skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Online courses are cute. The stanford machine learning course is a watered down travesty that doesn't compare to Andrew's original material out there. There is a reason for that too. The harder the courses get, the more it is nice to have an actual person to talk to about this shit. My real analysis class made sense only because I was able to talk to the professor after class and understand why I should care about open balls or closed balls.

Similarly from a systems perspective, my OS class was the hardest C.S. class that I took. There was very little that I remember from the lectures but the most I took away was during designing shit and getting stuck and then going back and talking to the professor and brainstorming. This is stuff that inherently doesn't scale well to millions of people.
Designing a data-informed decision process
I've lived in Japan for quite a while, and to the degree I can judge (I'm not an architect or a civil engineer... :), the housing stock seems pretty good on average. While obviously there's a wide range of examples in all countries, certainly modern Japanese housing seems to be of far higher quality and far better finished than "equivalent" modern U.S. housing (U.S. housing from 100 years ago is a completely different thing).

It is very true that there is a somewhat different conception of what housing should be like, with Japanese housing being relatively small, compact, and lightweight (though there are those heavy tile roofs on more traditional houses...). The concept of "insulation" seems to be rather unknown in Japan, which is a real shame given their energy issues (I don't know the amount to which home heating contributes to energy usage though).

I think it's a mistake, though, to conflate all this with with a lack of quality, or to dismiss the cultural differences. Granted, if you, as a European, are trying to find housing, you're going to want what you want, not what the average Japanese wants, but your post does have a whiff of condescension about it ("These poor Japanese, how ignorant they are of our superior European practices!").

[I'll note that in my experience living in Japan, it's much quieter than urban living in the U.S., despite the higher densities and relative lack of insulation, simply because people take more care to not be obnoxious. There's some noise but it's more likely to be quiet conversation on the balcony next door, or children laughing as they play, and not so much douchebag-practicing-his-electric-bass-at-3am. The urban U.S. is noisy.]

I once visited a fairly wealthy Japanese family who had a big, newly built (and very cool) house in the countryside. It was a fairly cold windy winter's day when I visited, but the whole family was sitting in a small room with multiple glass doors to the outside wide open, with the wind blowing in, huddled around a portable electric heater watching TV...

I also totally disagree with your dismissal of the kotatsu; it's a fantastic invention (right up there with bathtubs you can easily completely immerse yourself in, with a friend), and there's very little more cozy and wonderful than snuggling up under a kotatsu on a cold winter's evening.... also, cats love kotatsus!! :] [and heating an insulated 0.5m^3 space is a lot more efficient than heating a whole house!]
We did a lot of development during the summer (including a rewrite that was long overdue), so there were a few segfaults back then. The library should be pretty stable now though -- we've embedded it into our SDK and build system, and it's been working fine.

As for the parser -- that started out as an experiment of sorts. I wanted to do something like parser combinators (but for scanning), and I decided to templatize the whole thing so that all of the scanning code would be generated at compile-time. If I were to redo it, I'd probably use expression templates (which I didn't know about at the time).
It's Penny Arcade. I'd be surprised if they didn't have XBoxes and Playstations at work.
Openmoko
I dunno... binding Esc to close lightboxes is pretty web-standard, and I'm very glad when it closes those annoying lightboxes too. Hunting for the tiny "x", which is often intentionally hard to find, gets tiring.

In fact, I had no idea Esc stopped page loads. Has that been a standard thing too? Although I must admit, stopping page loading is not something I hardly ever find myself doing...
I feel like I'm supposed to find this funny or angering (given the context of being posted on HN), but I'm not really sure why I would be. They're being up front about the demands they'll put on an employee, and they think they can find someone who will do it. More power to them. Any developer willing to relocate to seattle and meeting those requirements should have no trouble getting a higher-paying or easier job, so if they take this one, it can only be by choice.

I wouldn't take it, but I'm not so presumptuous as to assume everyone wants the same things in life as me.
This is an interesting new wrinkle for me, when it comes to intellectual property. In this case the benevolent anarchy of the old axiom "information wants to be free" rings less true.

This one feels dangerously close to the classic power struggle between underdog music artists and the rotten record labels that have a habit of steam-rolling over their creative sensibilities so they can bastardize an artistic work in the name of selling more spaghetti sauce.

This whole intellectual property thing has always, always, ALWAYS been about the individual's fight against the slippery oligarchy of private companies and corporations. It's almost impossible to paint a corporation as the poor, defenseless victim. The Beastie Boys, in this respect are more individualistic than the company.

In this case the Beastie Boys are not sell-outs. Their position rings truest.

It's funny to see this slight change in power differential augment the perception of the conflict. Does this mean that information wants to be free, if and only if it's being freed into the hands of a private individual and not a faceless profiteering company? Yeah, kind of.

Sorry, EFF. You are pretty much entirely wrong on this one.
Remedios Para Blanquear La Piel de Forma Natural
Just out of curiosity, what kinds of statistical problems do you tend to solve, or are you just a fanboy?

I saw you posted a link to something on lesswrong, which is confusing an application of Bayes Rule with Bayesian statistics. Maybe you should read what an actual statistician has to say on the matter: http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/what-is-bayesi... instead of a Harry Potter fanfic author.
It's a cultural battle. Subconscious mindshare is the name of the game. Whether people are or a can be convinced at a conscious level is more or less irrelevant- the impulses that go before rational thought are what count.
Good observation, but I just want to point out that the full dumps are downloaded from different servers. They are even mirrored by other institutions. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_...
> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server?

We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything.

> Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log events from writing to disk in the first place?

And what is the problem with writing to disk? I guess RAM disk is fine? I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk. Most of the time it's the application and securing disk more important.

I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx. To me all the points so far is about Nginx going commercial.
Interesting. I agree that "alone" may not be a requirement for an app like this. Alone is an experience that really resonated with me, in particular because of having spent a lot of time hacking on things solo. One hope is that by sharing this experience, we might feel a little less lonely when we are alone.
I'd like to see a split test on whether it's better to set the bar low like they're doing and immediately disinterest a lot of very qualified people or to set the bar very high and intimidate the marginally qualified or unqualified people.
If this job offering came from just about any other company, we'd be snickering about how clueless their HR department was. Actually, we'll be snickering anyhow, but it's surprising to see it coming from PA. This reads like PA just hired EA's HR dept.

I have no doubt that PA is a cool place to work, and the people are probably nice, but this job posting is pretty cavalier about the fact that you're going to be overworked, underpaid, and life isn't fair, so tough.
HAT (http://www.bailis.org/papers/hat-vldb2014.pdf) looks pretty promising in terms of multi-term transactions. It turns out that you can push the problem off to garbage collection in order to make transaction id generation easy, and garbage collection is easier to be sloppy and heuristic about. The only problem is it isn't clear yet that HATs are as rich as 2PL-based approaches, and that nobody's built an industrial strength implementation yet.
We do want to support the indented syntax eventually (and I believe it should be possible with a relatively simple pre-processing step), but it's still a low priority compared to reaching feature parity with the canonical implementation.
If I were a fan of Penny Arcade, my interest would be piqued - it'd be a challenge that I'd be interested in.

That said, pay would absolutely have to be stellar to put up with that.
My comment was to point that that a lot of companies (big and small) in the tech space use these "benefits" as a way of getting you to stay at work for as long as possible while doing HR selling of these as "benefits". I would rather not have XBoxes/Playstations at work (unless I was actually building shit for them) and just get my work done and get home and do my own creative fun shit at home.
Target user at the moment is entry level devs on up who want to start developing in seconds.

Medium term the target is small multirole teams (developer, designer, copywriter), who want to work more collaboratively using specific tools for the types of things each is most qualified to edit (code/schemas, mockups/styles/images, copy).
Wow - I read it as 250k for the build and was wondering why the complaints. Damn that's bad. I thought Auckland New Zealand was bad and our cost is about NZ$3000 per square metre for total cost on an average quality building. However the parent quotes over NZ$1000 per m2 just for permits. That's terrible.
I suspect in the not to distant future, insurance companies will provide significant discounts on their premiums to customers who provide DNA samples.

Eventually, policies for people who don't provide DNA will cost as much or more than current Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plans (PCIPs).
CSP property values, economic models, and exposed neighboring guest instances
man, can't wait for the headlines about "bitcoin kwanzaa"
If you go with Ruby, try sinatra-synchrony.
Are you familiar with Penny Arcade? The author's not kidding when he says it'll probably be the most competitive opening they've ever had. They could lower the desired experience just a little bit, offer this as an unpaid internship and they'd still get more applications than they could handle. There are people who would would essentially replace everything in their entire lives to work there - it's about the culture, the people and the access.
That is counterfeiting of goods, not money. Maybe edit your comment and I will reply again?

Also the correct figure to compare with the market cap of bitcoin is M1 (approx 2.5 Trillion) not US GDP (approx 16 Trillion)
I guess I'm confused as to why. Commercial use is but one of the four factors (within the purpose and character factor). Is it only being used to supersede the original and generate commercial gains? Or is it being used to stimulate for general enrichment? In combination with criticism of the original song it could (I believe) be seen as the second. Because of the criticism it could be argued to be a transformative and not merely a derivative work, no?
I hate when people whinge about free software...... You didn't pay anything for it, you use it to make money yet you whinge.
>That's the sunk cost fallacy talking.

nope. Unstable currency is just not very conductive to business. Speaking from experience with inflation. As any transaction has 2 ends, i suspect that high deflation has the same effect as high inflation. This is why Bitcoin as a currency has major built-in defect, while it seems to be wonderful value storage like Picasso or Ferrari California.
"My Grandma checked out in 1 minute and 45 seconds. Can you do it faster?"

Can I expect an upcoming blog post: How I hacked conversions by berating my customers.
Agreed. This analysis was so weak that it gives me hope that GoldieBlox will lose their lawsuit.

Also, can someone explain how "highly transformative" is defined? Does changing some of the lyrics and dropping the drum beat count as "highly transformative"?
Seems expensive to me.

I didnt really look at the components or r&d involved. Is it that much better than a tomato/dd-wrt based router?
InnoDB isn't anything like that - it's a transactional database engine that's been around since the 90's and has since become the standard storage engine for MySQL - it competes directly with Postgres' storage layer.
It's awesome that they are accepting bitcoins BUT I wouldn't pay with bitcoins. Why? Well last week I bought some bitcoins through coinbase. The rate I paid would have be $65 for .1 BTC. Coin base takes 4 days to process your order. (I know right can you believe it?) but by the time I got the BTC credited to my account (yesterday) .1 BTC = $85. So the cool thing is I made $20 for nothing for each .1 BTC so why would I let some COMPANY make that instead of me?

I'll be happy to spend bitcoins after six months of small price variation (which I bet is a year after they run out of new coins) but until then they are staying air gapped on my rasb-py SD card.
And what if I'm just jealous I didn't have SO during my CS days and want to punish the kids a bit? Is that so bad?
Whatever the failings/inefficiencies of college education, I'm not convinced that online courses are the answer. Given the non-credit nature of current MOOCs, they attract mostly bright and self-motivated learners, which leads to high-quality discussions on the forums. Every school and every company in the world has a few such students/employees, and there are enough schools and companies in the world to make current MOOCs shine even if a small fraction of these people subscribe.

SJSU's 'disastrous' experience with 'regular' students may indicate that most students need the discipline/peer presence of a physical college:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/23/education-revol...
There are many different degrees of "libertarian". In case you haven't notices, politics isn't all hard lines and absolute extremes of the spectrum. Also be sure to not confuse libertarian with Anarchist.
Yeah I'm very familiar with PA and a big fan of the strip. Less interested in the auxiliary work though.

I get what you're saying and you're probably right, but it seems almost malicious to take advantage of someone's fanaticism so boldly.
This position is without merit. People have every right to say that one particular free option is not what they're looking for, and explain why it's not what they're looking for.
Blind puppy, brother adopted after their photo goes viral
I think OP's issue is that writing to disk will break his old NetApp install.

I don't think it's really that bad to write the local logs to ramdisk and then have the centralized logging system pull the logfiles every so often as a stopgap. VMs are meant to be ephemeral anyways.
I'd heard this specifically with regard to automobile engines: that regulations, fees, and/or taxes are such that relatively low-mileage engines are considered obsolete, and are frequently available outside of Japan as low-cost used or rebuilt engines, often in very good condition.

I found a few general-information sites which suggest this or similar reasons, but cannot find a definitive source.
Do you have $10? In dollars, euro, yen, or whatever? Is a domain name worth $10 to you? Then buy it. If not, don't.

Your decision shouldn't depend on whether your $10 worth of money is denominated in dollars or in bitcoin.† Why not? Because if you have $10 worth of dollars, you can spend it on a domain name, or you can turn it into bitcoin. If you have $10 worth of bitcoin, you can spend it on a domain name or turn it into dollars. (And in an economist's perfect world, you could just as easily sell your domain name for $10 worth of dollars or bitcoin.)

All you have to decide is what relative allocation of dollars, bitcoin, and domain names (and everything else) you want. Then you just exchange one for another to get there. This is the basic idea behind opportunity cost [0]. You have to consider all your alternatives at once, and those alternatives are the same whether your money happens to be in dollars or bitcoin at the moment.

† — Except to the extent that prices differ with the currency of denomination (i.e., there are arbitrage opportunities), or transactions costs hinder your ability to exchange one currency or good for another.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
Stonebraker is a very smart person but he's also not shy about promoting his own companies/research. You generally get a well-informed but very opinionated take on things from him.

VoltDB, for example, is good for certain complex workloads over large but not-too-large data sets. For a lot of situations it isn't really an alternative to memcache+MySQL or a NoSQL solution.
As much as I like RequestPolicy, it doesn't do JS blocking if the JS comes from the same domain as the page you're visiting, or any whitelisted domains.
>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support.

Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves.

>And what is the problem with writing to disk?

Performance

>I guess RAM disk is fine?

It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold.

> I am not really sure what's the issue with writing to disk.

Performance. Specifically the thundering herd problem. All of his servers log to virtual disks all stored on the same SAN, which is stressing under the load.

>I still don't see any convincing argument why we should ditch Nginx.

It's a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, but the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.
It works for the same reason a well-administered datacenter does: because the professionals tasked with maintaining[1] it are assiduous in so doing.

[1] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/CDFinal/Lippman/cover.htm...
I do not have numbers, but while a fair number of people use FB in Japan, it's far from the juggernaut it is in the U.S. According to Wikipedia, Japan has about 17 million FB users, Korea about 10 million, and China only about 0.6 million!

LINE, in the meantime, just celebrated its 300 millionth user, and its user base is concentrated in Asian countries.
> Fork it.

Well, there's a fork of nginx called Tengine, made by the Taobao folks:

http://tengine.taobao.org/document/http_log.html
It's absolutely malicious, and what's more, they already know that: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/25
The mobile equivalents of these are worse.

No, I'm not going to install your app — I just want to see the content hiding behind this stupid ad. Even if I did install your app, I'd have to re-navigate to that content within your app.
This seems like the best spot in the tree to hijack, belatedly.

I got a concussion about six months ago playing hockey and am still recovering, not even working full time. I did a battery of neuropsychological testing about four month post-concussion and verbal fluency, specifically coming up with words starting with a given letter, was one thing they tested. They guessed at my baseline performance, then were able to pick word usage, among a few others, out as areas I'm now deficient in. My recollection is they said it was a common pattern to see.

I do have to say it's good to read of people who've come through this and feel normal again, even if it takes a long time.
Sigh. FOSS and NGINX as an example of FOSS have given us so much. If direct to syslog logging is what you're after, why not use Apache? As many people have pointed out before, Apache can certainly be hold a candle to NGINX if you put the time into tuning it. If you're expecting Black Friday traffic of this magnitude, and you haven't spent the last two months planning and load testing for it, you are either lazy or underpaid. If the first, okay, I get why you don't want to roll your own RPM. If the second, that's just what this business can expect out of their setup.

No one is going to dump NGINX over this. If it is this mission critical to your business, pony up and pay for NGINX.

> We’re using php-fpm anyway; the performance difference between nginx and httpd in this scenario is negligible.

So why are we even having this discussion? Honestly if you're experiencing that much traffic and PHP performance is hindering you, you should consider some sort of Varnish full-page caching anyhow. Disk writes, as you note, are not your primary issue, and certainly is no reason to dump NGINX.
If you want a job then get a job. If you want to build a company without shouldering any risk get a job at someone else's startup.
The most frustrating thing with these popups is when they come up after clicking through from the site's email newsletter. Some sites I visit do it on every single page load, which is a really good way to make an engaged subscriber unsubscribe.
Oh I get this comes from congress and the tortured history of dietary supplements. I'm just taking issue with what might define as reasonable.
Job requirements:

* Ability to move in a fast paced environment, at a speed of 180 mph or greater.

* Demonstrated physical capacity to produce calefaction directed from eyeballs, at or exceeding 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

* Signed note from esteemed scientist showing capability for producing X-rays (preferably 5 nanometer wavelength) from eyeballs or eye sockets

* Affidavits testifying to eidetic memory.

* Ability to physically resist and rebuff projectiles, including but not limited to arrows, baseballs, rocket propelled grenades, bowling balls, and bullets between the range of 1 and 50 caliber.

* Established reputation for instantly understanding and speaking any language sufficiently established by a human culture, after initial exposure.

* Distinguishing characteristics: Faculty for achieving flight, and resourcefulness.

Are these job requirements impossible? Absolutely not! They are laid out explicitly, so the list is perfectly reasonable. Being up front makes all the difference here.
Futon storage, maybe. Depends on the type of flooring.
Then ditch it and move on. If everyone made a post every time they chose not to buy X product but instead to use Y product then HN would be unreadable.

You have the source, patch/fork it. If you're too lazy/not skilled enough, switch to Apache and don't tell us about it.
Bocaikaihu
bocaikaihu
I'm starting to wonder seriously if we haven't already passed an inflection point in the wanton destruction of the environment from which we'll never fully recover. Someone please convince me we haven't broken our planet beyond its ability to carry us.
God this is going to get sadder.
You can compile nginx with syslog support with this module https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_syslog_patch and avoid writing to disk.

syslog is still blocking though.