I actually did buy an extended warranty for our Prius. It was a lease, and the warranty then covered the car to the end of the lease. On top of that, it covered all oil changes and maintenance checkups listed in the maintenance schedule. I ran the numbers and found that it was basically the same cost as paying for that maintenance directly, but this way the cost was rolled into the lease payments. I figured it was a clear win for the piece of mind and easier budgeting. Of course, the costs could vary, so always run the numbers.
Sure. Not that it helped any. Interestingly, it's more my "untechnical" friends - exclusively those, actually. The technical ones are somewhat invested in technology news and wouldn't do that because they understand a lot more of the process. On the other hand, those that are dishonest in this way, in my experience, know nothing about the tech of Apple except that it's, well, new and shiny.

As for myself, my iPhone 4 is half-broken and I'm still eeking out whatever life I can get from it before I get the iPhone 6 in the Fall.
LinkedIn Interns Flashmob All-Hands Meeting [video]
I'd argue that if you're more than 2 loops deep then you should, as I stated before, seriously evaluate your design decisions.

And, should you do so and end up in the same place, you may have stumbled upon that 0.1% of the time that I left wiggle room for in my first claim.
Yes, I was referring to Erlang's QLC module.
"I don’t think it’s going to work that way any more. I think that the power has decentralized. Successful people on Twitter basically can fulfill a lot of that same role. You can follow Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble and Tim Lee and you can get a pretty good summary of what’s happening around the universe."

But then, I have to know to follow those people. And I get a load of crap from them about their lives and networks that I don't want. Somehow having to 'click through' 30 links on HN is too much work, but constantly keeping up with the latest hot people on twitter isn't too much work? Makes no sense. Aggregators have served a purpose, and will continue to, for a long time.
Author here. The "regular JS scores" do REALLY well on several benchmarks (faster than native, even), for one primary reason: the transcendental math cache (which every JS engine uses).

This is a very specific optimization that expects that functions like "sin", "cos", and "tan" will be called repeatedly with the same inputs, and puts a cache in front of those functions.

In sunspider, this helps. In the real world, we call this "overoptimization for sunspider".

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Sunspider is a poor benchmark to use to talk about JS engines. All of them game it - ALL of them.

If I _had_ included the regular JS sunspider scores, the comparison would be unfair since all the JS engines are specifically optimized for sunspider.

The reason these benchmarks are somewhat appropriate for Java and C++ is _because_ Java and C++ compilers and libraries have not been optimized with sunspider in mind, and things like the transcendental math cache don't skew numbers.

(Also, to be clear: OdinMonkey, the asm.js compiler in SpiderMonkey, does NOT use the transcendental math cache like the optimizer for regular JS code does. This is why "plain JS" is faster than asm.js in several of the benchmarks).
However, their enthusiasm and sense of adventure have reminded me, once more, of grander purposes. Beyond the code and financial models, the business and the politics of the startup, there are insanis praedonum, latin for crazy pirates. And these insanis praedonum can’t be stopped. They roam the planet in search of the things their mother told them not to touch and teachers told them were foolish. Where books and movies require fiction to tell the tales of extreme adventurers, insanis praedonum need no such literary license. And though gold may be the excuse they share with others, it is the unconquerable human spirit that actually drives them, these insanis praedonum.
Oh, I'm not too surprised to hear that R isn't a full fledged programming language. I found python very natural to use, since I currently program mainly in Ruby (and, Java/C++ a while ago). Python felt easier for me than R, but that's probably related to my background.

Some of this may also simply be a result of doing some exercises in Python (in the coursera class), and not doing any R. I was pretty bummed that we didn't't get at all into R in the coursera class, because sometimes just getting set up a little bit (like having some sample skeleton files for homework) and a few exercises can make a big difference. Not meant as a knock on the course, which was free and (I thought) very good. But a bit of exposure to R would be helpful (while I appreciate the importance of visualization, I do think that given the choice between tableau and an intro to R, I'd definitely have preferred R).
Yup! Its even linked to in the blog post.
THC Hydra v7.5
Alien and Jurassic Park are from 2005. :)
Get the votes and see what happens before you claim that it wouldn't matter even if you got the votes.

The greens and libertarians are way off the mainstream on a whole host of issues. Can I vote in favor of privacy without also kicking abortion and civil rights and all those things back to the states, who made a mess of them? Can I vote for privacy without also voting for unions? Neither the greens nor the libertarians offer a credible alternative.

People broadly believe in a strong central government. People broadly believe in social security and Medicare and the department of education. People broadly want a strong defense and a powerful military. Get on board with all those things and then see if people are receptive to your views on individual liberties and privacy.
Potentially a few in each county.
I think you might be underestimating how cheap bandwidth and hardware has become at scale. If anything, because of the nature of how VPS work, you can make good money as server hardware gets faster and cheaper.
I'm really excited about the possibilities that devices like this will bring. Once there is an easy and affordable way to facilitate indoor location we will see many cool things. There are a few players in this space and retail is/should be interested in this.

The hard thing to do as a retail operation is to use this in a way that provides real value. The last thing that I want as a consumer is another interaction on par with SMS messaging. But, if this allowed the retailer to gather information on the consumers wants and needs and provided valuable information back to the consumer that enhanced the shopping experience, it could be amazing.

I think it is smart to start with retail, but this has applications all over the place. I think the price point is extremely important. But once the price comes down and consumers and businesses can afford to purchase many of these, we will see many cool applications. If this was matched up with an easy way to program them, like IFTTT, home adoption would take off. It could really change the face of home automation.

In short, I'm excited and have preordered.
Sure, but in 2002 there was no iPhone and apps that could handle the Bluetooth signal and trigger different actions.
There was also no centralized App Store which could protect users and ensure the the quality.

We are sure there will be lots of marketing people trying to use this technology as a SPAM tool, but we believe that Apple with the the new iOS7 and the feature called iBeacon solve it in an elegant way. It's still under the NDA, but there are some publications about it: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1597348
But now you're comparing unoptimized javascript to java, instead of asm.js.
It's not about linking to Scoble, it's about what Scoble links to on his twitter account.

By following a few prolific and informed people on twitter you get a good sense of what's going on through what they're linking, that was the point being made.
In the same article he wonders how there can be eternal growth (the graph up and to the right quote) while limiting the discussion topics to a very small number, but doesn't see the inherent conflict in the demands.

This is a failure to identify audience. A desire for identical "fundamentalist clones". Maybe you just don't get those in a tech audience.

He made it very clear he's not interested in a coffeescript release. Obviously some subculture is... And thats not necessarily a problem.
I agree with you, but what I found really encouraging was how apparently easy it is to get your 3D game working on the Oculus. I play iRacing.com, and they released official support for the Oculus in their shipped product less than a month after receiving their devkit. That kind of turnaround is really impressive to me. I'm really excited to see what Oculus decides to release as their final product.
He seems convinced that /. was the last great success in tech news and there will never be another to replace it.

IMHO it failed for 2 reasons, too many political articles & social news is better than news aggregators. In the end most articles were about Microsoft & SCO being evil. Plus the rise of social news (twitter, reddit) have killed the need for news aggregators like slashdot & digg...slashdot was awesome, it unfortunately didn't evolve.

[edit] Forgot to add the /. comment system. It has too many features. Even today it's hard/annoying to use.
Indeed, both are mentioned in the related work page!
And he's comparing JavaScript with the JVM, not Dalvik. And on a laptop.
Blood, sweat and kanji
I recently discovered 'turbostat' for reading actual CPU frequency on Linux: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/tools/power/x86/turbost...

Bruce's direct testing approach has a certain elegance, but instead of timing a loop 'turbostat' queries the CPU's performance registers. So in addition to being handy if you are running Linux, it could serve as a guide for developers of other systems trying to figure out which MSR's are needed and how to interpret them.
Has anyone tried a site like this except with additional exclusivity? Can't vote unless logged in, can't log in unless invited? Or can't vote unless 'approved', or something similar?

Would it work better? It seems like the problem is that you get too many political submissions and polemic comments which get the votes but aren't "hacker news" in the sense of what that used to mean.

I've been here apparently 4.2 years (no idea how), and the only thing I really notice that's different is the marked uptick in political discussions as well as the more confrontational nature of commenters. Is that bad? I dunno.
It's easy. They're alligator mouths, that always go for the larger number (greedy alligators!)...
While I agree that there may be some short term gains to be made without integrity, there are a number of examples of successful companies that work very hard to maintain it that have seen great success, whether it is the customer service ethic at an Amazon or Zappos, or the need for the late Mr. Jobs to make sure even the unseen components were of the highest quality. Companies with integrity tend to build more stable platforms for success, though there are plenty of profit opportunities for those without integrity. (asserted with merely anecdotal proof...)
I'm specifically saying that the File System overhead is negligible for files/executables that are frequently accessed. Windows uses RAM to cache these files... Setting up a Process to execute said file vs a service that stays running is a different story.
There is a earning ceiling for software developers who do not sell, or are not lucky in the equity lottery.

That ceiling is around 100 USD an hour. It may vary geographically but its really a ceiling.

And guess what, on my little business park where I have an office, the owners of many of the businesses do not experience that ceiling. They sell.

I like their nice cars. I want one too. So I am learning to sell.

I also have "The Little Schemer" open next to me, and dream of the time when children learn the 4 r's - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and recursion.

Just because I want to sell, does not mean I am abandoning my principles or my profession. I hope to contribute further. But I want to be more secure, and earning more will help that a lot.
This argument is made constantly with hybrids and electric vehicles. Yet it is not made for any other vehicle that isn't the most economical option, so it sounds like a double standard to me.

I mean, if you look at what's on the road, you'll see a lot of cars that are more expensive than what could do the same job. Some people even pay extra for fancy wheels, sunroofs, bigger engines (which cost more in fuel), cosmetic modifications, etc.

So either we need to judge all vehicles purely on economics, or we should admit that car buyers are looking for other things than purely functional transportation at the lowest cost.
Have you updated your app for iOS 7?
Well, that was good a waste of time.
True, but it gives me the opportunity to call myself a Pythonian, so I'm OK with it for now.

People always come up with words to describe groups of people, Rubyist isn't the worst one people have come up with.
Can hacking help us "see" our health?
Show HN: Commoso | A Communications, Marketing and PR Marketplace
Many startups need marketing help but can't afford a full-time employee/don't know where to find freelance marketers, so I built Commoso (my first startup).

I would love to know what you think about the idea and what improvements I could make. Thanks in advance!

http://commoso.com
This exact same article was posted a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171813
N.S.A. Official use only - http://screen.waxy.org/screenshots/ENEMYO34.jpg
You fight terrorism by refusing to be terrorized. America (or at least, its successive governments) failed from the start.
A Simple Text Editor Foot Pedal
Agreed. HN is what it is, it's not an all-encompassing tech news aggregator like Slashdot was. HN is fairly focused with a few outside stories that creep in here and there.

I know everyone likes to run the 'back in my day' line every now and then so I might as well. Slashdot is crap now. Back in my day things were fairly relevant and, while there was a slight lag, if the story was interesting it made it to Slashdot quickly. Now stories might not show up for not just hours, but days! By then it's been discussed elsewhere to death so you only read the Slashdot comments for snark and not insight. The technology section of Google News is better than Slashdot (sans comments).

Also, the design of Slashdot is so 2003 it hurts. They let the look and feel get too long in the tooth and people abandoned it for better sites.
> Chrome should ask for the master Keychain password when you attempt to unmask a password. It does not do this, and it could easily do this (like Safari does).

Well, except that you can just dump the passwords from Keychain without the master password.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4518873
It has been tried. Exclusivity could arguably make things worse, since it leads to elitism and doesn't necessarily ensure the quality of content is better.
The retail applications are very obvious - imagine you walk in to IKEA and approach sofa you like the post. You want to buy it, so you take a phone out of your pocket, unlock it and BAM - so you the picture of the sofa, you could add it to the cart or read more about it.

If you go browsing for other furnitures some of them like a pillow might notify you that it fits to the sofa you have in the cart.

No more wooden pencils and obscure Swedish names you need to write down :P We posted a blog post about it http://blog.estimote.com/post/57087827916/wooden-pencils-are...
aaron's link seemed to disprove this.