skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the big items on my todo-list is to play a bit with aws (the Ada web server):

http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/

I've no idea what the architecture is like, but being Ada, I'm pretty hopeful it delivers some nice guarantees (or at least hefty promises) regarding reliability.

An hello-world example web server:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Libraries/Web/AWS

An outdated, probably flawed (aren't they all) benchmark:

http://wiki.ada-dk.org/aws_vs_node.js

If nothing else it seems to indicate that aws isn't hopelessly slow.

There's also awa - the Ada web framework. I've yet to play with it, but it would appear to be relevant:

http://code.google.com/p/ada-awa/

According to a stack overflow answer[s], Ada also comes with a spitbol-package, allowing you to use spitbol/snobol rather than regexpes for pattern matching. See eg the bottom of:

http://www.adacore.com/adaanswers/gems/gem-26-2/

[s] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5904053/web-programming-i...
The USB condom? Much lower-level than that: no data pins, only power.
What does it say about Apple? That they can do no wrong?
You don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Weird, I'm on an upward trajectory since 18. At 18 I was a total mess with low self esteem. Now I'm doing pretty damn good other than the constant poverty.
I thought NFC was more impressive then fingerprints ... :)
I disagree. The new iPhones are muddying up the picture and losing the distinctiveness of the iPhone - it is less and less an instantly recognizable phone, and since social signaling has always been a large part of iPhone marketing and image, that is a mistake. In the same vein, cheaper models kill the exclusiveness of the brand. In a way the gold model illustrates this shift perfectly, flying in the face of Apple's longtime 'tasteful and minimalist' philosophy and towards mass market.

Of course, this might be a calculated move to move away from exclusivity, in which case those things make sense. But that would be a little baffling in itself, given the huge profit margins a premium brand commands (while still having huge market share in Apple's case) compared to any old mass market device.
Agreed. You can see that he criticizes Apples cloud offerings. iCloud, Siri. They still have to mature and improve.

But the rest, I agree with Gruber 100% that it is apparent that Apple does not play the specs game like other companies simply to have a nice spec sheet you can read off like a Baseball trading card. They put in their devices things that are "fast enough" to achieve what they want to achieve. And it is apparent they are very good at that seeing as what kind of performance and thus resulting user experience they can get out of the hardware they use.

I still remember the times Android fans were raving just how much faster their phones were compared to iPhones just because it said so in the spec sheets. But when you actually used them, you would have a hard time not to laugh at just how jittery and overall unpleasant it was navigating through the Android UI. It was no contest compared to the iPhones back then.
"BMW is definitely in control of the luxury car industry"

I think VW Group and Mercedes-Benz might argue with that.

Of course, it depends how you define "luxury" but with Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche and Audi brands, VW Group seem to be doing pretty well.
Gravity Movie - Spacewalk WebGL Experiment
Not that they can do no wrong, they just don't do it very often.
Another example of a double standard where the corporation can violate regulations with impunity yet an individual is imprisoned for an inordinate term in regards to the act of incrementing a digit within a URL.
I'm pretty sure anybody with industry experience cringed when the government first launched this project. It strikes me the government would be better off devolving purchasing decisions to a local level where individual units can choose something off the shelf.
New open source key-value store from Spotify: sparkey
As someone with a little first hand experience in the NHS IT (I develop medical imaging software) I saw how at the mercy of the vendors the NHS became in the world of PACS (the systems used to store and retrieve medical images). Not only where they being charged vast amounts but the level of capability delivered was embarrassingly poor. I worked with many clinicians as a university researcher and again when I was working in clinical trials for a pharmaceutical company and they were continually amazed by what we could do with images; I heard the phrase "why can't we do that in the clinic" so often it was one of the reasons I moved into a medical imaging startup. I thought the limitations might be regulatory but after developing and successfully marketing an FDA cleared, CE marked piece of software we came to realise that the biggest obstacle in the UK NHS were the PACS vendors. Essentially they own connectivity to the images and made it almost impossible to integrate into their systems in a way that really addresses the clinical need. It doesn't help that the NHS seems to be filled with people only to eager to encounter a reason NOT to do something (in part I'm sure because everyone is too busy to add more to their plate). The technical competence of the senior folk was also often poor, they were usually senior clinical folk who relied on consultants for advice, often consultants provided by the vendors. The result was it got itself lumbered with long, expensive contracts that tied them into particular vendors which prohibited access to the wider ecosystem of solutions. Thankfully the NHS started to realise this and began rolling down many of these contracts. Hopefully a fresh start this year particularly with the cessation of the problematic Connecting for Health [http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/] program.
Show HN: Interface Sketch - free sketch templates for web, mobile and tablet
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee passes media shield law
Bitcoins & Inflation
> The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.

Consider yourself surprised then. ;-)

Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages.

There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_.

I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.
They promote the idea that they can do no wrong, and that everything they do is carefully thought out perfection (eg. screen sizes)
Yeah, he notably left out the elephant in the room that is the 4in screen.
Sounds like a fun side project. But I would not risk doing such thing for money - support would be a nightmare. And by the way, wasn't that what Go was developed for..?
Superb deal.
But consider having PS+ one year subscription. Totally worth it.
OK, thanks, I understand. (I hope we'll never read it in the news "thief cuts off finger".)
I don't think the author has offered a great argument in this article. Building a new website in C sounds like a fun learning experience, but it's not a practical choice for the typical startup CRUD app.

When you're a startup, your biggest problem 99.999% of the time isn't running out of memory or not having a fast enough app, but getting an MVP up and launched and finding enough paying customers so that you don't run out of money. Except in specialized cases where your app is very CPU intensive, C provides a major headache without a major immediate advantage.

But C is a great choice for replacing parts of your app if you start growing and when you start figuring out exactly what services need to be faster and use less memory.
I really don't understand his battery life claims. Either he doesn't use his phone much, or he charges it when ever he can.

A true revolation would be a phone that could last days without needing a charge. To my mind it's one of the great features of the iPads, you can leave it on playing video for literally 10 hours, it lasts days with average use.

For all the improvements on processors, screens and cameras we get very little inovation in battery technology and it's stifling the industry.
Thanks for the reminder about fossil. I tend to forget that it's all c (and therefore, must contain a wiki in c). Reviewing in that code base added to todo...
David Craig's book "Plundering the Public Sector" is a bit old, but it gives some details of how these projects were run and for whose benefit (there is a hint in the title):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plundering-Public-Sector-David-Craig...
The thing that irritates me is that he pretends to be an indipendent point of view, but he actually isn't.
Show HN: API Snippet Library
It takes something like Google Now for Gruber to realise Siri isn't great.

He does bash Apple for their services frequently.
Good discussion of your question: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24359/why-do-obje...
I think Gruber is usually either wrong, or right for the wrong reasons.

His articles read like he is constructing a narrative to fit a particular conclusion and world view. The people that I know in advertising/marketing all know that a lot of what they say is bullshit. I imagine its the same with Gruber - I dont think even Gruber believes Gruber.
So, I have a credit card attached to my iTunes account. Say my phone with TouchID gets stolen.

If what is said holds true, the absolute worst case scenario that could happen is that the thief actually hacks the device and gains access to the storage place of the encrypted hashes that should only be accessible by the sensor itself. He then somehow reverses this hash into a form that the iOS system would expect to come from the sensor. Then, he would be able to forego to fingerprint sensor and send the spoofed fingerprint signal to the system, making it seem like the owner touched the sensor. And since he now has access to my phone, he can do everything someone can do with an unlocked iPhone plus make purchases with my iTunesID.

This spoofed signal should be useless anywhere else outside the iOS system. I very much doubt that someone could re-factor this hash into an actual image of a fingerprint.

And if I get my phone stolen, TouchID or not, I would of course go and a) remote wipe the device which I hope includes the deletion of these encrypted fingerprint hashes and b) Maybe cancel the credit card attached to the iTunes account.
20% off all new domain names (350 TLDs)
"I would venture that we understand more of the immune system's complexity than any other system in the body"

NO - this is a completely and profoundly FALSE statement.

We have learned quite a bit about the immune system in the past decade or so but it is still one of the most mysterious systems in the entire body. The immune system is a black box from the standpoint of most clinicians today. It's an _incredibly_ overwhelming and complex system with dozens of interacting cell types and different molecules spewing into our bloodstream; with each of those cells containing tens of thousands of genes whose activity is dependent upon dozens of factors.

So it is far from being understood. But the research and technology is promising. Immunologists today still perform the same tests they did in the 1960s outside of advanced and experimental immune studies done at the university level.

Your generic explanation of cancers is also incredibly incorrect.
You don't know any of Neitzke's grad students by any chance, do you? A certain fellow with a fondness for army boots and camo fatigues used to live down the hall from me at Caltech....
This guy treats hindsight like prior foresight. He is continuously criticising other people for making bad predictions, but loves to say "I told you so" by cherry picking his own previous observations.

Surprise; Apple made a great device. Gruber loves it, everybody who counters that argument is a 'Jackass' making 'Claim Chowder' and so the world keeps turning.
In the early days when Perl was the CGI de jure the company I worked for wrote their cgi in C and ran on Zeus webservers. This was for performance on one of the most highly traffic'd sites at the time.
I just hope the surgeon turns her email alerts off before opening up.
> So when it comes down to it all you are really doing is string parsing and string transporting, thats really the last thing you want to leave to C.

Exactly. String parsing is the biggest shortcoming in C that always gives me a second thought when I'm about to choose a language for a higher level application (especially if it incorporates user input as strings). Even such trivial thing as AT command parser is a pain in C. Of course, there are parser generators as Bison, but still it's tedious amount of work and usually not worth it.
> it is less and less an instantly recognizable phone

How so? People were already using cases that camouflage the device somewhat.

>cheaper models kill the exclusiveness of the brand

This is the thing, there have already been "cheaper models". With every year when a new version comes out, the old ones got cheaper. Don't they give out the 4 or 4S for free with a contract right now?

You might also have heard bickering that the 5C is not the "cheap iPhone" everybody expected. Seeing as it is priced not nearly anywhere you would call "cheap".

Instead of continuing this behavior of simply keeping last years version of the phone around and selling them cheaper, Apple now decided to not do that this year and instead try and vamp up the old phone a bit so as to not just go "yeah, this is our new phone and of course the old one you already know but now, it gets a little cheaper"
Brazilian president postpones Washington visit over NSA spying
I would agree to a certain extent. We still have phones that last days before needing a recharge, but they are not smart phones (remember those Nokia candy bar phones?)

However, with the growth of smart phones, it seems that companies are focusing on one-upping each other on specs other than battery life. Most launches have always worked hard to keep the battery life at roughly 8 hours, no more no less, and spend any excess juice on more features. I'm pretty sure that the reason for this is the assumption that people will charge their phones at least once a day anyways, which would be a perfectly fine assumption IF the phones actually DO last 8-10 hours on normal use... but sadly for me, most of these phones usually last 5 hours with the level of intensive use that I put my phone through everyday.
I thought the whole idea was to allow sharing of patient data between units - how is that going to work if everyone buys their own system?

e.g. my son has an eye infection at the moment and we've been round 4 different places - GP clinic, optometrist, hospital, eye hospital over the last week. The process of getting the appointments was great (the time from asking for an appointment to the actual appointment time) has never been less than 2 hours - but this caused a problem in that the systems couldn't keep up.
In short because things move from a state of higher energy to lower energy. Not subduing yourself to gravity would take energy in opposite direction to counteract it (or the geometric slope in this analogy). Newtonian conservation of energy is a pretty good model analogy (although isn't the same thing) and the geometric one is even better. But that's all they are, however accurate - analogies, constructed on the basis of available information and mathematical models.

Outside of that there really isn't a 'reason'. This isn't how physics works, although it's certainly in our nature to create and expect meaning and cause everywhere. Brain is bound to think in hierarchies, because that's how it's built to operate, but the universe doesn't have that limitation.
Elephant to you, not to him.
RICO is about holding leaders responsible for the crimes of their organizations. That, in itself, makes sense (further, I recall courts being resistant to using RICO against "upstanding" but essentially criminal operations,sadly). As far as I can tell, the act doesn't extend the definitions of crimes or call for any specific enforcement whereas the Patriot does this in spades, as far as I can tell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrup...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
The number one place I would want security on my phone, would be at a bar (or party), where someone might take my phone when I'm distracted, and then doing either something innocent ("lol. im gay. party hard!!!") or nasty (transfer $100 to own account), depending how well I know them. This could easily be done within a meter or two of me, without me noticing. Adding some rules could be nice (be in car, charging at home etc), but generally, I would want my phone to be locked unless I'm holding it.
Eradicating Double Chins: The Next Half-Billion Dollar Business?
Take the new iPhone 5C. Turn it over. Look at the position of the Apple logo, and the "iPhone" brand.

Put the case on it. Turn it over, look at the position of the Apple logo, and the "iPhone" brand.

Hint: It looks like crap.

That sort of detail wouldn't have escaped Steve Jobs.
Beta B2B Our code = more leads if not CEO 2 dance naked in SF & post Youtube
email me: nathan@leadsgenie.co.uk
Totally free!
1 simple code snippet!
97% of B@B web visitors don't complete a CTA - we discover who they are.

If you are spending money on Paid Search (PPC) or Organic Search (SEO), or investing in data lists and Telemarketing or Email marketing, then you need to look at LeadsGenie.

LeadsGenie can transform your B2B lead generation activity and sweat your web marketing spend to deliver a higher return on investment than straight out SEO and PPC spend, or the investment you make in Telemarketing and/or Email.

LeadsGenie will allow you to see who your real sales opportunities are, when they are looking for your services and will make your sales process highly effective, from prospect, to pipeline, to sale.
If you can get your hands on it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions,_Donkeys_and_Dinosaurs

written by Lewis Page (Of theregister.co.uk fame) has more stories related to the MoD
In condensed-matter physics, toy models play with you!

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0007254
BeanBooks: Cloud Accounting App From System76
> What's the infatuation with performance in a cell phone?

Consider the case when Apple starts using these (ARM) in a MacBook Air.
I disagree with the bit regarding data redundancy and integrity.

You are welcome to disagree but I'd like to see some reasoning.

You can do it other ways, but that doesn't make it a good idea; it's a bit like Greenspun's Tenth Rule, but for data.

Had to go searching for that rule, which seems to be Lisp-snobbery which is clearly somewhat justified in theory but almost irrelevant in practice. Right tool for the job, and all that. It's such a broken metaphor for storage consistency or availability that I'm not going to comment further.

ZFS, or something like it (and there isn't anything else like it), is the foundation of any modern setup

Do you honestly view ZFS as the be-all and end-all of data storage? That would be ... sad. Other filesystems can offer snapshots and high availability, as can other elements within a storage system. For example, in Linux, DRBD is a block device driver that provides even more powerful availability guarantees that any conventional (~single-host-homed) filesystem. Likewise, LVM2 has provided block-layer snapshots for ages. Similarly, Linux is unsurprisingly the most vibrant platform for cluster filesystems. Then there's also other great general purpose tools such as RAID, signatures/checksums, and such.

If your data is important, then you'll need to look elsewhere than Linux for the servers where the data sleeps.

That's just ridiculous. I guess you're going to tell me most of the world's data lives on ZFS? Google uses ZFS? Facebook uses ZFS? Yahoo uses ZFS? Let's be realistic here: you're absolutely and demonstrably wrong, and have provided no compelling argument.
"Selective enforcement of laws is trouble in the long term."

Also inevitable and unavoidable. Has been this way since the beginning of time (or whenever the first law was enacted).
Comparing CPU performance using Javascript benchmarks isn't very useful-- much of the difference depends on which Javascript engine is being used.
Asana announces Apps
Here's where Apple's resistance to larger screens (and bigger smartphones) also bites them: Larger phones can pack much larger batteries, leading to longer battery life (even despite the larger display, which does _not_ consume proportionally more energy). E.g. a Note II will last nearly two full days without a recharge, and you can get 2.5 days of normal use with power savings enabled.
ZDNet covers the app here: http://www.zdnet.com/new-cloud-accounting-app-makes-bean-cou...
KTH ID2203 Distributed Systems, Advanced Course, with Youtube video lectures http://www.ict.kth.se/courses/ID2203/video_lectures.html

By Seif Haridi, who co-authored 'Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming' which is well regarded among functional programmers.
It is possible that Gravity as we know it is an illusion. For example, the Newtonian take on Gravity was that it was a force. That according to Einstein was illusory, Gravity was really a geometric manifestation due to the curvature of
space-time. With that take Gravity as we know it is different from the Gravity as was once known. However the Newtonian view that Gravity is a force can and still does facilitate useful everyday computations.

The go to illusion when we think of illusions is the mirage, you can see as water complete with the wavy nature of water and if you had no way of getting closer to inspect it, it might as well be the real thing. Depending on your philosophical take either it is always an illusion, or it becomes an illusion when you find out that it is not water.

A note of agreement with what seems like your main query, we might as well drop the word illusion when it comes to the physical description of the universe. Any framework of description is full of illusions that may never be proven otherwise.

I took QFT some years back and it also went over my head. There is still that mental gap of where the only way you can think about time is via time-(in)dependent wave function.
and usersnap is one of them: https://asana.com/apps/usersnap
Spam Attack Immediately Follows Post on Brett Kimberlin | Popehat
> yet more evidence that the iPhone was designed in sunny south California

The evidence is also on the phone itself where it says "Designed by Apple in California"
You mean like this?

https://github.com/tyler/Bogart/blob/master/bogart.c#L53

I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong there...
Passion Projects Talk #5 with Jessica Hische