skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If done right, rethrowing exceptions does not affect the ability to debug the code. You don't throw a pristine new exception on the spot. You wrap the exception in a new one, effectively maintaining all the information. Coded recoverability suffers, but debugging ability does not. You have the same debugging information in the rethrown exception as you did in the bubbled up one.
"Noisy neighbors: sometimes instances would behave much slower than usual, because other people on the same hypervisor were using all the hypervisor’s resources"

The Xen hypervisor actually has pretty good resource allocation between virtual machines, and although there are academic attacks [1], I'm interested to hear what evidence you've seen of neighbors hogging your resources.

[1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~rist/papers/rfa.pdf
> Opera 12 then just gets weird on us. It says "Generic English please, or U.S English, if not then uh... Arabic! If not then perhaps Catalan? If not then Danish, or if not that then Dutch. Ok perhaps Greek? Finnish?... Go home Opera, you're drunk.

Most amusing part. Seriously, I can't imagine why Opera sends all these languages in its request. Bizarre.
I know about it, but licensing for 50 servers running IIS on Windows 2008 vs 50 servers running LAMP is a big price difference to even a medium-sized company, let alone a startup. I also wouldn't bet my company's success on whether mono is working correctly this version.

Oh and if you start building on that infrastructure using AD, Exchange, etc you're in CAL licensing hell. Next thing you know you've spend the wages of two really good engineers on just MS licensing. How is that cost efficient? I'd rather have a 5 man team running linux than a 3 man team running MS.

Not to mention, if I'm recruiting young talent, how many of them will have MS enterprise experience vs linux-based experience?
Good tech skills, but most of them didn't speak english/german (working languages here) well enough.

The misunderstanding lead to software that had good quality but often didn't do what we wanted :\
Beijing sits in a geographic bowl (trapping pollution) and is inland from the coast compared to Shanghai. It also gets hit with dust storms from the desert to its west, all of which lead to it being "crazy bad"[0] in relation to Shanghai.

re: "crazy bad" being tweeted by the US Embassy in Beijing -- a cautionary tale on string sanitization. "The "crazy bad" terminology – which was at odds with the normally sober and scientific language of the Twitter account – appeared to have been a joke embedded in the embassy's monitoring program and triggered by a reading that was off the normal scale."

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/nov/19/craz...
this is such a silly and dummy argument
Is it so damned hard for companies to tell us what their product actually is?

I looked at the linked page and the About page and I still have no idea WTF this thing is supposed to be.

It drives me nuts. It's like people design these pages so they can pat themselves on the back, not to actually communicate any information.
PivotDesk Offers Drones a Home
There are a lot more computer software jobs today than there were 30 years ago, and this caused an influx of clueless gold-rushers trying to get in. There always were bad programmers and buggy software, it's just that today there's a lot more of both (both in terms of percentage and total), simple as that.
I agree that stuff like this needs to be well-sourced, but I'm glad to see some of it getting attention. Mandela is, and rightfully so, held up as a beacon of kindness and forgiveness that we should all try to incorporate. But I think we do his legacy a disservice by not talking about all the corruption he fought, and who we really was (including the parts that make him look like, as you suggest, he "pretty much deserved to go to jail").

I've done a lot of reading on this topic myself. I would love to post some sources but I don't have my books with me at the moment. But for what it's worth (which is not much, admittedly) - let me add my endorsement as a fellow HNer that what the author talks about is plausible, and there is plenty of evidence if you care to go looking for it. I believe this is a well-accepted theory by many other South Africans, rather than a fringe conspiracy. But yes - unfortunate that the author doesn't do more to back up the claims in a verifiable way.

edit: The cover is different, but I'm pretty sure this is the book I read that did the most to back up these events: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-B-O-S-S-Africas-Secret-Police/d.... The details, as I remember them, have always been very consistently reported by the various "sources".
I agree. The GUI changes in Windows (pre-8) are pretty negligible. Your Start button used to be rectangular; now it's a circle. Big whoop.

The most frustrating thing for me about Windows over the years is that the path to perform routine tasks is always changing.
Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks - Part 1
>Ten years from now... Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live.

Oh, of course. Dontcha know that, during that time, we'll be no more than 6 years away from a computer passing the Turing Test? http://longbets.org/1/

And we'll be only ~20 years away from the singularity which solves everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

But in all seriousness, this was quite entertaining. I don't know if we have any reason to expect another (highly) intelligent species to arise in the next 100 million years. Were there any obstacles in the past 100 million years that prevented an intelligent species from developing before humans?
Show HN: RiffBank – A reverse guitar tab search engine
Little side project from the past few months indexing ascii guitar tab sections into pseudo-language "words" (notes, chords) and "sentences" (riffs) that can be queried and indexed with ElasticSearch (Apache Lucene).
I was going to make a wiseacre remark about how my work frowned on bringing pot plants to work, but I know what you mean :). I work out of my home office now and love being surrounded by plants.
You summarize one point I learned from this article and the comments: deployment and development is not the same. On the development machines it might make sense to easy_install complete package trees, but in a deployment environment the most important concern is a clean system wide package management and for that I need binary packages in a format that the system's package manager understands.

Thanks.
Ask HN: How do you deal with verisimilitude at work?
I've been in several work environments where either people lack the humility or confidence in themselves to admit they don't know (and ask someone who does) or the political climate leads to sub-optimal decisions that have to be justified somehow. Generally, this makes me unhappy and tends to poison the workplace for me and I'm assuming others have a similar experience.

Does anyone have any advice or techniques they've successfully used to change the nature of the conversation from posturing and chest pounding to fact based? Personally, asking probing questions that socratically teases out the gaps in understanding in a meeting where people are using bad information to make even worse decisions, has ended poorly for me.
There's more to Web content than the colour of its fonts.
Do you believe his jailors deserved to go to jail? What about his prosecutors? The results of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission clearly indicate evilness of the apartheid regime and those in control of it. That Mandela's response when gaining power was not one of retribution, revenge, and bloodshed clearly indicates in my mind that his was a principled, moral mind and that he clearly did not deserve to go to jail.
I heard once: "'Private Cloud' is like calling your house a 'Private Hotel'".
Please add a link to the PEP in your post. Thanks.
> Big disgrace if the CIA actively sponsored this regime

The US was the apartheid regime's next-to-last overt ally (Israel was the last -- and proliferated nuclear weapons technology to South Africa) -- US overt support ending only late in the Reagan Administration under intense public and Congressional pressure -- and its not really the worst regime the US backed as a bulwark against Communism.

Regardless of whether the CIA was involved in supplying information for Mandela's arrest, there is no question that at the time -- and for decades after -- the US government was -- overtly, not merely potentially covertly -- backing the South Africa apartheid regime.
Sex and brains: Vive la différence
If your launch on HN fails to get any votes in the first 5-10 minutes, and you feel your post has significant merit for the community, your best course of action is to just delete the submission and try again.
offset qwerty keyboard by one key - win
That being said, people who sniff UA string to serve different content (or even block the user) should end up in hell.

Goodness me how I could rant endlessly on this subject.

I operate an automated web frontend testing service and much of that centres around retrieving a HTML document and running some tests against it.

I have tried very hard to be nice and fair and to set appropriate UA strings, such as featuring only the product name and relevant version numbers. Unfortunately for reasons relating to how responses are altered in relation to the UA string this is not possible.

My product features the word 'test' in the name. Some server-side services return a 404 or a 500 if the UA string contains 'test' in any form. Due to this I can't include the full product name in the UA string and expect all tests for all end users to work in cases where they really should. Some others respond similarly is the UA string is only 'agent'.

The number of services that respond in a different manner to a blank UA string is significant. Likewise for cases where the UA string is not somewhat similar to that of common browsers.

On a related subject, I'd love it if everyone supported the simple HEAD method consistently.

Some services respond as expected and return only the response headers. Some services respond fairly with either a '405 Method Not Allowed' or '501 Not Implemented', giving me the option to try again with an equivalent GET request. Some services send a 404 or 500 in response to a HEAD in cases where the equivalent GET request works just fine.

And lastly, https://myspace.com/ responds with nothing when making a HEAD request and you have to wait for the request to time out in cases where an equivalent GET works just fine.
Show HN: My girlfriend needed a Secret Santa web app, so I built her one
I ask how their typical day looks like (especially if I speak with developers).
Don't do this.

pg has said that this is a ban worthy offense. And I still see people doing it.
Throwing in nodes doesn't help you get past the $/Gflop barrier, which is ultimately what is important.
At least in my circle of friends, and company, which are pretty much all Mac users, the basic premise that they don't rant, complain, or talk about Mac OS is completely flawed. I have to hear about problems with every Mac OS release for days and weeks after each release, and get tired of the cross-chatter about it. The Mac users I know talk about and complain about Mac OS probably more than any other topic I hear them talk about, nearly as much as sports fans talk about sports.

I'm really just jealous that the people I know don't all use Linux and aren't as passionate about it. :-/ But there's a certain blindness when you're the fan to how much you fan out about things.
This is a very old observation and in fact, the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system.

From John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s General Education Board, Occasional Papers No. 1, 1913:

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.

We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm."
Lyapunov time - Pluto's orbit becomes impossible to predict in 20mil years
Asset prices: Not fully inflated
.I have had more luck with Homebrew than I did with apt: my experience has been that brew handles dependencies better.
Box Confirms It Raised $100M
I was going to say, that feels spammy and weird.
It amazes me that the A/B tests work. Is it just that they catch people who have never seen a scam before? How can people who consistently fall for this crap have any money left for rent?
Why it's obvious an user-space daemon should be written C? It's a myth other runtimes don't have enough performance.
That's not at all the case. "Cloud" isn't about external hosting, its about using virtualization to allow dynamic provisioning of resources. Outsourced external hosting was around a long time before cloud computing. Its a key application of cloud computing, but they are no more equivalent than "internal compustion engine" is equivalent to "wheeled land vehicle".
Surely there are subreddits more relevant than /r/programming? May not have been targeted well.
Uber And Twitter-Backer Benchmark Closes $425M Fund
So out of memory failure won't happen when you malloc, it will happen when you assign a variable in a COW page. This somewhat invalidates the idea of a failing malloc.
I'd say: people don't like change. Creativity is change. Change takes energy, and there's a fininte supply of energy to go around.

If you can introduce creative changes that require little energy to adopt, you're on to something.
" If your password has few characters that Telepathwords could not guess, attackers may also find your password easy to guess. "

This is somewhat grammatically tricky to parse. A better way to phrase it would have been:

"If your password has many characters that Telepathwords was able to guess, attackers may also find your password easy to guess."
Self-administered placebo
Best Tools to Build Your App Prototype in a Day
> or if we radically change the fabrication process and turn transistors sideways

This reminded me so much of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb_PyKuI7II
Details notwithstanding, I still want to hack it -- to pieces.
I've seen some research on internet scams that talk about how a lot of the point of the initial BS is to weed out the skeptical people, because that's not the target audience. Their target audience is the gullible.
> it was always a bunch of boilerplate work to get virtualenv setup.

curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-X.X.tar.gz
$ tar -xvfz virtualenv-X.X.tar.gz
$ python ./virtualenv-X.X/virtualenv.py myEnv
$ source ./myEnv/bin/activate

yeah, that's a killer alright...
I think you get billed for at least 10min... still better than 1 hour though.
> A deployment that changes only the code is simpler than one that changes the DB.

In your experience, perhaps, but that's reversed in many other places.

As for everything else your point is only accurate if you assume that migrations are done by hand. If use a migration library it's impossible to forget to apply a migration to a database so there's no problem working with copies or even forks of databases.

> And if it was so safer and easy to do it PostgreSQL wouldn't have added the json field.

You're implying causation incorrectly: hstore and JSON are useful for cases where you explicitly do not want schema enforcement or can't afford the performance impact of normalization. This is not saying that migrations are hard, merely that not all problems have the same best solution.
Back in the day, .NET was coherent, well-designed, well-implemented, and the tools performed well on PCs. This was circa 2001. NETCF was in beta, and you could literally drag-drop an object from the mobile endpoint to middleware to back-end. Visual debugging of on-device code, emulators, understandable errors and warnings... Brilliant!

At that time, attempting to run Linux, Eclipse, Forte, Java, etc. was difficult, buggy, and slow - sometimes too slow to be usable. Until Sun sued it off the market, Visual J++ was the only usable interactive Java toolchain/runtime/base-classes with UI base classes that resulted in applications that looked and acted polished and clean.

The big difference today is that you can take a laptop out of a box and within two hours have a Linux-based Android development toolchain up and running without any hitches, and have an even more coherent managed language runtime targeted by that toolchain running clean beautiful mobile touch apps.

Open tools and OSs have been completely transformed. I don't really see the 13 years of comparable progress in VS and Windows.
One place I worked at a few years ago, a guy did this. The problem was that it ended up introducing fruit flies to the environment, which was pretty miserable to work around.
This one will mostly be of interest to Python developers but not only to them. Conda is an excellent example of "screw it, let's fix that" attitude that I like so much. Personally I migrated all my internal Python workflows from pip and virtualenv to conda and Anaconda (Python distribution from the authors of conda) is now my go-to Python distribution.
Yeah, but the joke is responding to a post that is saying that davidgerard is the left wing equivalent of them, so to include more nuance would have made it less funny.
How Tesla Batteries Are Powering an Energy Revolution
Bankers Balking at Bitcoin in U.S. as Real-World Obstacles Mount
>I think it's more a commentary on the inane comments that are being made on the issue by people who seriously have no idea on who he was and what he did but want to jump on the bandwagon of his 'celebrity' status.

This was all I could think reading this thread.

Mandela, and his undertakings, probably never crossed the minds of 90% of the participants in this thread. I know very little about him myself, outside of his celebrity. But suddenly everyone has an opinion.
And who are you? No other posts, anonymous account, simply to call someone out and try to tie them to a company?

Full disclosure: Know 2 ex coworkers at Docker, no financial ties.
Probably. My thinking is that the low CTR (click through rate) can be explained by poor targeting, but once you arrive to the landing page you should have a pretty good indication of whether you want to trial or not. The low number of conversions to trial just from reddit is a bit strange.

That said: any ideas for better subs to target? /r/sysadmin, /r/linux were some of the smaller ones i'd considered, or i could go wide with /r/technology, but this experiment has left me feeling cautious.
this looks like a good sign for the world economy. S&P 2000!
I think I accidentally down voted this great post, sorry! Wish I could change it like on Stack Overflow.
As mentioned in another reply, this means you can get rid of a mastercard or visa while shopping goes on as usual.
ShowHN: Kites + Smartphones = aerial photography
When I saw people "raving" about it, I did end up going back and reading the rest...
I built this. Girlfriend needed this to organise her christmas party and we couldn't really find a nice one on the internet.. So I built it myself. Mostly for her and as an exercise for myself (I learnt the basics of Angular and NodeJS along the way), but then my designer friend came up with the design and we put it live. Hope you enjoy it.
There Is No Cofounder Formula
Mi main concern is about keep well & alive the database (postgres). I can do the app server but the data server is the one that scary me ;)
It's odd because I am a long time Windows user and just recently (2 years ago) bought a Mac. I have to say the things I dislike the most about recent Mac UI is the dock, notifications, and mission control.

The dock staple is part of my biggest problem with my Mac. It takes of screen space and is completely useless after I open the couple programs I am working in. Sure, you can auto hide it, but the transition, plus deal with it randomly popping up on my screen make it extremely cumbersome.

This is where Windows 8.1 gets things right (and some wrong). You can make the menu on the bottom extremely thin, then use an overlay transition to choose your programs.

This is why on Mac I wish I could just rid myself of the dock completely and use Launchpad. I don't understand why there is both. When I minimize a program and want to go back to it I just pop launchpad open and click the app again.

Most of all these both work perfectly with touch based screens. I personally don't have any touch based screens yet, but that is the way technology is going and it embraces it while still making it useful for mousing.
Not only that, but ... prioritized!
>"So if I'm saving up in a deflationary currency, it's better for me to wait upgrading my computer until the day before I die, instead of doing it now?"

If you're maximizing your economy, yes.
344 2.5 AQI right now in Beijing. I just bought a $1k air purifier to cope last week to cope with what is going to be a very bad winter.
To each his own, I guess.
They, together, are two of my favorite tools. Never had a problem with either of them.
Bitcoin Boom Spreads to IPhones With Mobile-Payment Apps
What business model doesn't want to reduce costs?
This is a terrible article which is made worse by unnecessarily being broken up into 4 pages to quadruple ad views.

Mac users bitch about the OS. It just so happens we're at a point where Windows 8 is a drastic change from Windows 7 and OS X hasn't made any drastic changes for a while.
As others have said; this does a terrible job at explaining what this product is about.
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>> People ranted about OSX for years, until one day they kinda stopped.

The hardware finally started to be fast enough for it to not be a slideshow. Early releases of OS X were so resource-hungry, and OS 9 ran like a rocketship on the same hardware. Besides, the G3 and early G4 Macs weren't really that fast anyway.
Two observations...

One is general - that other people imposing their creativity on me requires me to think. This isn't bad, but I have a limited capacity to think, and my bias leads me to think that my new ideas are great, and yours aren't. This is an oversimplification, but if everything changed all the time, we couldn't cope. Some people reject all creativity as a result. Others just put up filters.

Second is just practical career advice. Someone at a large company once told me, "People around here talk about diversity and innovation, but what they really want is people doing the same things just a little cheaper, a little faster, and a little more predictably."

This isn't to say that Change is bad, only that there is lots of resistance with semi-rational reasoning behind it.
The comparison is moot. You can't drive 100 times faster with a car from 2013 than from 1983. With computers, you saw that huge progression in a matter of 10 years. Now what you have in your pocket is close to what used to run servers 10 years ago in terms of power (or maybe exceeds it). If at all, your argument strengthens my point that cars have stopped evolving in performance and now car manufacturers work on other attributes.