skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't referring to a 10% error rate, just a 90% "You can use Apple maps to solve this problem" rate. I've not had any significant error rate with my use cases for a while now.

The 10% use cases I was referring to are the "I want to find generic type of business in this area" case, and the "I need a street view of this" case, both of which are (for me) comparatively rare versus searching for a post-code or known address.
Author here.

I've been working on a lot of things (exercises, phys.js simulations, new free tutorials) and planning a bit launch, but now I realize that the fall semester is almost over so I decided to launch v4.0 ASAP.

Maybe my book will help some students who are freaking out about their upcoming calculus and mechanics finals!
Can someone explain the stickers thing? Basically, people are buying new created emoji to use in their messages?
Can someone explain this thread to me? What exactly do you think programmers do? Yes.. algorithms are important.
I have an Android, and my wife has an iPhone. Recently, my phone was dead, and my wife had to pull up directions for me on Apple Maps. For most of the ride, I had a very tough time with Apple Maps.

The biggest 3 problems for me with Apple Maps were that: 1) the map was zoomed in too far so I couldn't tell what turns were coming up; 2) as far as I could tell, there was no textual representation of how far I needed to go on the current road or which direction my next turn would be; 3) dragging the map is not a "thing" in Apple Maps. I like to be able to drag the map to look ahead at the route, and Apple just doesn't let you do that. You can only pivot around your current GPS position, and since you're already zoomed in too far, it doesn't help at all.

Apple may have "won" in the sense that they have claimed a lot of usage share, but from the perspective of a satisfied Google Maps user, I certainly feel like the end user has lost.
Good job anyway!

Unicast ping doesn't work here either. Are there too many people connected right now?
Containerized freight has never been used in an act of terrorism. For that to be a concern, it would first have to be plausible for terrorists to get a nuclear bomb and have the capability to set it off. Then, using a shipping container would have to come to the top of the list of how to deliver it. Neither is now plausible.
Google attacked for Remembrance Day poppy tribute
Agreed. Also there are benefits to spreading out the acceptable work week like reducing traffic congestion.

Obviously this sort of spread wouldn't work in every industry, but the idea that any "professional" should work from approximately 9-5 on M-F causes obvious lifestyle load balancing issues we could avoid by spreading it out much more were possible.
The assumption seems to be that intellectuals still have a home within the university. The enthymeme in the air is that those unfortunates who were unable to find suitable employment in the academy do not deserve to live the life of the mind. But the university is no longer an institution “where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind.” This activity cannot be the exclusive domain of a tiny elite.

See http://mg.co.za/article/2013-11-01-universities-head-for-ext...
The Secret Ingredient in Computational Creativity
Please never act professional! That post is awesome.
JS emulator running GNU/Linux with network support
Someone was just sending some pretty gnarly flooding traffic a few minutes ago, I had to "gently remove" them from the situation. It should be better now, but you'll need to refresh the page.

Right now there are about 100 hosts connected, but a minute ago there were about 140. It ebbs and flows. More ebb at the moment since I think we're no longer on the front page.
SQL is actaully a rediculously elegant language at expressing data, and relationships. NOT a good general purpose language. So I tend to always favor sql for relational data, actually most data.

queues, caches, etc = nosql solution. They tend to have much more features around performance to handle the needs of these problems, but not much in terms of relational data.

If you study relational databases and what they do, you will quickly find the insane amount of work done by the optimizer and the data joiner. That work is not trivial to replicate even on a specific problem, and ridiculously hard to generalize.

And so this article's assertion that mongodb is an excellent caching engine, but a poor data store is very accurate in my eyes.
I'm digging "Peanut Butter Docker Time". Crunchy. :)
The Quaterly Social Media Noise Reduction
Arq is simple and works great, although it seems that a half of my S3 bills are for the thousands of requests that Arq makes back and forth. Simpler upload & forget backup model probably could save a few bucks...
"it overwrites how require is actually supposed to be used"

According to whom? RequireJS is an implementation of the AMD spec.
>Assume in both cases, the sale is guaranteed...
That seems like an invalid assumption. The publisher doesn't choose which book the students buy, the professor does. And its not like theres a publisher with a pure monopoly on mathematics textbooks, so there is a market and choice avaialble. We can of course question whether the professors are choosing the best textbooks, but in general, unless they're trying to boost sales of their own books, they're not choosing books based on increased cost.

>That's the "injustice" I'm trying to fix, but it is a bit of an uphill battle because first-year students assume that the bigger (thicker) books must be better because they have "more stuff" in them.

Well, what first-year students think should be irrelevant, shouldn't it, because as you stated, the students have to buy whatever they're told.

Its not to say that I think your book is bad or anything (I haven't read it, I can't comment) I just thought that I'd mention this as criticism since at least for me it automatically causes me to think of your book as a gimmick and lower quality than it probably is.
Compatibility Is Hard: CHARTEST.DOC Is From 1989, Was Not Readable By 2003
The Day The Barges Opened
He was the product manager some years ago and very briefly.
I think now it is the time we get some tutorial/resources/classes on practical implementation of these ML techniques. Enough of Introduction to ML. How to handle large data (say 6000000 rows), how to convert csv/tbv data to different formats needed for different machine learning libraries for e.g. Weka, LibSVM etc.
Contacts and history only work if you share them with Google. It refuses to use the local contact store.
Health records is a great space. 2 quick things that jumped out at me, the first is the iPhone feed that showed one user saying they just got a colonoscopy (my thought is that patients typically do not and would not share that type of info), then second down below it says health is inherently social, I do not know that this is true, I believe health is very private and often for good reason (insurance companies used to use such info to reject claims and insured for preexisting conditions, maybe not the case anymore with the reforms. But employers or potential employers can use this info to make hiring decisions). My concerns might sound far fetched and creepy but they are legit concerns on how people can use this info.

In truth I hope my initial concerns are all wrong and you find a huge market. Best of luck.
Designs for iOS are completed and implemented and are then re-used for Android. The excuse is 'consistent user experience' but really they just don't want to do the same job twice

Yeah, this is a sign of a bad PM, who doesn't understand the market or mobile ecosystem enough to realize that the targets are completely different.

On the other hand, if the interface was designed to be completely unique and skirted all the specifics of the deployment platform, in an attempt to be branded or for reuse of designs, that's reasonable. Often, however, it is obvious that the design was optimized for another platform than the one you're using it on. "Custom back button" on Android, indeed.
You are wrong because the USPS is required to fully pre-fund all of its pension obligations. It does not pre-fund based on a vesting schedule, it must prefund each obligation all at once. That is why the prefunding obligation is always brought up when discussing the USPS's finances--it is a unique requirement that is not shared by any other entity, public or private.

You are probably misunderstanding the pre-funding schedule. Beginning in 2006, the USPS was obligated to make pre-funding payments with the goal of fully pre-funding 75 years worth of pensions by 2017. See the linked WaPo article, which explicitly states "Congress passed a statute in 2006 requiring the early payment of 75 years worth of retiree benefits within 10 years. " (This is not the same as vesting, because the pre-funding obligation is not tied to the vesting of any particular group of beneficiaries' benefits.)

More specifically, see section 801, et. al., for the specific language of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act fo 2006 which creates the silly requirement.
Understood. They may have done well to bring a car broker onto their team who understood the market, and already had relationships with dealers in order to shortcut through these issues.
I reported two issues to Google Maps on a recent trip to Ireland and the UK, both have been fixed and I received followup emails from Google Maps on the issues.

These were reported via Google Maps on Android.
Aww, I was expecting a game of tetris in CSS.

But awesome all the same
Links in mongo aren't really links though; its up to the application to handle the "joins", which really means making an extra query for every linked item. It's like SQL joins except without any of the supporting tools or optimizations that exist in RBDMS.
I think your summary is only half. The other half is, I think, "Think real hard about whether your data is relational or not."
Because you can (and usually do) have areas of memory and disk that are more or less active, meaning it can make sense to evict some ram pages to disk while still caching other disk pages.
Yes, I was thinking perhaps this was trying to get the Kaspersky name out there in front of people when they are renewing their anti-virus packages. Since a lot of students end up with computers at Chrismtas time, it seems there is a renewal hump at the same time. It seems to correlate with people who make such systems trying to get into the press about how aware/good/active they are. It looks like a great example of a self organizing system :-)
Or you can just http://downloadmoreram.com/

(joke)
Updated version of Jotgram.com looking for testers.
I did the Stanford free online one the first time it was offered a year or so back. Was perfect -- didn't move at a blazing pace and was very lean. Great instructor, highly recommended (though I think it may have been absorbed into Coursera?).
Hola Unblocker or Tunnelbear
I'm on the fence about this issue. The problem is that this is often the only way to get a bureaucracy to do anything, ever.

For example...

I am skeptical of manmade global warming alarmism. Not that I don't think humans might be altering the climate, but I think it's probably low on the list of real environmental and ecological risks we face. Nevertheless I think it's good to "pimp" it. There are so many other reasons we need to move off fossil fuels sooner rather than later, anything that causes us to do this is almost by definition good.
I must have read a dozen (conservative estimate) articles now all called "Why you should never use MongoDB ever" - or permutation thereof.
Each and every one of them ought to have been called "I knew fuckall about MongoDB and started writing my software as if it was a full ACID compliant RDBMS and it bit me."

There are essentially two points that always come up:

1. Oh my God it's not relational!

Well, you could argue that if you move from a type of software that is specifically called RELATIONAL Database Management System to one that isn't, one of the things you may lose is relation handling. Do your homework and deal with it.

2. Oh my God it doesn't have transactions!

This is, arguably, slightly less obvious, and in combination with #1 can cause issues. There are practices to work around it, but it is hardly to be considered a surprise.

I keep stumbling on these stories - but still these are the two major issues that are raised. I'm starting to get a bit puzzled by the fact that these things are still considered surprises.

In either case, I'm happily using MongoDB. It has its fair share of quirks and limitations, but it also has its advantages.
Learn about the advantages and disadvantages, and try to avoid locking too large parts of your code to the storage backend and you'll be fine.

FWIW, I think the real benefit of MongoDB is flexibility w/r to schema and datamodel changes. It fits very, very well with a development process which is based on refactoring and minor redesigns when new requirements are defined. I much prefer that over the "guess everything three years in advance" model, and MongoDB has served us well in that respect.
Recently read "The Mom Test" which had some good advice about how to avoid the positive feedback that people only give you because they want to spare your ego or whatever. Not exactly applicable to this post, but still some pretty relevant ideas in there which I've made good use of.
Moreover, everything has evolved to the point where we can't live without some "parasites" - see gut bacteria.

Perhaps some sort of a similar homeostasis will also be reached by software.
Really, can't you comment on someone promoting their favorite language without accusing them of screwing everyone?
Why, that's exactly what it is? It's a named pipe, but not one used explicitly by you but implicitly by the process substitution feature to pass a file, which of course has a name, to another process. It's only anonymous to you because you didn't name it, to the system it's an ordinary named pipe.
Opening Google Maps from Siri is tricky, and then the app crashes - often. You don't want your voice navigation app to silently crash when you're on the highway - you might not notice until you've missed your turnoff by twenty miles.
I am very glad we did. And yet I also hope we may never have to again.
Docker is starting to get about as much unwarranted hype as Node.js did. Yawn... It's nothing more than hipsterware.
Google Adding Smartphone Location Data to its Advert-Selling Schemes
Yes, I'm taking it now.

Edit: https://www.coursera.org/course/ml
> why would you still need a swap partition?

Because sometimes you (read applications) need to use all/most of your memory. Ability to swap out all the not being used memory to disk maximizes amount of memory available to applications.
I'm using CouchDB hopefully for the right reasons. Each user is storing and accessing only their own data. I need that data to be easily stored offline in localstorage in the browser (sqlite/indexedDb not being supported in all browsers), and similar key/value stores for iOS/Android apps. On top of that I need synchronization when the user does come online. This is the type of app you'd want to use on the go as well as on your home computer, so easy synchronization is very important, which the CouchDB changes feed provides.
Do you have a link? I would be interested.
OCaml's been around in various forms for 30 years. 20 years of continuous development on the current code base. Regular releases through all that time. In the form of ML for 40 years. What makes you think it's going to die out in the next 5 years?
If that ended up nicely formatted beneath the definition of `foo` in the documentation I would recommend it wholeheartedly. In practice it doesn't happen, sadly.
OCaml's type system is not particularly sophisticated for a functional language, but it's still way ahead of Go. I can't see how Go's type are comparably sufficient.
According to the crop-circle interpretation of the "response" to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message, the responders added silicon to their elemental components list.
I have quit iOS just after iOS 4 came out: it was much much slower than iOS 3 on my iPhone 3G without much in term of new features (no multitasking, no home screen wallpaper). Because of this I felt that Apple was pulling a Microsoft on its huge mobile user base, forcing them into planned obsolescence.

When I bought an Android phone I instantly fell in love with the concept of intents, where you can choose what app opens when you're click on an address, a URL, a link or open up a keyboard. It was then I realized that this was exactly what Microsoft had been convicted for and what Mac users were so vocal about in the nineties.

I still use a Mac, because I think that Windows is still prevalent enough that Apple is forced to keep it honest, but the moment they will break that point in mind- and market-share I'll be forced to migrate.
Nope, it's still around on youtube and on the Stanford Engineering Everywhere site. The coursera version of the class is much more introductory and skips significant parts of the full Stanford version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseInfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a...
I make, on average, 40K requests a month which is like $2 while my storage costs are ~$22. At the low end you'll be paying what seems like a lot for requests but as things scale your requests costs become a much smaller percentage.

You an cut down on requests by moving to daily backups (what I do) and narrowing down what you're backing up. Backing up your applications folders will take a ton of requests (Some apps have upwards of 1000 assets whose bless values may change if you open the application and this trigger Arq)
It's worth noting that very many CMU courses, from all departments, have notes available on a publiclly-accessable course website.

Source: Am a CMU 2012 grad.
I agree that the OP is lengthy, and putting together this well-illustrated post is no easy feat. However, I don't think the OP should be the one to write about when you should use a document store.

Maybe I'm too annoyed by the poorly chosen title. Or that I read that entire post and was thinking where's the punchline? On one hand, I credit the author for thinking things through. On the other, the fact that she unequivocally attributes this issue to MongoDB shows that she currently lacks the domain knowledge to consider appropriate use cases. It's not a MongoDB problem, it's a problem inherent to this data structure, and someone more well-versed in this topic would not conflate the issue...just as a decent IT person would not blame "Windoze" for the fact that she can't get good Wifi reception in the office.

OK, to be even more petty...I think what really aggravates me is how the OP says she's not a database expert -- which is a good disclosure, but self-evident -- but attempts to assert authority by saying "I build web applications...I build a lot of web applications"...Uh, OK, so what you're saying is that it's possible to be an experienced web developer and yet be a novice at data design?

If that was the angle of the OP, I'd give it five stars. Such sentiment cannot be overstated.
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseInfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a...
"Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides, "Today I will strike a blow for evil!"

Hipsters might. Ironically of course. They may even have a twirly villainous mustache to go with it.
Please tell me that "Performance Cloud Servers" are not the official response to the issue of normal servers being created very slooooowwwwly... The time spent in BUILDING is really annoying. Are you planning to improve those?
The best thing about this article is it demonstrates the problem with pg's "The submission must match the title" policy.
Ok, here goes:

> Ok, so I’m going to ride the command line like a cowboy

That's a lot of kool-aid in a short sentence. Note, I'd rather have this over "Rackspace is the market-leading solution provider in the containerized virtualization space, empowered by award-winning Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) products such as Docker and LXC", but I do feel that you're pushing it a bit far in this post, here and there.
You have a problem, you open a ticket and… you wait… and wait…
For me, Google Maps's killer feature is still transit directions.
I will not lie, I felt kind of silly opening the page at work and did the quick ctrl+1 to switch to a tab when a coworker walked by my office!

Aside from that, I have had a recent interest in Docker, LXC and QVD. Thanks for the information, jnoller. I have been doing the reading (without the typing), but this just reassured me that I am on the right path. The Docker part rolls in for segregating applications from each other. In case one app gets compromised, they do not all fall down. Another interest is hitting a few compliance standards by utilizing LXC on its own. Finally, virtualization with QVD and LXC.
but then you can take it out of mongo into something made for analytics. this is a challenge i'm currently facing, but I feel the flexibility mongo has offered in letting us iterate on our data collection is paying off in the end.
I'm not understanding everything here, but I agree that my post was simplistic to say that language is just a reflection of reality. It's more complex than that. I thought that when I wrote it, too, but didn't go there because it doesn't change my point and because I'm unsure how much precision I'm capable of.

Words condition our thoughts and feelings and behavior. So it's not just that people-change causes language-change; there's a feedback loop. But it's not a feedback loop we can control with anything as heavy-handed as ideology. To attempt to intervene that way is exceedingly crude. That's why it's associated with rigid thinking and pushy behavior.

In its milder forms that intervention is nannyism; in its more virulent forms it turns into persecution. Is it as evil as racism itself? The question seems ridiculous. If I have to answer, the answer is "obviously not", but really that whole line of thinking is a distraction. I don't accept that a repressive attitude towards language is of the least value in correcting injustice.

I could go on about this indefinitely so perhaps I'll stop here.
I believe the intended meaning was "a language that nobody else knows" rather than "a language where code is impenetrable to everyone but the author." OCaml is pretty easy, but not if you don't know it.
while docker seems really awesome for development, all articles i've read so far stop at the point where things run, but are not yet really production ready: your article ends with running django in a docker container, which is really cool - but on a random? nat'ed port.

what would be the next steps to actually expose this django container to the public via port 80 and surviving a host server reboot?
I would look at Neo4j. I originally came across it when vetting Grails (it has a Grails plug-in) and it seems to be one of the heavy contenders in terms of a production-ready graph DB. People (this article's included) seem to say that production-ready graph DBs don't exist. Maybe these projects are still trying to gain traction? I expect some stable builds will be out there soon if they aren't already...

http://www.neo4j.org/
Perhaps, but this is the first time I've seen the news presented on a website with an autoplaying video of unrelated material under a full page overlay popup that nags me to like them on facebook.
I think you meant noting* ... haha
In a not-so-sketchy way, this is what a resume and cover letter should be able to say through your past accomplishments, whether professional or academic. "Look what I did for X company/project/professor - now let me do that for you!"