skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they say software doesn't cost them that much.

Just because someone says it does not mean it's true.

The Internet says SDE comp at amazon is $90-130K. Seems safe to estimate total cost per employee to $125K on average. They're building enough office space for an additional 12,000 employees in Seattle. Assuming there are already 8,000 SDEs that's $1B dollars. I wouldn't call that "not much."

Installing a dense rack of servers is in the neighborhood of $150K. How many racks per year would you have to buy to make $1B "round to zero"?

What's actually important, and not being explained, is the relationship between the different types of costs and revenue. Developing & operating a service is roughly flat. It doesn't take 10x as much human resources to go from 10,000 requests per second or 100,000. However you will need roughly 10x the hardware resources to serve those requests.

The other important property of infrastructure, which is mentioned, is scale. The cost to service each request can actually decrease due to increased utilization and efficiencies. The 10x requests might only require 8x infrastructure, for example.
I wonder why they don't sell it for cost +x% and give x to charity. Wouldn't that give more to charity with even a fairly small run?
Really? No, the experiment does not "change the odds of a coin flip". It could maybe change the odds on each choice that the subject of the experiment makes. But even that isn't new. People's choices aren't 50/50 to begin with (due to cultural and social reasons usually).

""When a tree falls in the woods and no one's around, does it make a sound? Well, is there money in it for me either way? No? Then I don't care." Life could be made so simple."

Again. Really? Yes, life could be made so simple. It's called idiocracy. Let's stop arguing philosophy, arts and literature unless we stand to make money. How have we managed to transform money from the means for a working society to the ultimate goal for our social actions is beyond me. But since there is no money in finding the answer, who cares right?
All you needed to do was to predict where the financial crisis will hit! How can anyone be unemployed?

I find the comments here pretty amusing.
I still use it from time to time and it has got better - but I still think Rdio is miles ahead.
I started using screen before I started learning that facility. (At the time, I mostly used Windows, so the Home key was available.)

Of course, when I started developing on a Macbook, screen rapidly became problematic as there was no Home key and I started using Ctrl-A. For the moment, I'm developing locally so I don't need screen or tmux, but I'm working on off-loading to a VM and I'll be using tmux there for the purposes of maintaining my own sanity.
Sweden Is Closing Prisons Due to Lack of People to Put In Them
I think people should wait at least five years before bothering to analyse Tim Cook's tenure over Apple, because at this point, it's just stupid to even try.
I thought that was the NSA.
I agree it's really important, but we need both parts of the puzzle, not just one. Out of interest, what would your proposal for a new trust model for server communication be?
> Here is the US, we're allowed to criticize the government.

Mostly true, I suppose, but I remember this : "TSA loudspeakers threaten travelers with arrest for making jokes" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkWPMeLSk6M
Images aren't working for me either.
Further, there is a big difference between long term persistent land mines out of a plane into a civilian area (what the treaty is meant to stop), and keeping a careful inventory of (mostly wire controlled) mines in a controlled area just south of the border.

The former will kill tons of non-soldiers and persist long after the war is over. The latter will kill NK soldiers moving south and can be easily collected in the event they are no longer necessary.
They would be in the same situation, only earning much more money and be able to afford to fly back home every other weekend.

There's such a shortage here in Amsterdam that companies are hiring non-EU citizens (with all the visa crap that comes with it). There's lots of Southern European engineers here, but a lot more sitting back home whining about how bad things are.

This is why I don't feel awfully sorry for our young Southern friends. There's well-paid work a cheap two and a half hour flight away. No visas, no work permits and getting paid in familiar currency. Hell, the IRS will even throw in a 30% tax rebate for your troubles.
In general this only applies to dangerous or violent felonies. In Colorado for instance, the applicable felonies are:

arson, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, sexual assault, or a class 3 felony sexual assault on a child

If somebody or a group of people are participating in these activities and somebody ends up dying, they should certainly be held liable for murder due to the reckless and malicious nature of the crimes being committed.
>>First, as the line in the chart below shows, Apple's iPhone sales have slowed sharply<<
And then the graph shows rate of growth slowing, but and actual increase in numbers. The story may be true, but at least match your words to your graphs Business Insider.
Nice paramiko tutorial (2009)
It would be interesting to see another column on the table with some sort of criminality metric per 100,000 people.
How much, really, does sentence length have to do with re-election?

If you mean, with the voters? Almost nothing.

It you mean, in the ability to get votes in the next election through adequate funding? It means a lot.

The prison union (among others) is a heavy, heavy funder of politicians here in CA (and I assume other places). Obviously they benefit from having more customers^Hprisoners; hence, politicians are willing to vote for legislation in their favor, to keep the money flowing for the next election.

This should surprise no one.
> What would be the point of letting him out? He knew he wasn't supposed to walk into other people's hotel rooms and take their wallets.

How do you end up concluding that petty theft is a good reason to torture this guy for the rest of his life? People do things they're not supposed to all the time.
Gals, stop sexualizing men in your mockups
I've been using screen for years. It works well for me. Can someone list some reasons to switch to tmux? Just about the only thing which annoys me in screen is the awkward switch to "copy mode" to scroll, instead of just hitting PgUp.
Plausible. The other comment doesn't actually specify what kind of costs it's referring to; I initially thought it was per-prisoner costs and decided on second thought that $167k per prisoner per year in new york made no sense at all.

Food for a year is barely even noticeable in $13K; if they cost $5 / day to feed that would come in under $2K / year. Where's all the money going?
I don't know about Spain, but in Poland programming pays OK, and if you know anything you will find a job no problem.

On the other hand you can earn 4 times more in other EU countries for the same job. In my city Java/C# developer with a few years experience earns around 1000 Euro after taxes.
That seems like a weak reason. The US and South Korean militaries could surely defend South Korea without mines.
EVERYTHING starts with education.

Education is the most important thing the human race needs.
>He made a dozen trips to U.S. Bank because they wouldn't give him more than $30,000 at a time.

This is illegal. Checking accounts are legally known as "Demand Deposit Accounts," and you are allowed to show up (at any time) and demand as much money as you have available, in cash, and the banks are absolutely obligated to deliver. They cannot close their doors without first paying you, even if you show up moments before closing trying to withdraw millions of dollars. (They are, however, allowed to stay open late, if needed, should an armored car delivery be required.)
.london & .newyork TLDs. Seriously.
I am in OZ,(I'm English). From the media I see, Sydney has more "startup" things going on, that Melbourne. But from the people I talk to, Melbourne gets the thumbs up as an easy and fun place to live.
What makes you think that isn't happening? It's just not the story the media likes to tell.

The right wing media likes to paint a picture of how bad the "socialist" state an Europe is functioning. The left wing media likes to paint a picture of unemployment and the failure of capitalism.

There's plenty of other things happening. Yes, it's harder in Southern Europe because of both cultural and regulatory issues. But that doesn't mean everyone is just sitting on their asses waiting to get hired.
> FBI warns hacking spree on government agencies is a “widespread problem”

Another “widespread problem” is government agencies conducting mass surveillance.
Congratulations on your good understanding
of and application of probability densities!
That subject is again something many more
men understand than women!

All or nearly all your arguments are fine.
You are the first woman I ever heard of who
actually likes technology. I doubt that
Marissa Mayer really likes technology;
maybe screen layouts, colors, and UI/UX but not
actual technology. Congratulations on your
liking what you do and doing what you like.

My wife was a big challenge. I met her
when she was 18, first saw her socially
at 20, and married her at 22. At 20,
she looked fine, and she had two younger
sisters that also looked fine. And her
mother looked like Bismarck's church,
cooking, children, sewing (in German,
all start with 'K' but I don't want to
go to the trouble to get the umlauts
typed in correctly so give you the English
translation).

But my evaluation was seriously wrong.
It turned out, if knew some of what to
look for, her mother had cut off essentially
all communications with her husband and
with everyone else talked only about trivia
such as the weather. So, the parents had
no intimacy between their ears. I failed
to see that until years later. Otherwise,
the family looked terrific.

Alas, all three of the girls started to
encounter serious problems near age 22.
That's just the way some of these things
work. See it? Now, sure. Then, no.

There was next to nothing I could do.
The only option for her and us was that
she regard herself as dependent on me,
be subordinate to me, look to me for
nearly all direction and thinking, for
what she was to do, day by day, nearly
hour by hour, have me make requests,
show her how to accomplish the task of the
request
if she didn't already know
well, let her do what I had asked, and
then get praise and approval at the end.

This solution did work; I never tried it,
but in effect we tried it by accident and
it worked well.
But, she was very angry about that solution,
so angry she just would not accept it.

I never tried to get her to follow this
solution, and maybe that was a mistake
of mine, asking too much of her. When
I married her, my view of her capabilities
was very high, the polar opposite of
the solution I described.

But, how she lived before I met her
actually was close to that solution:
Her parents and school teachers and
professors made the assignments, and
she did them with high diligence and,
then, got her self-image and self-
esteem. Her big problem, where she
stumbled, dropped the ball, tripped
over the ball, fell on the ball, and
lost the ball was just when she was
given some independence and expected
to work out for herself what to do.

There was more to the situation, but
there was no easy solution except the
one that she was so angry about she
would not accept it.

Technology can be fun, involving,
and profitable -- go for it!
MPAA's list of top pirate sites
This. Cheap, solar powered, slow moving UAVs or something like that would be ideal for this.

Also, for those HNers that haven't learned about California forests:

Part of reason we have massive fires today is because in the early 1900s we didn't understand that forests in California depended on fire for regrowth. Loggers didn't like big fires burning down their precious trees, so we suppressed fire with great prejudice[1] - even though the Native Americans used low-intensity fire frequently to manage the forest and we knew that! [2]

So, today, we're still dealing with "insane fires" that we basically set up a century ago when we let much fuel accumulate in the forest. It's still going to take some time (see: decades) before all this excess fuel sorts itself out.

[1] http://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/files/78651.pdf page 5
[2] ibid page 2
Privatizing prisons generally reduce the financial incentive to incarcerate more people.

In non-privatized states, you generally have a prison guard union. The prison guard union lobbies for more prisoners and gets more money. Simple as that. A non-monopolistic prison corporation spends their own money lobbying, and all the other prison corporations get to reap the benefits. Classic collective action problem.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/10/the-effect-of-privatization...

http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/11/the-effect-of-privatization...
DOJ congratulates batkid.
It's pretty disappointing to see so many comments praising what most people here would describe as "absurdly disproportionate sentences" and "probably something out of North Korea". Especially when the same people were up in arms not long ago about Aaron Schwartz.
Turning assertions into a domain-specific language
€1200 in Amsterdam is not a decent salary.
I got a bit of a dust mote in my eye while reading this and had to step outside of the workroom for a short break.
> I recommend Facebox or UIfaces for those times you need real-looking people in your mockups.

So am I now restricted not to use any woman in bikini? Or a woman wearing tan top? Are you saying by choosing a female in tan top is bad?

I don't see why we can't use those photos. I don't think people are sexualizing women. Sexualizing sounds like we are making a woman sexy. I am on Tumblr daily and I see a bunch of bloggers using sexy photos to attract followers so maybe we should stop doing that. I see instagram full of sexy photos and I guess we should stop doing that as well.

The iOS example seems off and I would agree with OP that that photo is questionable. the other two are fine. The second one doesn't really sexualize women. Just because the designer found a bunch of women avatars doesn't mean they are sexualizing women; maybe they haven't found a good looking guy avatar. Maybe those are friends of the designer.

The third app is also fine. To be fair, make a poll and ask how many women like seeing a beautiful woman picture than a man's picture.
I don't doubt it. A lot of people obviously do. My point is that it is not desirable for people to want to come to Hacker News to talk about politics.
I believe this is because Reddit is like 4chan... everyone knows it, everyone uses it - including those who are just plain stupid.

HN, in contrast, is mostly known in educated circles and so does not attract as many trolls and idiots as Reddit does.
There shouldn't be that much difference between the two forks. Which parts were failing?

For swscale, was it compile problems or something later?

Also, if you have a way to run libav's "make fate" (regression tests), do you know which ones fail?
it won't die. it will be used for years by millions of users. that some company stops issuing security updates for a software means nothing to most users. it probably will even make them more happy because they are not nagged by update messages all the time.
Ask HN: Who are all these mean people and why are we tolerating them here?
I made the terrible blunder of opening the comments on this story this morning:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6742514

Yikes. Is this even the same website where a supportive community of entrepreneurs and tech folk would offer one another helpful advice? How did we go from that to this hateful, mean group of people shouting insults and personal threats at each other?

I wish there were a button that somebody could press to hellban ever single user in an entire thread. Seeding a few honeypot stories like the one I linked and simply banning anybody who stooped to wallow in them would surely do this place some good.

Anybody else have any suggestions for a perhaps less heavy handed solution?
(FWIW, parent commentator more or less co-founded ZeroMQ with the grand-parent commentator; rumcajz left the project and is now working on http://nanomsg.org/.)
As a second point, and speaking without knowledge, it's conceivable for a prison to be bringing in revenue such that it only operates at a loss of (for example) $13K annually.
Something in-house, which they have no choice but to use because of the in-game overlay.
WebKit makes relatively heavy use of reference counted objects, though a custom reference counting implementation is used rather than std::shared_ptr. That said, there has been an increasing emphasis on preferring unique ownership to shared ownership of objects where possible.

I'm a little confused by your throwaway comment about Gecko being the smallest browser engine though. WebKit weighs in at less than 3 million lines of code, much smaller than the size you quote for Gecko.
Why does everything has to scale? Why can a good deed not go unpunished (like in some comments here)?

Your comment reminded me of one famous quote from the ring, the yews gave Oskar Schindler[1]: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire."

Some people (ok, a lot of people) just made the miserable life of one little child a lot better. And they made their own lifes better, by showing what can be accomplished together. What is so bad in that, that it warrants these snarky remarks here on HN? That I really do not understand.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler#After_the_war
Java 8, Lambda Expressions and the Psychology of the Masters of the Universe :-)
Seems so much faster than Youtube.
Life isn't a computer program, lighten up jesus this thread makes me cringe...
The prison industry is what's wrong in the US. Most countries like to keep prisons empty, in the US some prisons like to keep all cells occupied.

Keeping prisons empty means that you educate prisoners about what they did wrong and how they can change there behavior.
If You Want To Work For Twitter, You'd Better Be Able To Answer These Questions
Buy rental properties across the nation, try to earn 10-15% annual return on rents after expenses, plus appreciation in the long run.
You should try looking at prison differently. It's incredibly expensive to lock someone up for their life - that's four walls, meals, space to exercise and guards for say another 40 years. We shouldn't spend that unless the alternative would cost a lot more (say violence against another person, a person's life).

he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away

Crime is often impulsive, irrational. Now this guy had poor impulse control and started from a difficult position in life. He then did stupid things like petty crime. The loss to these golfers was probably $100 - balance that against the cost to society of a life in prison. I disagree that's a worthwhile trade or is protecting society to any significant degree. It costs huge amounts of money, throws away a life that could be turned around, results in disproportionate and inhumane punishments, and doesn't even help the victims. This is little better than deportation for stealing an apple.

The US has 1.6 million of its population in jail, and that figure rose very rapidly in the last few decades, probably due to laws like this and jailing people for minor drugs offences, I'm not convinced that has saved US society any money or even made it much safer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
Remembering my favourite Innings of Sachin
Remembering my favourite Innings of Sachin Tendulkar an Indian Cricketer who is no less than a God.
Force Voronoi Kaleidoscope
Thank You DHH (and others)
PLAYIR: A budding #gamedev’s dream come true
This article might have some truth somewhere, however Vogue magazine which is run by a woman does far more sexualizing that any Silicon Valley designer ever has. The funny thing is that it's typically only American women that try to turn this alleged 'sexualization' into an issue while in Europe this article would be laughed at. Not everything is a conspiracy against women. Would showing images of a handsome man be met with an equal response? Probably not. The hyper-vigilance against imagined 'serious' issues kind of borders on ridiculous. How about focusing on why there's a lack of female designers in the Valley? .. and it isn't because of bikini pics in a mockup.
I think this is what happens when you mix current affairs and politics with a partially anonymous, virtual discussion system. These topics are incredibly emotive even amongst the most rational of agents. Discussions about pure tech, running a business, hacking (in the non-geopolitical sense), investment, etc. (i.e. what HN focused on pre-2009ish) continue to be quite productive here.

(I'm not saying current affairs and politics aren't worth discussing, but they're worth discussing in better venues that provide appropriate features for participants. What we're seeing here is the equivalent of discussing high end fashion in a haberdashery forum.)
While I found the content interesting, the videos do a very poor job of presenting information efficiently and concisely. Time is wasted in the introduction, the listing of materials takes far too long when bullet points would suffice, diagrams are only shown for a few seconds apiece, and the music is downright irritating.

A bullet point list of materials, a paragraph of description, a few diagrams and an embedded video demonstration would be far more effective. A slideshow would also work well.

I apologise if this seems nitpicky, but as interesting as I found what you've done, I only watched half your videos because I found it so painful to sit through them. I doubt I am alone in this.
Cabinjs: Static Blogging with grunt and node.js
I can't get too worked up about a system that sentences this guy to life in prison.

Is that seriously the best fucking option you can come up with? A massively expensive revenge-trip that causes far, far more damage than the theft of a wallet?

Perhaps there's some kind of much, much more effective way to get him to stop taking things that don't belong to him. I say perhaps; of course there are. Lots, that are cheaper, more effective and build a better society; but no, (parts of) the US is happy doing this. Cutting off its own nose to spite its own face and destroying a life in the process, behaving like children.
I'm surprised bitcoins are legal at all.
Violent nationalism isn't particularly partisan.
Heroku is great for clients though. When I was a freelancer, I built these apps for other companies that assumed that I would do the admin & hosting. Heroku is great way to just "tack on a fee" for doing the hosting. If they want a cheaper option, they can always do it themselves. Most clients don't care about the savings on hosting..
I'm an avid Sketch-up user (printing primarily with the Replicator 2) but I've been super impressed by www.tinkercad.com lately.

It's browser based (WebGL) but surprisingly powerful.
Hmm, does this solve the browser audio support issue? ;)

Use Opus, but if browser lacks support, render to Vorbis, RIFF Wave or MPEG Audio Layer 3. Obviously this isn't a serious suggestion, but I really wonder if it could work.