skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The FSF is about advocating for Free Software. From their point of view (and I think this is mostly true) the conditions are in place where society doesn't actually need to use proprietary software (outside of device drivers, and they are actively working to improve that situation). Sure, you personally have to use proprietary software because the rest of the world does and proprietary solutions are often superior (either technically or in terms of usability), but we would get by fine, as a society, if we did away with proprietary software. Further, so long as proprietary software is used by most people, and most developers are getting paid to develop proprietary software, technical superiority is almost guaranteed. I think that the FSF long ago realized that the battle field is in public opinion, not in delivering quality software. Sure, the software needs to be "good enough", but once the software is "good enough" then no killer feature is going to shift people away from the proprietary software that they know and that the vast majority of the world is using. Now, there could be meta-killer features in terms of responsive development, transparency, and privacy.

So, I can completely understand that the FSF feels that their time is best served by getting the public to change their views regarding Free Software vs proprietary software. I don't think that it has been very effective, but it is a heck of an uphill battle. But doing this in combination with their other work (lobbying, writing briefs for court cases, acting as a GPL violator watch dog, and publicizing when large organizations have selected Free Software over a proprietary alternative) also help the cause more than funding any particular project I can think of.
So don't make a product without knowing the potential user base first?
It's not about control jumping. Google makes decisions based on data so they know these changes require more clicking. Why did they hide them? Probably because their data shows that most people do not use them (which I've noticed in most non-tech people), so not showing those buttons is actually less confusing for most people and thus offers a better UI to them. Objectively.
Which doesn't help at the moment, since jsbin is 502'ing.
Universe Was Born from a Four-Dimensional Black Hole, Says Big Bang Alternative
Just tested this on my GMail. None of the tools required to send an E-mail are hidden. In fact you can do it all without even using a mouse if you have shortcuts turned on.
That's what I get for being cheap. :)
Constitute: The World's Constitutions to Read, Search and Compare
What surprises you here? This is standard operating procedure for most startups, including the 'hip' ones that write navel gazing bullshit.
More like shoot us in the foot. They will surely have been incentivised by the relevant parties to leave gaping loopholes allowing said relevant parties to continue doing what they're doing.
As mentioned on the other thread, pointing to the official announcement, the iPhone 5 launched in China on a different date, so it had 2 million sales on its launch there.

So to get the real comparison you need to add first weekend sales of the 4S in standard launch countries and China to that 7 million figure.
you wouldn't test current Gmail users against a new interface

Why not? If you're trying to assess the impact of a new interface, surely the fact that it's going to confuse existing users is important?

You'd get a group who'd never used either one

So if this group likes the new one better, that outweighs any amount of confusion caused with existing users? That's basically what you're saying here.
Seasonal Boundaries
In the Shiny framework we think less about short-lived HTTP requests, and more about long-lived (websocket) sessions. Reactive expressions cache their results within or across sessions, depending on where they are declared (this is just a natural result of R's lexical scoping).

http://rstudio.github.io/shiny/tutorial/#scoping
It really feels in my body like running + weightlifting for about an hour and a half. That is what I was doing about a year ago to get the same results I am getting today.
Why was the title of this submission changed? I clearly remember what i entered. Odd
I've never had so much trouble to view a js demo
Did he know that they were going to be terrible? Given Apple's history of making attractive devices, I for one didn't see this coming.
UTF-8 The most beautiful hack [video]
But you're missing an important point: If you own your phone you can get much cheaper 'SIM only' deals with the mobile carriers, meaning that over your 1-2 year contract, you'll pay far less.

Getting a new phone as part of a 'subsidised' contract is effectively borrowing money to buy a phone. Your loan repayments are the monthly fee. If you have the cash, buying the phone up-front is almost always cheaper.
Well, what isn't a gamble of the candidates time? I'm assuming that the two hour test is done from home, and depending on travel time, that's a lot smaller investment of time than travelling in for an on-site interview, plus it's likely to give significantly better signal than a two-hour on-site session early in the process.

Yet another way to look at it is as leveling the paying field. A two hour on-site costs the company at least two hours engineering time, so you have to sort more aggressively in incoming applications - this puts those with "high value brands" (top universities and well known employers/internships) at an advantage over a maybe equally qualified candidate with an off-the-beaten-path CV. A complete-from-home test is much, much quicker and comfortable to "grade" and can thus be given out much more broadly.
This year there are two new models, that is why they are grouped. Last year the iPhone 5 was the only new model released on opening weekend.
Diving Deeper into Cache Coherency
It has to end at some point, certainly. But there's no particular reason to think it's now. Current technology for chips has been near the end since the 90s. So far, something has always come along to avoid the end.
As i said in the blogpost, we still love AWS, its awesome, we used it for many other projects and S3 is great in combination with EC2, but in some cases it makes sense to think about it, maybe it saves you something!

As i said, we really miss the simplicity of AWS, one mouse click and you have a loadbalancer, ec.

PS: trust me, AWS EBS volume can die, and this is a pain! :)
You need to think bigger and deeper than "using computers for Facebook".

1 billion times faster computers could help us manipulate weather, terraform planets, solve death, have a much better understanding of physics at a much more fundamental level, create fusion or matter-anti-matter engines, etc.
I work for a company that heavily uses Linux and work in a position where I do all my work exclusively remote via web share/phone call. So we need a web sharing application that is stable on linux & windows. We've had good success with Elluminate (now owned by Blackboard). It's re-paint algorithm seems to be bearable.

Great suggestion about #2. I know a number of my colleagues that don't get that. And screenshare a 1080p display and don't even use a fullscreen presentation. So the text is completely unreadable on small screens.
We've never had anyone explicitly decline. Maybe 5 or 10% drop off the radar at this stage - perhaps they didn't feel able to complete it successfully?

If it were feasible, I'd actually prefer to pay candidates consulting-rates to do a (useful) 4-5 day project as a final interview. We've actually done this 3 or 4 times - but only when the candidate is thinking about moving his family from abroad to come work for us. We feel like there's an increased obligation on us to make sure we're sure in these cases.

Normally, though, it's just not practical. People are normally in jobs already, and asking them to take 4 or 5 days of holiday isn't fair. Especially if they were in the final stages of applying to 3 or 4 different companies. That's your entire year's holiday allowance down the drain.
I really started to notice the latency around 100ms
Testing AngularJS Apps with Protractor
Wow, that's amazing. I had no idea Amazon offered that.

I also have no idea when I'll ever use it, but still. Damn cool.
There are more provider like http://www.redstation.com/ but we have only experience with Hetzner & OVH, so i cannot say something about the other ones.
Nailed it. I knew this was yet another Asian play by Apple. The iPhone is getting long in the tooth in Western markets, but there are still many virgin markets in the East.
Could you be more accurate? This video is almost 2 hours long, at which minute does he talk?
jsbin is up again
Obesity, cancer, and chemotherapy
Drag and drop interfaces can be a beautiful thing, but they're most effective when in a split-screen environment with the flowchart on one side and the code it compiles into previewed on the other side. The script being visible as the diagrammatic design changes lets the coder see what's going on behind the scenes, and lets him understand the structure so that he can tweak it in the next stage to do the many things that the GUI designer didn't anticipate.
Yeah, I'm on the non-S cycle, going from a 3G to a 4 to a 5. Each of those had a feature (3G, Retina, LTE) I wouldn't have wanted to live without for a year, but for quality of experience and useful lifetime, the "S" cycle is the place to be.

But I expect Apple will stick with the C/S distinction for at least one generation, and my next phone will be called a "6S". Or a "6X" for "extended"? No reason they have to stop at two letters/models.
> What we see is that somebody, some other VM(s) sharing the same underlying host, is stealing about 30% of the CPU that really belongs to us.

That's not how it works. CPU steal time is when the hypervisor stalls your CPU because you're using more than your allotted share. Depending on the hypervisor configuration it could happen either consistently (ex: AWS micro instance) or on demand (ex: whenever your neighbors are actually using their fair share). If your neighbors are not using 100% of their slice of the CPU then you can generally use it yourself[1] but if you can't they're not "stealing" from you. You're just not able to use their unused capacity[2].

[1]: For regular AWS instances, not for micro instances which stall almost immediately when using a lot of CPU. Try a non-trivial compile on a micro instance and see what happens.

[2]: Alternatively, you can look at as they're preventing you from "stealing" from your neighbors when they're not using it.
Is there any actionable advice for those of us who are not your customer and without access to your monitoring panel?
Google Has Spent $21 Billion on Data Centers
Teamocil - Window and pane layouts for tmux using YAML configuration files
OVH actually supports running the Proxmox virtualization distro on their servers. That means you can easily get a 32GB dedicated server with raid1 SSDs (around $100/month here in Canada) and spin up VMs to your heart's content. Proxmox also supports running your host nodes in a cluster, which allows for live migration. And if the math isn't already ridiculous, keep in mind that all the running OpenVZ containers (which proxmox supports) actually share a single kernel, and thus share a good chunk of RAM.

That being said, OVH is notorious for lack of support, and my experience so far (6 months) suggests that using them is not without risk. So at the moment I'm automating everything so that if an OVH engineer does decide to accidentally pull the plug on my server(s), I can failover in an hour or two.
Look how much time was wasted on animated GIFs
The same could have been said about computers fifty years ago. No one used computer as part of their daily life when computers filled entire rooms. I'm glad Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't get into insurance.
Just got this visiting this article page on TechCrunch => http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/facetime-audio-is-apples-bi...

Chrome automatically downloaded it => http://cl.ly/image/2u3R2m3j3j1E
I like it, too, and the amount of hate it receives baffles me. I like the fact that the message-compose window does not stretch across my whole screen - my laptop screen is quite wide. I don't want anything to stretch all the way across. I have no problem replying inline, I very rarely ever change the font of an email, and I very rarely change the subject. I don't do these things very often, so I would prefer that they're hidden.

I also use GMail mostly for personal emails, not professionally. I wonder if that's part of it. But, even then, I use Notes for professional emails, because I have to. The GMail changes work well for how I use it, but there's also the fact that I constantly compare it to Notes.
XSS allowed on eBay members pages
Right - the question is pretty open ended, with lots of potential areas to explore after getting a basic answer.

As a potential employer, I'm happy to help them learn, but I'm not going to spoon-feed them. If someone is profoundly incurious, maybe they'd be better off working somewhere else. Or in another career field.
I think it would be wrong even if you're right. My point was that you shouldn't have children as a cynical insurance scheme as an absolute, it's cruel to bring unloved people into the world.

But if you're looking for pragmatism:

If you don't love them, children seem likely to be a bad investment. Having children isn't free. It's actually one of the more expensive things you can do. Both for yourself and for society. The USDA estimated cost of raising a child to 18 in the US in 2011 as $169,080 (dual parent family, lowest income bracket mentioned)

http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/Publications/CRC/crc2011.pdf

$169,080 (accounting for predicted inflation, actually closer to $212,000) is a quite substantial pension fund, especially if you invest it early. $169,080 is £105,509 - that's enough to buy a flat outright; I mean you wouldn't, you'd buy several flats with partial mortgages and leverage expected rent to expand, but still. $169,080 is a new degree in a better class of work.

It seems probable, if you're coming from a low income family and have been neglected, that you wouldn't even be capable of it financially - poverty is highly correlated across time; poor areas tend to stay poor.

I'm inclined to think it would be better to invest the money that might be spent on those kids over their lifetime (and all the worse for the state if the kids themselves live in poverty from an expense perspective) into a fund to provide a better pension for the potential parents. It's true that working adults provide for people, but the money that creates those working adults can be more efficiently applied. It's better to have a new company funded that provides employment to ten or twenty people and adds value to the economy than it is to have another person for whom work doesn't really exist.

And this is before we get to the motivation of the children themselves:

Because, even from a pragmatic perspective, love is valuable. If your parents don't love you, why would you love them? And if you don't love them, it's hard to see why you'd support them. Living with your parents once you're an adult is very difficult even when you think they're okay people.
most frustratingly this is another datapoint that won't matter much in the current slew of punditry aimed at talking Apple down.

just go back to the HN post of the 5s launch event and it's full of doomsayers.

seems like apple is going against the very fabric that unites neckbeards around the world - and is crazy successful. just like carmakers that stopped catering to the tinkerers. here's to the crazy ones.

next week? we'll return to the usual apple is doomed because innovation and open blabla.
My 'if I was an oracle' wish would be two-fold:

I realise 5S supply would be very, very constrained initially... so how well did introducing the 5C unconstrained at launch work?

I think the 'champagne' phone would have sold out in the launch weekend, regardless of supply. Is Apple playing this out? (yes).

Every customer lining up, or entering stores are dropping almost a grand. You want to keep some top tier 64gb 'space grey' in stock, to sop up those who missed out on a different alloy.

And everyone who isn't eligible to upgrade? Well you get a fantastic OS, and you can buy a nice case! Well played Apple. And I mean that without bitterness. Great product launch.
> Anyone prepared to devote the time and resources that CCC did to breaking your phone has other simpler means at their disposal

Really? Lift someone's print, leave it with superglue, scan and print it and then dump glue on the scan.

That seems to be the sum total of what needs to be done. You need only sticky tape to lift the print and the rest can be done in an hour.

It sounds quite action movie, but in reality it's pretty damn simple and if I wanted to get access to your phone I could easily prepare it in advance and carry a tiny latex strip in my wallet for just the right occasion without your knowledge at any point.
Funny, I thought HN was dominated by Android fanboys. Perception is everything eh?
What do you need 34 assemblies for? Seriously?
Show HN: Sexycrets 2.00
Supposedly there were production problems that came up when the white iPhones were released. It was a couple months until that all ironed out.
Discovery of a "Router-Botnet" used to steal passwords
reproduced in Egypt, this thing is all over the place
I'd be very surprised if it did. It's likely that the Russians would know about any Shuttle launch (I'm guessing they had a capability to track orbital objects) so it would be fairly obvious that the American's did it. At the height of the Cold war, things could have escalated pretty quickly is the US stole a spy satellite!
If you move to Rackspace, stay away from DWS, the dallas datacenter. It's over-booked, the network has constant issues, vm's on the same host machine as you are able to cause your vm network issues, the list of problems never stops.

We recently switched to Azure from Rackspace, but we're still evaluating if it will work for us long term. Azure's issues are that you have to request number of core increases, and you can't capture an image of a vm without shutting it down. Also you can't just give your VM a regular ssh public key, you have to generate SSL like certs. Also weird is a lot of the documentation is only for the Windows side of things, even though you can get some of that stuff to work on linux and that you can do that by installing an SDK even though you might not be installing an application, just running your own stuff on a VM.
I am sorry, but I think you are assuming a little bit too much here.

You are guestimating that 4000 gold phones were sold in the stores based on a 10 per store rumored number you've heard and 400 stores. Then you guess that retail is only 10% (another guess) and so multiply you original guestimate by 10 to get 40000 gold phones.

It's quite hopeless guesswork. We don't know the distribution of models in retail or online. We don't know how much is sold online compared to retail. We don't know how much was sold outside Apple's retail stores (by e.g. AT&T). We don't even know the geographical distribution (i.e. higher gold-ratio in China than US).

If we assume a factor 3 to 1 sales of iPhone 5S vs 5C based on Localitics'report (1), Apple has sold between 6-7 million iPhone 5S. Your 40.000 number isn't even 1% of that, so I think you are an order of magnitude off still.

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/23/iphone-5s-3-times-...
i would argue for the opposite of this article - it serves the public's interest for successful companies to be known. we might want to become customers. we might learn something that applies to our business. it is a public good to know where power and influence lies. and it is good to know so others will compete with them. :)

i think the reason why a lot of firms shy away from publicity is that if you're making money, you don't need people to know about it - can attract competition.

a lot of the publicity heavy firms are profitless - they hope to make money based on users or attention.
I don't know, maybe I was expecting more given the article, but I'm sure even 7 minutes a day go a long way when it comes to feeling better and energized. I'm still skeptic about the claim that you can swap an hour-and-a-half long routine for 7 minutes worth of intense training.
How is it that Google hires PHDs in HCI to design this stuff and they're still getting it wrong?

I don't think they're getting it wrong; I think they're just judging success by a different metric than you are. As other comments upthread have suggested, their success metric appears to be how many users they can keep within their walled garden. So the HCI experts aren't figuring out how to make Google's apps easier to use; they're figuring out how to make them harder to escape.

Case in point: a bunch of people in this thread have pointed out various things wrong with GMail's web UI, but nobody, as far as I can tell, has said "Screw this, I'm using a different email client." [Edit: I have now spotted one such person, but that's still effectively none in a thread with this many posters.] (For the record, I use KMail on Linux, the KDE 3 version, and I don't use GMail anyway, for reasons which go way beyond its UI.) To Google's HCI experts, that's success.
Study: Babies can learn better from TV than books
Not the biggest U.S. mobile carriers. AT&T and Verizon have awful BYOD plans, as I understand it. I'd be thrilled to find out I could do better than my grandfathered AT&T unlimited plan (two phones, 5GB/each before throttled, $120/mo.), but keep their network.
Are you an engineer? Consider applying to Hipmunk
The advice in this article isn't "don't worry if your plan [or product] isn't scalable." It's "getting your first 1,000 users is usually not a scalable process."

The idea is that you need to do some serious legwork, and involve high-touch, high-response tactics to nurture and cultivate your early userbase. You're tending to every plant in the garden, personally, by hand. That's not a scalable process, but it can be necessary before being able to transition into scale mode.

This advice is offered in opposition to the "build it and they will come" approach, in which you build a product, throw in a few theoretical viral loops and growth-hack mechanics, maybe go for a bit of PR pickup, and then assume the product will achieve scale on its own.

A lot of growth plots don't start off linear or exponential. They start off with a few staircases.
CPU steal is a stat that looks scary and is compounded by the number of sensationalist blog faux-tutorials about how cpu steal is the devil.

http://adrianotto.com/2010/02/time-stolen-from-a-virtual-mac...

^ read
Is not about Apple haters is that the security code is actually more secure than TouchID.

If having TouchID will increase the amount of people that doesn't lock thir phone I'm up for it. But is not this amazing super-secure technology that will revolutionize the world.
The problem is not so much what CCC has done, but CCC has started. In the days/month ahead.. there is now a possibility of building a more practical attack.
Remember the firefox plugin which allowed users to steal FB user sessions in a cafe with Free WiFi (or any WiFi hotspot)? That wasn't a new attack.. just made an existing attack easier (and hence caught a LOT of attention).

The threat is similar. Now there is an exploit.. now the collective security researcher (and hacktivist) will work to make the hack easier by building a tool.. THERE lies the real danger.

I still commend Apple for trying. The real issue will be if I can steal the "Hash" of the fingerprint and reverse it to know who it is... so far TouchId has done well. The way that happens, Apple users will need to rethink using TouchID