skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Good for you. Premium products are not for everyone.

Ouch, you are off course right, my nexus 4 only has 1280x768 screen vs the 960x640 screen in your 4S and as a non-premium product owner I only get 110% the talktime and a piddling 200% standby time plus your premium product has a full 512Mb RAM vs the miniscule 2Gb in my non-premium product and the 0.3 megapixel front camera vs the 1.3megapixel camera in mine is just outstanding luckily though your 800Mhz dual core A9 will annihilate my quad core 1500Mhz Krait.

Luckily you will be able to upgrade to the 5S which will then have a glorious 1136x640 screen vs the 1280x768 in the current (and about to be replaced) N4.

> my iPhone 4S with a new 4S for about 280 USD; I had bought the iPhone 4S for about USD 960

Good customer service, so you paid 1240 for two 4S's, I can buy 6 N4's for that and still have 40 change (though this is disingenuous as they just dropped the price so call it 4 and a good night out).

Better hardware, less than half the price, more open platform and I can run it on giffgaff so for £200 plus £15 a month payg I get state of the art hardware plus 400 minutes, unlimited internet, unlimited texts and I can upgrade whenever I want.

That sounds premium to me.
dangerous business, ijburg :p
How exactly does a vodka bath affect an earthworm? Do I have to take the class to find out?
Mobile Software Engineer. Or as I like to call myself App Conjurer
I know of several large users of Python + Phusion Passenger. Globo.com, one of the largest media companies in Brazil, runs Django on Phusion Passenger on some of their sites. There was also a site that monitors the forest firefighting progress in California, that runs on Python + Phusion Passenger. Unfortunately I forgot its name.

We run Graphite (a Django app) on Phusion Passenger on our internal servers.

By the way, we open source Node.js support in 4.0.16. Previously it was only available in the Enterprise variant. You can learn more at https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Node.js
Simulate SymLinks on Rackspace Cloud Files
Stats like that are private not because they might encourage competitors to enter your space, but because they might give your existing competitors ammunition to use against you. Very obvious example: someone who is considering becoming your customer may chose a competitor if they know that the competitor has three times as many users as you.

Or maybe you're doing really well, but you want to save the fact that you have over a million users and use it up get a great press story at a strategic moment.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep your numbers private.
>Like I said in OP, we've identified MySQL to be the primary bottleneck and are already working on resolving this.

Ah, yes. I remember from your prior post that you have very large databases and table sizes and are considering (or have begun) partitioning the largest tables. It turns out there is an innate partitioning scheme built into the most recent MySQL versions, but it has to be compiled into the running binary by way of a compiler flag:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning.html

I apologize if you've already heard this, or if it's already in place as a partial solution.
Is this not just another point in a decades long quest to save LISP?

Maybe LISP doesn't need saved? Maybe it's okay that a language isn't popular? Maybe It's okay that a language isn't hip? Maybe it's okay if a language doesn't have the latest gee wiz social status? The fact that people keep trying to save LISP every 4 or 5 years could mean it's perfectly fine how it is. I don't see people trying to save the COBOL, or FORTRAN, or <insert favorite esoteric language here> community.
Hi, I worked in both roles. I did an undergrad in theoretical Math and MFE. Its particularly easy to get a risk management job. My first job was for 100k + bonus out of school for BNPP. It is a highly quantitative risk department and was one of the best (if not THE best) institutional risk management gigs on the street. I did not know this at them time but I started in 2007 and after 2008-2009 I came to this conclusion.

Anyway back to main subject. Risk jobs are easy to land and you can learn TONS or nothing interesting. Every shop has Risk integrated at different levels. Some shops its a backoffice type job where the risk guys are in the back seat (and this is the dominant case actually 8/10 I'd say). And rarely in places like BNP will you sit on the trading floor and have more power than traders. Yes traders will actually fear you... Rather than vice versa where Traders that are making money are big swinging dicks doing whatever they want (this is still the case at most shops).

I started quant trading by chance when some guys running an arb blackbox were started constantly loosing money and were working late hours. I gave them a hand fixed a few bugs and word quickly spread. Next opening they offered me a position and I did an internal transfer...

After I went to managing a portfolio (2 years after). And successfully did that for 4 more years.

The summary is this. Quant Trading roles actually come in tones of flavors.

Banks have option desks and in the recruiters will call these "quant trading roles". Hell, for all they know there is complex math involved and 'quant' sounds sophisticated. Truth is all option traders are proficient and calculus and derivatives to the point good traders are able to calculate pretty accurate 2nd orders in their head. And the tools available are also vast.

But this is not a 'quant trading role'.

A true 'quant' role is what some institutions have in house 'quant' teams that manage all the pricing models and libs.

A 'true' quant trading role is stat-arb or some other arb strategy desk or similar type of strategy. Most banks do not have them anymore so its hedgefunds only. But even these vary vastly in quality. I know desks that would make 2-3 million a day net with very shitty hardware and patchwork system with lowlevel to mediocore guys working on it. And brilliant guys whom struggled (talking tier 1 guys, PHd MIT, princeton).

So its a strange game and I would recommend going into a trading role into a medium level shop. Whats important is a good team and having a good vibe with the people you will work with.

Trading is high stress and high emotion business so for your sanity in the long term its more important to work with good people rather than a top tier shop in the beginning.
It is especially suited to highly complex tasks. (Your code should stay as simple as possible.)
Theoretical max efficency of PV is 40% and we're not likely to get there any time soon. Do the math:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-eff...

We're at about 15% now but let's be generous and use 20%. Neglecting the mounting angles and resulting reflection, that gives 640 watts collectible if you cover the whole car.

So you're collecting 3.2 miles of range per hour of peak sun. Note that the sun is not at peak elevation for 12 hours per day.

The middle of the country averages about 5 peak-sun-hours per day, so that means you're adding 15 miles of range per day of sitting in the sun.

It's not nothing, but it's very close to nothing. Useful to keep the car from self-discharging while it sits in long-term parking at the airport, perhaps. But it's not gonna provide meaningful range extension. The average EV has about 100-mile range, so if we assume a moving average of 33mph to make the math easy, you're moving for 3 hours, during which you collect enough power to actually move for 10 more miles. If you happen to be driving at noon in summer...
> This is another case of Apple skating to where the puck is going to be in maybe 2 or 3 years time.

That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means. It has nothing to do with planning for a long product life.

"Where the puck is going" is towards affordable off-contract phones and cheaper carrier monthly costs. The 5C is Apple doubling down on the carrier subsidy model. It's the model that makes the 5C seem competitively priced.

It's ironic because Apple is often credited as standing against carrier power, when in reality the status quo is exactly what will allow Apple to keep making those legendary profit margins on iPhones.

Once unsubsidized becomes the norm (as started by T-Mobile and now being adopted by others) they're going to be forced to compete on price at the expense of margins. They can stay exclusively on the high end if they want, but the high is going to be ~300-400 at most.

That's where the puck is going. Selling a 2012-grade 5C for competitive price in 2015 is not "where the puck is going".
In essence, we have a reward structure that we think is internally consistent, attracts the right sorts of research, and makes an optimal use of our resources - and we try to apply it fairly.

Here, we handled the communications poorly, and I think it's OK to call us out on that. In fact, I think it would be wrong to offer a reward in hopes of buying silence from the reporter :-)
As a newish freelance/contractor, what stood out to me is that's a shit tonne of money made there. I wonder if there's contracts close to that floating around still.
(1) Like dpcx said, dealing with that isn't premature optimization.

(2) Be careful about load averages, lots of people don't understand them. It just means the number of processes ready to run over a period of time. It is entirely possible to have a very high load average with a very low cpu utilization. A bunch of little processes that hop on and off the run queue really quickly because they only have a little bit of work to do at a time can kick the load average up way higher than a single self-contained process doing the same amount of work with the same amount of total cpu utilization. The single process wins on context switches, but modern cpus cache those in hardware so its barely a win any more.
NSA sponsors cyber operations training at univ's. Here’s what students learn
This is pretty good math work. Take a look at the actual data below.

Shares of Household Income by Quintile, 2011

Quintile	Share
Lowest quintile	3.2
Second quintile	8.4
Third quintile	14.3
Fourth quintile	23.0
Highest quintile 51.1
People use services like Doozer, Zookeper and Etcd because of consistency+availability guarantees. S3 will give you the availability, but not consistency. If you can sacrifice consistency, there are tons of trivial ways of doing this (in addition to your suggestion of S3):

* DNS with slaves

* LDAP with slaves

* Rsync of a directory of config files

* Pair of web servers or NFS servers or Samba servers using either rsync or a redundant network filesystem (e.g. GlusterFS) or block device (e.g DRDB) to back it.

Solving that problem is easy. It's once you need/want the consistency guarantees things get dicy.
> explains that all your customers need to do is install Chrome, it might get a little ugly.

No, since these are his customers exactly because they don't want to install Chrome.
I like the layout of the book. For a self publish book how did you get the layout and typesetting to look that good?
Should be tagged [2012]. Rubyist briefly falls in love with CL, then falls out of love. News at 11.
I'd love to hear it.

My experience has been an abundance of charlatans. The other issue is that 60% or 6 out of 10 is deemed the best you will ever get out of a Dutch person. And, a lack of accountability in anything that's done - so if it's not done, nothing is said... poor.
For a ball, can't I just randomly generate two angles (0-2pi)?
> - Open up the reader. A Lisp without full reader macros is unlikely to win over all potential converts, not because reader macros are this incredibly common thing, but because the personality of most Lisp hackers tends to thinking like "well I don't think I'll need a reader macro, but why would I want a language that won't even give me the option?"

While I agree that most of the other points are valid personal opinions, this one could safely be ignored. New Clojure users are largely converted from the enormous Java, Scala, Ruby, ... developer pool, and ignoring the projected wishes of (Common) Lisp programmers is a valid choice.
Yes, big suppliers do have "skin in the game" and also big companies have long relationships with big suppliers. Many have Approved Vendor Lists and to do business with them you have to be approved first.
My understanding is that a lot of people had bad experience with FTTP/FTTH when it was first rolled out in the US, because the telco would cut the copper cables that lead to the house. This meant that once you switched to FTTP/FTTH, you had no way to switch back to ADSL (or that it was prohibitively expensive to do so).

In my neighbourhood in Canada, FTTN is quite common, and speeds of 25Mbps/10Mbps and 50Mbps/10Mbps are commercially available using VDSL to cover the last mile between the node and the home (and this is well below the theoretical capabilities of VDSL, since the telco is also using VDSL to deliver the TV component of a triple-play package ). While a new modem is still required, since the last mile is still copper, it means that switching from ADSL to FTTN+VDSL and back is easy (alleviating concerns that a FTTH provider might suddenly jack up prices knowing that you can't switch back to ADSL).

I believe the local telco has started rolling out FTTH to select areas, but:

- it's available in far fewer neighbourhoods than FTTN

- the monthly fee is much more expensive (think $150 CAD/month, compared to $40/month for FTTN)

- there's an expensive installation fee for FTTH

- the bandwidth cap on FTTH doesn't increase proportionally with bandwidth compared to FTTN or ADSL; the caps are so low that you're basically on usage-based billing for all usage above the base monthly fee
Or, my favorite category, cookbooks. Look at traditional baking directions: "Begin heating oven to XXX, mix dry ingredients in bowl, add butter, whip, ..." Doesn't get any more imperative than that, and yet people around the world often have great success replicating the desired results.

After living with a chef for a couple of years, I came to believe that recipes would be much more effective if less imperative and more focussed on exposing the contribution and relative importance of each ingredient/process for the final result. In cooking there is much variation on the inputs: I want to know if the lemon juice is there for taste or acidity so I can tell if I have a bad lemon and for what I can replace it.

It's like GPS navigation: the step by step instructions will often lead you off track. Let me see final destination on the map.
If you don't tell your lawyers what you want, they will try to remove every problem.

Tell your lawyers you want decent terms, and you don't want to spend forever working on contracts, and have them explain the risks you face from the contract the other party proposed.

Failing to engage with lawyers and then not liking their results is like managers who fail to engage with software developers and then don't like the results. You need to tell them what you want.
They've certainly taken a stance on porn that is opposite of, say, Apple.

Too bad you're being downvoted for expressing a different opinion on porn.
Your analogy doesn't hold. The "roads" are carrier networks, and the iPhone plays well in most of those (in fact, latest models have impressive band coverage for data).

Not even sure how Apps fit into the car analogy, but they sure as hell aren't even fuel, maybe accessories or tires?

You're right - a car analogy just don't fly.
Thanks for posting this. I just replaced the <section> I was using on one of my projects by a <main>. In the context of this project, this particular container was always meant to be unique anyway; and it had been bothering me a bit these past few days to know that I wasn't using <section> quite as intended. Using a <div class="main"> wasn't a very sexy alternative either.

Quite sure that when I read the list of HTML5 elements a while back, <main> wasn't in the list! Glad it got added.
I've had load issues in Postgres, not MySQL before and it was due to autovacuum running on tables getting updated/inserted frequently. I'm not sure what the equivalent in MySQL is, but if you have a ton of insert/update queries, consider archiving your tables after a certain period of time, so that your main table doesn't have ton of rows. You can consider sharding of course, but also consider sharding the actual tables in the same database. An insert query on a table with 1000 rows will take much much less time than an insert query on a table with 100 million rows, all things considered.

Also, consider creating a buffer in the application layer that buffers inserts/updates and executes them once as a single transaction, if they don't need to be executed immediately. It puts less stress on the database. Of course, this would require a lot of rewriting in your app, so not sure if you want to go through this route.

Indices are another area. I'm sure plenty of people have told you to optimize your indices, but also consider REMOVING unnecessary indices. Do you have an index on a text column, or multiple varchar columns? Those can be killer after awhile because inserts will slow down. Consider changing indices on varchar columns to indices on an int column by hashing those strings.

A quick suggestion: Install NewRelic (it's free for a certain period), and check out the database transactions that are taking up the most CPU load. Sometimes there's that 1 query you overlooked that is table scanning and could be the main culprit.

Also, are you using Rails by any chance? If so, there are other areas I can suggest.

And please post your server specs. Maybe your VPS just does suck (no offense), and the easiest route is just to upgrade your server.
O-pen sesame: getting the most from penetration testing
For a general-purpose developer interview question, I think this relies a little too heavily on domain-specific knowledge to be generally useful.

Personally, while I was quite decent at algebra and geometry in university, my skills have atrophied significantly, to the extent that I really didn't know where to start with this problem. I don't think it represents what most programmers do on a day-to-day basis, and someone with a strong math background would probably be far more capable of answering this, despite not necessarily being a better developer.

If this sort of thing represents what developers at your company would likely be doing on a daily basis, I think it could be a relevant question. Otherwise, I think a question like this is very likely to inadvertently screen out good developers.
Apple wisely brings its iLife strategy to the iPhone and iPad
Detecting program-tampering in the cloud: advances in zero-knowledge proofs
I'm wondering if those improvements will actually matter to customers - I'm seeing diminishing returns with respect to putting R&D money into phones.
Can't those modules simply depend on GCC? FreeBSD is no longer building GCC by default. You can still build GCC as an option.
Indeed, it would not be long before the press makes the case that 0% tax for media would be awesome for everybody. "There would be no commercials!", "Think of the children, we can make quality programs with more cash!" etc. etc.

Direct democracy is not a solution. The solution is the thing we're doing now. The system works in the sense that we're righting it by having this kerfuffle about the secrecy. And something will change, and then the issue will be forgotten for awhile and the story will repeat.
Clang has been the default compiler for a while now, and many ports either work just fine or have been patched to work properly with clang. Ports that really need to use gcc (those depending on OpenMP perhaps) can still depend one of the gcc ports.
500 k is nothing for a Fortune 500 company. When they work with a small company they know it might be write off (ie the small company cannot deliver and the money spent is wasted).

So they won't sue but they have internal processes that say everybody must sign "The Contract".
I came to precisely the same realization about ten years ago, after struggling in vain with the culture and quirks of Common Lisp. There's no question that learning Lisp in some form will make you a better programmer but don't get caught up in the cult that surrounds it. Virtually all of Lisp's innovations now been validated and adopted by more mainstream languages and the fact that nobody has picked up the s-expr syntax is telling.

These days I focus more on writing useful code and making end users happy and I've found that to be much more satisfying than wringing my hands over the inelegance of everyday languages.
Side discussion- As a kitesurfer/snowboarder/skater I think can appreciate the more technical aspects of windsurfing and not just look for 'wow' factor. But what I find difficult to watch in freestyle windsurfing is the 'sinking' or 'stopping' after tricks. It seems that in order to do anything really impressive you're going to just stop after you land. I think the best looking tricks in windsurf (and all of these sports actually) are ones where you leave the tricks with (close to) speed you entered with - such as certain tricks done on waves or some of the less technical 'pop' tricks. To me the root of this problem really comes down to the size of the gear you are having to throw around. In comparison, kitesurfing really frees your body up when riding and allows you to move around more in the air, as well as providing a 'pull' from with more freedom of control than a windsurf sail.
The Perks and Pains of Trying to Live an Open-Source Lifestyle
I have to disagree with this. It would easier conceptually and faster computationally to use rejection sampling:

do {
x = uniform()
y = uniform()
r = x*x + y*y
} while (r > 1)
x = x/sqrt(r)
y = y/sqrt(r)

This does generalize to higher dimensions d, although as d gets large, you waste more samples. For spheres embedded in a handful of dimensions, it would still be fine, and it avoids all the transcendental functions associated with Normal variates. It's due to Marsaglia (1972).
<file grep xyz

works in bash for one.
Restarting the processes isn't really solving the problem. What is the actual bottleneck? It should be possible to figure this out.

I think your first problem is that you are using a VPS. You should never use a VPS in a high load situation like this - buy a dedicated server! They only cost about $70/month, which you should be able to afford if you have a successful site. Ideally you should get as much RAM as you can afford and/or an SSD drive.

I know you said you didn't want to throw hardware at the problem, but there are limits - you can't run a massive database on crappy hardware and expect it to work smoothly.
You won't have to wait for long! Initial patches have already been accepted as of August 27th.

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.clang.devel/...

http://clang-omp.github.io/
Quote: "However, a financial crisis in the Western hemisphere coupled with other macro/socioeconomic factors has lead to a reduction in scientific and engineering budgets and later-stage investment in such technologies."

Translation: The recent worldwide economic meltdown was caused in part by quants' inability to accurately assess investment risks, or to influence decision-making, or both. The fallout was public distrust (justifed or not) of quants and what they do for a living.

The bottom line is that reliable quantitative analysis hinges on the degree to which economics is a science. Economics isn't a science. Any questions?
> For a ball, can't I just randomly generate
> two angles (0-2pi)?

Why would that be uniformly distributed?
Now the NSA will have our fingerprints
It's not very clear from the article why this solution is superior to using a x-mixed-replace/multipart stream that contains image/jpeg bodies. If you don't have any audio just stream your jpegs using the x-mixed-replace HTTP response type. All browsers support it (even IE6).
Building a Minimum Viable Product? You're Probably Doing it Wrong