skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We run a master-master setup between Oregon and Virginia, and its served us very well. We monitor MySQL instances for multiple customers, so uptime is a must; having a multi region setup has filled that role perfectly.
Excel Pivot Table Tutorial 
This video shows you how to create and manipulate a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel. You can use Pivot Tables to quickly create alternate views of your spreadsheet data. It accompanies the full article on VitaminCM.com.
Show HN: Traces - A mobile blogging app for your iPhone. By two biotech grads
Finally was motivated to try this out. Totally happy. Honestly, all I really wanted was python and a nice shell, but having a full OS is great.
ANN: Fogcutter Suite Synchronized Release - 418 Teapot
>>both groups completed it in roughly the same (median) amount of time.

Sometimes if there is no other option people just adapt. Even if it is uncomfortable.

Besides, it also depends on the tasks you are doing. I can pretty much code any regular problem-solution pattern in a noisy set up. But if I need to debug/trouble shoot. Or if I'm doing something new which I haven't done before I need some silence and undisturbed time to focus and get it done.
At most that certificate is good for 24 hurs. The user has to get his assertion signed by the identity provider too, and it is possible to get them pre-signed up to that same 24 hours. So the window of users is narrowed to the list of sites that queried the identity provider and the users who had an assertion signed within those 24 hours. Which is weakly anonymous for high-volume sites and no protection at all for low-volume cases.

However, the kicker is the protocol doesn't protect against the identity provider setting the expiration to something like 5 minutes, effectively unmasking the client and the website by requiring them both to talk to identity provider within that 5 minute window.
You would not want to implement PXC across regions - the round trip time would be too hard in individual transactions, and the ISTs would be murder to your bandwidth. Between AZs should be better, but remember with PXC that your transaction time is limited by your network round trip to the slowest node.

Regular asynchronous replication is your best bet, with a regular run of pt-table-checksum scheduled to ensure your data is consistent.
Here are writings from some other sources about the meaning of irony. Though some of them disagree with each other.

“If I were in charge of the networks” – comedian George Carlin’s opinion: http://www.sense.net/~blaine/funstuff/carlin.html

TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Irony. It lists seven types of irony: socratic, verbal, dramatic, tragic, situational, cosmic, and historical.

Everything2: “ironic” http://everything2.com/title/ironic and “irony” http://everything2.com/title/irony
Crowdsource Microsoft's new CEO
Regardless of field, I see this as the right attitude. You would be surprised how many eyerolls I get, even in IT!
Outsourcing has done much more harm to the american middle class than technology. For every job lost to automation in the US there are many that are lost to outsourcing.
Submitted by me 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266765
No, I'm not missing the point. I'm trying to figure out their logic here. Which, I believe would be that they are trying to pay "just compensation" for a mortgage, based on the actual value of the house, and a built-in discount. The question is: is this a fair estimate of "just compensation". And it just might be, if you look at the mortgages in aggregate. It is harder to argue with an individual home, but when the entirety of all homes underwater is taken into account, that has a known risk associated with it. Each mortgage is different at the individual level, and so the risk would be harder to include in a discounted price. But when you lump them all together, you can start to look at how the risk affects the entire group, so you could start to apply the risk discount across the board. Some will be more risky, and others less.

At least, that would be an arguable theory...
It's entirely possible that he recognized the threat but had to denigrate it for public consumption. But even if he says exactly that in his memoirs, nobody will believe him.
Read the Ars Technica article.

The hole in your logic is: there is no point in guarding against the case where, if two users share the same password, cracking one will crack the other, because the only time that two users share a password is when that password is really weak.

What are the odds that two users share the same password? If passwords were totally random and 24 characters long the answer would be "pretty low". And the odds of cracking one of these passwords by brute force would also be pretty low. If only we lived in that world.

In the real world the odds of two users sharing a password are frighteningly high, but that's because most passwords are awful: they are things like "pizzapizza" or even "password". The cracking programs can crack one of these in a millisecond, because they are equipped with lists of thousands of real-world weak passwords harvested from real websites. And then, if another user shares this awful weak password, that user will also get cracked, a few milliseconds later. There is no point in "parallelising cracking across users" because it's so easy to just guess all the weak passwords for every user.

Another way to think about it: A salt could only help in cases where (a) two users share the same password, but (b) that password doesn't appear in the list of several million other real-world passwords that is built into the password cracker. And that just isn't worth worrying about.
That's a good headline. We should start calling what NSA is doing "un-American" too - because it is.
Android might be a challenge as well if Samsung locks up their supply chain as tightly as Apple.
Could it be that he made his profit (With little upside from here) and looking for a reason to exit?

When someone made profit of a Billion Dollars in less than 2 years, there is more to it that what it looks outside.
Thanks for this. Everyone I know who uses R raves about how fast it is, so it was surprising to see the claim go the other way around.
AEGLE Life's mobile and web apps revolutionise healthcare Information Technology
Why do you think that third situation unlikely? For example, HP will be releasing their customizable ARM server, Moonshot[0], later this year. Furthermore, Facebook's PHP VM, HHVM, already runs on 64-bit ARM[1].

[0]: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/...
[1]: https://cards.linaro.org/browse/CARD-327
EBS is now per-zone. So as long as you are properly distributed across zones you should be fine.

The only caveat to this would be if you have a single point of failure. Like a PostgreSQL database or something else that just doesn't have a good high availability story.
us-east-1 is a region, which has multiple Availability Zones.
There is a huge community around wireless community networks in Germany. Checkout http://start.freifunk.net/

Don't miss the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks (http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/).
Erlang seems to pay a small performance penalty for that ability though. The VM is not allowed to run more than a few thousand instructions without checking for a signal to task switch.

But if that kind of guaranteed cooperation isn't needed, I'd expect that lightweight threads could be added to a language like this in a straightforward way.
Eminent domain isn't a punishment. The lender's interest is solely financial so they should be theoretically indifferent so long as they are compensated at market value.

The reason they care (and the reason the situation doesn't resolve itself without outside intervention) is that they're dependent on reporting improbably high property and loan values in order to not appear insolvent. The city doesn't care about this and is uninterested in punishing it, but they are interested in getting a large chunk of their tax base out of legal limbo and they have the legal right to do so.

This article makes a good rundown about how this is an unremarkable taking and likely to succeed in court:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-16/eminent-domain-isn-...
On average shareholder activism is good for share prices. Your assumption seems bad without more info. In particular, the fact that he led the push to hire mayer in the first place means that his net contribution to yahoo is probably positive.
Ha!

The term 'distraction' is defined as 'A thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else.'

Note, distraction specifically refers to a thing that 'divides your attention' in other words a 'distraction catches your attention'. If you surround yourself with 100 people doing things no way connected to you- and are pretty busy and loud, you are essentially isolating yourself! Have you ever had that 'I feel lonely in the crowd' feeling?

Walk into a hall full of accountants and tax consultants, and then try to code. Tax laws will seem so alien to you, and those guys will be so busy talking and chatting aloud. You will essentially be isolated and that will help you focus. On the other hand, walking into a room full of programmers or some topic in which you like. You will never be able to give your full, and will always have a tendency to eavesdrop on some ones conversation and that will tapping into your mental bandwidth.
A sort of invitation only controlled by social relations?
not perfect but at least, misbehaving people can be trackable..

should be based in social connections and trust.. the old school policy
>As AllThingsD‘s John Paczkowski wrote on Friday: “Here’s one metric by which Ballmer will be judged harshly. On the last day of 1999, the day before he took over as CEO, Microsoft’s market capitalization was $600 billion

That fails to take into account, the crazy dotcom valuation days and the subsequent big crash in 2000. Not to say that Ballmer did great as a CEO but that's just poor reporting. Microsoft did have its great growth days, like Apple recently did before petering out, but it was back in the 80s.
"recent pressure from activist investor ValueAct — which has a large stake in the company — had a good chance of succeeding in its efforts to obtain a seat on the board of Microsoft, especially if Ballmer stayed in place.
...
In talks, said sources, it has asked for an aggressive stock buyback and also a dividend increase, which might assuage its efforts to garner a board seat."

I agree that Microsoft has too much money, but would much rather see them investing much more heavily into bolstering their devices strategy. But then again, Microsoft was never good at acquisitions.

edit-
Appears that ValueAct is against the entire devices strategy, but I see no way for Microsoft to compete on the level it needs to without a strong devices play-

From: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/19/net-us-microsoft-v...
"ValueAct is thought to oppose Microsoft's recent foray into making its own devices."
Contrary to the editorialized title (which I'm sure will be changed soon), here's the best article on Unicode I've ever read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
Why solar photovoltaic technology will keep fossil fuel backers in their nappies
We run many (hundreds) of instances in most/all AZs, and this appeared to be about 30 minutes of flakiness in EBS instances created during 2012 (roughly) in only one us-east-1 AZ (Amazon randomizes the names, so my us-east-1e is different than yours).

Data point in favor of Amazon.
OpenID is a horrible idea. I have like a bunch of them, and I never remember if I signed up with Yahoo for this site or Google or whatever.

With Persona at least I know which email I use to sign up for random websites. I hope it succeeds.
A bit easy to game... Just submitted Bill Gates eight times.
The New Yorker ran a good article about the leaf blower issue in Orinda a couple years back. I can't stand leaf blowers either, but the article does a decent job of (among other things) pointing out that blowers are a necessary competitive technology for the gardening services.
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-10-25#folio=050
Some people just choose to use separate database names for each branch.
I live near both those things and can put up with the intermittent noise. Leafblowers are an invention of Satan and must be destroyed, preferably along with their owners and operators. They are the epitome of laziness.
It falls in line with running you ssh on an obscure port or putting your password database in .hidden/. Most likely it is just a false sense of security and security though obscurity. You are doing X,Y,Z and W and in the end you could have just used a KDF.

If anything the false sense of security plays tricks on you psychologically "oh look we have put our database in a .hidden directory. Nobody we'll find it here" and that makes you not pay attention at the weakest vulnerability -- a weak algorithm or parameters of the encryption.
> The problem with this is that a person makes an investment with a known risk profile

Which gets back to the root of the problem. Mortgage companies were not properly assessing (or outright lying about) the risk for some of these mortgages. A lot of those seemingly safe mortgages were in reality very unsafe.

Everyone needs to feel some pain on this one. Homeowners, mortgage companies, and investors - everyone who underestimated their risks should see some loss. If that risk wasn't properly assessed the first time around, then yes, it will cost more. Mortgages are at ridiculously low rates from a historical perspective, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to see those rates rise.

The people who really got screwed were those that had a properly sized mortgage, ability to pay it, but then had the value of their home drop when the rest of the market failed. If they were unable to ride out the collapse, it was brutal.
West Coast houses are made not to hurt when they fall on you

True, they're junk. In most places it would be smarter ot make them out of brick, and the chances that they'll fall on the occupant are very low indeed. Some of the oldest (pre 1906) houses in SF are made of brick, ditto in Oakland.
John Carmack: The Physics of Light and Rendering
Isn't that kinda their job?
I have two active kids and am reasonably active myself. We have probably received medical treatment a dozen times in the last year, a combination of walk-in clinics, personal physicians and emergency room visits, depending on the circumstances. During these visits, the staff have used equipment, given procedures and prescribed medication and have rarely, if ever, inquired about my thoughts on treatment.

When my son jumped off the couch and cut the inside of his mouth open, I wasn't asked my opinion on treatment. And if I had been asked, I would have simply said "you're the physician, do what will make him better the fastest." The same would have gone for when I had pneumonia or had to get a tetanus shot after getting fishhooked while surfing. My goal is simple -- recover the best the fastest.

How does one legitimately comparison shop for a baby delivery? Imagine, for instance, Hospital A says their births average $20,000 and Hospital B says their births average $30,000. Which rational prospective parent chooses the $20,000 option?

Hospital care is not like buying a car, where most people can consider themselves educated enough to make a decision based on competing factors -- perhaps I'm willing to give up some handling for a lower price or I'm willing to sacrifice fuel economy for more power.

The average person knows nada about the medical practicalities of giving birth (or treating pneumonia, or even stitching gums) so they cannot make informed decisions about what are reasonable tradeoffs.

As other people have said, medical treatment is an inelastic need. Parents don't say "you know, I'm cool with 50% less effective treatment for my child at 50% of the cost" and people don't say "you know, 90% functionality of my leg will be just fine if you can bring this in at a discount."

So not only do you have a lack of informed customers, you have a lack of choice in outcomes. A free market solution for medicine is a fairy tale spun by people of certain social and political persuasions.
The Application of the 50-80 meters cell phone jammers
Peru's archaeologists turn to drones to help protect and explore ancient ruins
Shareholder prices, right. That's one metric, and the wrong one to follow IMHO if you want to innovate and grow. Firing 12,000 people would have been devastating for morale of the company, even if Marissa bought other good talent and companies - and other problems with it too.
Moreover, unless you are Schneier or tptacek don't create your own obscure slow function, use a well known one like scrypt.
Could you explain why? The post below explains about how two users really shouldn't share the same password, and if they do, it's easily crackable - that makes sense. However, if you had a list of 100,000 passwords and did, say, a brute force attack of all passwords with letters, numbers, and special characters to a length of 8, without salted hashes you would be able to run that brute force once and grab every password matching the criteria. With salts, you would have to run it once per salt. Am I off on that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_netw...
I use a password manager but so many important sites still require me to use <10 characters in my password and then restrict the character space. It's crazy really. My two bank online accounts force me to use weaker passwords than any blogging service or email account I have.
In densely populated areas, WiFi can suffice due to the mesh topology.
GitHub under DDoS
PhantomJS uses the same mechanism that wkhtmltopdf uses (headless webkit) and thus requires the 'server-side trickery' mentioned by the parent.

Also, the correct link is http://phantomjs.org/
Yes, salting has a role to play. That is not the point. The point is that use of a weak underlying Key Derivation Function makes the benefits of salting nearly moot.

To fully spell it out: MD5 is a very weak KDF.

I would recommend looking into the KDFs mentioned in the comments here as alternatives: PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt.
The problem is making it anonymous, uncontrollabe, P2P, flies in the face with other aspects like performance. Wireless links simply do not have the capacity to afford 10,000 people the speeds they are accustomed to today.
Incidentally, Loeb has also been stirring up shit at Sony, as of late: http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/5/4592330/sony-ceo-kaz-hirai-...
The Facebook iOS shouldn't be running once it's off your screen. I really loved the iOS app actually. I went from S3 to iPhone 5 to HTC One. The Android app was fine when I was on the S3, but it seemed to have gotten worse while I was on iOS.

Battery usage on my HTC One has several times been double what my screen uses (very, very, very weird) even if I've swiped the app away from my recent apps after using it for maybe 10 minutes.

Either way, I've always been amazed at how terrible a company like Facebook is at designing a coherent mobile experience. Their Symbian, Windows Phonee, Android, and iOS apps are all different from each other and just hit (recent iOS is mostly fine) or miss (all the others). I think they have a different team for each platform.
The article focuses on what can hardly be considered a complicated good: salt water. Medical grade saline is highly regulated, and must be one of the most commodity products that exist in the country today. (The article takes pains to establish this.) It takes minimal effort to understand what it is or to compare prices. And yet, as the article says, there is no functioning market for it.

For something like "set this broken bone" sure, it's difficult to talk about the price for this risk vs. that risk. But for the liters of saline used during the procedure? That ought to be trivial to analyze. Yet it is not.
> Why do you think that third situation unlikely?

Using a non-Intel architecture for general-purpose compute slices seems like, at minimum, a huge toolchain investment.

Things are probably better now than they were five years ago (eg there seems to be LLVM support), but even assuming toolchain parity we're talking about having two flavors of each binary to maintain; a new constraint to consider when scheduling jobs; etc. (Edit: The HHVM ARM target is interesting, and mitigates some of these).

It's not impossible, but IMO pretty unlikely compared to the other more "traditional" possibilities.
It's interesting that the article fails to mention that Google Ventures just invested $250 million in Uber[1], so it's more like Google is essentially giving these cars to Uber rather than Uber buying them.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/08/23/as-google-v...
Firing 12,000 people ...

Point taken, but if you're referring to Loeb's firing plan that Mayer supported, the firing would have been towards roughly 2,400 - 3,600 workers, not 12,000.

From the article:

"... Loeb’s plan was to fire between 20 percent and 30 percent of Yahoo!’s roughly 12,000 workers — an idea Mayer initially supported ..."

Edit: yep, I agree it's still a lot, just wanted to point out the difference.
The Hackathon Experience Is a Hack
But if there is a database of 1,000 unsalted password hashes with no people having the same password. Your password cracking regime does 1 trillion guesses. So you hash each guess then try it against each of the 1,000 password hashes. That is a total of 1 trillion hash operations.

But if the database has individually salted hashes then you need to do each hash operation individually for each user. That means you have to do 1 quadrillion hashes. That will take 1,000 times longer.
I've always found this debate a bit pedantic.

The definitions listed include, "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result."

It's an odd definition to showcase to make the point that irony doesn't merely mean "the unexpected."

The prescriptivists should note that they've been losing this fight over usage since around the 1640s. And even if Alanis was the first to use the word in this way, there's another very strict rule of English: you may extend the meanings of words wherever you damn well please. If the extension is likely to cause confusion about your intended meaning, that's on you.

I will posit that no use of the word 'ironic' to mean 'unexpected' has ever confused anyone, except as to whether or not they should be an ass by pointing out how much more they know about what's proper than the speaker.
I'd add on to this to consider using CloudFlare and setting up page rules to cache static HTML so the majority of your anonymous reader traffic is served from their servers and not yours.
CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
Interesting JSTOR sidenote - before we made Coffitivity, this research was behind a Paywall, and we convinced them to remove it. It was weird timing when it happened, it was kind of emotional to speak to JSTOR at the time, but it's cool we can just link to it now.
Interesting talk by Nick Patch of Shutterstock about Unicode, why they use Perl, and what he calls best practices for working with encodings:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2FQHUHjo8M