skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the status; there are a fair amount of people on HN who have PhDs (I have no idea what the actual fraction is; ~5-10%?) and a lot more equally smart people who don't have one. And some (surely small) fraction of those people either have their own insecurities, or feel badgered by PhDs (like michaelochurch below, who I am glad explained his negativity).

But it saddens me a bit, because getting a PhD really can be a wonderful and valuable thing.
I wished the article went into more detail about how it could form. My hazy memory of astronomy from college, I thought matter falling onto a neutron star from a companion star was how a type IIa supernova occurred. How would the neutron star be "swallowed" without triggering the nova?
I'm a nerd who spends most of his time in "ugly" terminals; but KDE is still my preferred DE.

Since I use tmux heavily and am often found browsing the net in lynx (or just curl when I'm looking for something specific), I could get away without Xorg completely if I had to. But KDE just seems to compliment my workflow nicely.

Everyone is different though. I wouldn't ever push my preferred WM/DE's onto anyone else any more than I'd expect to like whatever set up they've fallen in love for.
Clojuratica = Clojure + Mathematica (powerful parallel data analysis)
The following is a presentation in 2008 by Richard Erwin of Microsoft at the BCS CMSG (Configuration Management Specialist Group):

http://bcs-cmsg.org.uk/events/e20081124/2008-11-24-agile-scm...

Lots of good stuff there, but a key one is slide 8. In the question session Richard confirmed that Source Depot (the custom version of Perforce) was at that time still used for the source management although TFS was used for bug tracking etc for Office and Windows.

Don't know what has happened in the intervening years...
For what it's worth, I tried out a dev kit at the start of December (Half Life 2, spent probably 15 minutes playing) and had no nausea at all. There were a couple of other people trying it out at the same time, and I didn't hear any of them complaining about it.
The Joys of Being a Woman in Norway
I don't get it.

Did they actually benchmark all possible options like shared memory or Sqlite or mysql memory engine (periodically backed)?

They say memcache (or redis) would have been slower because of network latency even over localhost. But did they benchmark.
As an aside, still don't understand how process->kernelspace driver->platter is faster than process->kernelspace socket->process->RAM? Especially for random access patterns. I suspect a memcache misconfiguration?

The point is to use the file system cache, so in the common case you're not hitting platter. I'm assuming all these machines do is serve tons of web pages, so the common case will be VERY common and you will almost never hit platter (e.g. only on a deployment of new strings).

My intuition says that memcache is slower because of the extra process switching (and potential context switching). With their solution, you go from Ruby -> kernel in the common case. With the memcache solution, you have to go from Ruby -> kernel -> back to user space for memcache, EVERY time.

Also as far as I remember, using a local TCP socket isn't as fast as using a Unix socket or pipe. The network stack actually does a lot of stuff.

I like their solution a lot better. Fewer moving parts. Let the kernel manage the file system cache. The kernel knows how much physical memory you have and will aggressively use it. Memcache has no idea (AFAIK), and if you are too aggressive you could end up with page faults in the memcache process anyway.
I guess time will tell, but I think this is a pretty slam dunk trademark infringement case (like it or not). Also it isn't a function of them taking the bait or not, trademarks have to be actively defended if the owner wishes to retain them.
Pay No Attention to that Man in Your Bathtub
I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation

Indeed, the success of Linux in the enterprise owes a lot to Red Hat, as they gave enterprises the sort of consistent, corporate-buzzword-compliant support agreements that removed a lot of the scariness that would otherwise impede use of Linux for "important" services.
> The problem comes about when someone wishes to rule out the idea that the SC can make faulty judgments by construction

I think you're talking past each other.

Obviously the Supreme Court can get decisions wrong (not just "the context was different then" but actually wrong; e.g. Dred Scott).

But the point is that for the purposes of the government and of the law there is no higher arbiter than the Supreme Court so if they get a Constitutional interpretation "wrong" in your humble opinion then it still won't matter that you or anyone else disagrees; in the interim the government and the courts will use the new precedent.

Saying in essence that "other people can have their own opinions about the Constitutionality of a Supreme Court decision is tautologically true; how can it add to a discussion? You might as well mention that water is wet. For that reason it's easy for other people viewing that comment to believe you meant something else entirely...
Yes, Academia, Winter Is Still Coming
It is kind of a dick thing to do to someone. The creators are just profiteering off a celebrity's infamy.
I found it really immersive when I wore it while standing up, but when I sat down to actually play the game it got a bit more "I am wearing a very cool headset".
Their interests are not the same as yours. That particular clause allows them to require the removal of content that places them at legal risk.

"Policing" incorrectly applies that they are actively trawling the site and telling people what to write about. That is clearly not true.
That's weird. I just bought it with paypal and I didn't see any reCAPTCHA.
+1. I was reading the Mercurial mailing list while the Guestrepo design was being hashed out, and i was really impressed: the goals and mechanism were carefully considered. I haven't actually used it, so i can't vouch for the implementation!
Eclipse? Surely you mean IntelliJ IDEA.
> Rust looks way too unpolished and has not only one but multiple pointer types.

This is overstated. There is just one pointer type in the language, the unique pointer, and there are also references.

That said, the distinction between unique pointers and references is there for a reason. You need this power for low-level programming. A pervasive global GC is not appropriate for all applications.
C unit testing framework in 2 defs:

http://www.jera.com/techinfo/jtns/jtn002.html
I don't recall ever having any issues myself when donating for a Humble Bundle, but I frequently enter the wrong characters on other sites' CAPTCHAs, so I totally understand your frustration.
Actually, I think it's because I'm always (just barely) beating the average: "Orders below the average must authenticate with reCAPTCHA to help cut down on costly abuse." Is this the CAPTCHA you're referring to?
Not only Netflix they get some better price (I have no info but it will not be surprising) but I have even heard that Netflix do work with the AWS team to test first some new features before AWS release it to a larger public.

I have even heard that a couple AWS service were in fact created because Netflix was asking for it.

Netflix being probably the most visible company on AWS, I am sure they do have some special deal with Amazon.

Anyway concerning the news, it will be interesting to see Adrian in his new role! He is a great guy!
"AWS is pretty much running very close to at cost (super razor-thin margins"

Compare the Amazon price with other VPSs.

It's a different service, yes, but it's not even close, not even if you reserve the instances (it's been a while since I did the math though)

But for small scale, I recommend strongly against AWS
Stuart Feldman, from "The Art of Unix Programming", on why makefiles must use tabs:

"Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history."
There was a time when the developers advised using parallel clones rather than named branches, though. I never really understood why.

These days, the standard practice is probably to use bookmarks, which are more or less like Git branches.
I don't get it. If we start with COINTELPRO as the baseline, why would the current situation be any better?

Nothing happened, the programs continued, the people running it back then are now happily retired or left the world without a mark on their record. There were no mass firings of the hundreds of agents directly implicated in these obviously unethical and illegal things.

The people running COINTELPRO back then to find the communists tutored the government agents that are now trawling through the massive NSA data to find terrorists. The capabilities were only expanded.
GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil. Discomfiting legal maneuvers do not cancel their thousands of commits to the Linux kernel, init.d, GWT, Cygwin (!), etc.
No, I paid above the average. I was given the CAPTCHA when trying to log in to my existing account.
Perspectives on Writing
Interesting. Is there anything specific about KDE's workflow that you like and haven't seen elsewhere? When did you start using KDE? If you discovered Linux today, how likely do you think you'd be to use KDE?

(i'm writing a toy WM + DE stuff in my free time, and am curious to hear about all of that :)
Well I'm currently reading an economics book that describes the "creative destruction" that results from disruptive innovators displacing old industries... and I guess the point to that is that if KDE gets made irrelevant because no one uses desktops well, such is life, you know? May the best GUI win and all. It's not impossible we'd make a KWin-lite that only does tiling WM (but how would that integrate to the rest, that's the question).

IMHO the KDE contributor community is even more valuable than the software at this point, which is all the more impressive given how anarchical it all really is. There's no Linux kernel-style "hierarchical command-and-control" development framework, no major corporate sponsors, and yet things still get done which is a testament to the skill and "give-a-shit".
Resque maintainer here: in recent versions we do the RPOPLPUSH stuff, so 'reliable queueing' should be there.

At least, as reliable as you can get with Redis...
For various reasons, ads can not be easily cached.
I've had the dev kit for a few months now. My experience has been that it depends highly on the type of demo played. Most people seem to have a lot of difficulty with first person shooters, but fare much better with flight sims. Lunar Flight (http://www.shovsoft.com/) is my favorite so far.

I think everyone's vestibular system is sensitive in different ways. But FPSs in the rift generally feel very "wrong" (not sure how else to describe it), when moving using a controller. Especially when strafing - it produces a sensory response similar to a feeling of drunk stumbling. But in a flight or driving sim, the same kind of movements feel much less wrong, even to the same people. Maybe because similar movement in the real world are also performed via control inputs, and our minds understand that?

I think there are some interesting questions there. In the coming years, an entertainment concept as vague as "immersion" might actually have tangible metrics associated with it, since its exactly that kind of understanding that will be needed to overcome this "VR sickness"
Resque maintainer here: this looks really great! Congrats!
From what i heard, mostly Perforce.

The story i got from a Googler was that there are many separate projects in a single repository (which is normal for Perforce), and dependencies are handled by making your libraries subprojects (or whatever they're called - like subrepos in Git, essentially symlinks), rather than using an artifact-centred approach.
Cool, there is also a wearables hackathon happening in Phoenix next week by #hackphx: http://hackphx.com/

They've done some really awesome hackathons in the last year or so.

(Full disclosure: this happens at a hackerspace I'm very active in [heatsync labs], and I have volunteered at the last couple of events)
I used to have a housemate who would come in and watch me play Doom clones, seated behind my shoulder - she would get motion sickness even sitting that far away (in the 15" CRT days)
Feature of GMake 4.0: your programming language in a Makefile
Ah I'm so excited to play To the Moon. This one by far stands out above the rest in this bundle at least to me. I'm going in with very little foreknowledge, just the way I like it.
Bitbucket never supported svn (and still doesn't), it was created with django + uses the pure python mercurial (It was one of the major "posterchild" stories for django).

Not sure if it's still django though.

You might be thinking of http://beanstalkapp.com/ which supports svn.
No, it's really not. Its very simple to create a fake FB account, all you need is an email. Relying on FB login is a really stupid way to try to verify identity - why not just use emails if they want some minimum bar for registration? FB is no more useful, ubiquitous, or reliable.

I see the attraction for FB in this though; they're desperately trying to come up with ways to avoid becoming the next geocities or myspace - if lots of websites or services use their login or comments system, they will manage to stay at least minimally relevant for a bit longer.

I'm not really sure what's in it for the businesses or consumers though, unless they trust FB...[1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims...
My impression is that they got a bad rep long ago before there were decent package managers. As I recall, you had to install dependencies manually and updating a system could get nightmarish. Nothing really wrong with rpm as a package technology per-se, but before yum it was a lot less friendly.
If the only evidence you have is in a password protected laptop then the case is flimsy yo begin with. You might as well add coin flipping to the case because that's what you are basically doing.
Change the face of healthcare by rewarding patients for being engaged consumers
I don't want to state the obvious but just use a site like odesk or elance and have your freelancers join your team. Not only do you get protection for the work that gets done and a tremendous amount of reporting / accountability tools but they get the protection that if they do the work, they'll get paid.

It really cuts down the hassles and and questions that prevent most people from outsourcing and if you think about the 10% fee on oDesk you'll calculate it to be a minor surcharge on excellent productivity and accountability tools.

To give you an example, before India changed their payment rules about 4 years ago my vendors would tack on a 4% surcharge to paypal payments...and then India prevented payments over $500 so I switched to wire transfers that ended up costing me $40 per wire and about an hour per month per vendor to coordinate and verify.

I manage eleven outsourcers in six countries and I am the cheapest person that I know...and I still find a huge amount of value and protection by using these sites.
Yeah Erlang looks awesome and I should definitely try to learn it at some point.

To me Node.js and ToffeeScript seem a lot more straightforward and have the advantage of the whole package system which I believe is more advanced, as well as the npm ecosystem with 54,000 packages.

But anyway it would be good to actually learn Erlang and use it in some projects so that I can really evaluate it.

I'm not sure but I think it might be a lot more resource efficient for one thing.
I'm using Seatest[0] for a hobby project I'm writing. I was looking for simple xUnit-style assertions. Works pretty well out of the box, but I did modify it to make it ANSI C compatible and change the output. (I want colored terminal output, darn it! Green if OK, red if not!)

[0] https://code.google.com/p/seatest/
Well, Ballmer's gone. So maybe they will figure out how to pull together their innovation. It is kind of deflating sometimes to realize that MS was doing something that they simply dropped the ball on. The smart phone is solidly one of those things. They dominated the PDA market prior to the iPhone coming out. All they had to do was put some focus towards it.
Uber CEO: Surge Pricing Is Here to Stay
Just had a robo-call that school meeting was cancelled for the local school due to a burst water pipe.
A new venture is a lot more likely to reach PayPal's threshold for discounted fees ($3,000/month) than Stripe's ($83,333/month). There is no additional fee for American Express cards with Website Payments Standard.

The only fixed fee my current merchant provider charges is $5/month, and I pay a $99/year fee to a PCI scanning service. The merchant account space isn't resting on its laurels with startups like yours moving in; there's dozens that have moved to simpler pricing and eliminated bullshit fees to remain competitive.

Anyone accepting mostly domestic transactions with a monthly volume between a few thousand and $80,000 is probably going to save at least $30/month by choosing PayPal over Stripe, so the monthly charge isn't really a barrier even for their Pro service. Unless they go through one of your partner integrations like Shopify where you seem willing to offer the discounted rates without a minimum volume. I've set up a few people on that, it's a good deal for little shops.
Fiverr Main Page, 240k Hits and $5
Ask HN: State of Rails e-commerce?
I'm looking to set up a small web store(on rails) and I've been looking at available solutions. I've found Spree, which seems overkill for my project, ror-ecommerce, which seems to be far from complete, and Piggyback, which hasn't been updated in months. Are any of you using these platforms? What other options do I have for a small-scale store? Am I better off coding it from scratch?
End of life for myOpenID.com
Did you see my comment below with the ToffeeScript example?
Google runs the largest Perforce server out there.

http://www.perforce.com/blog/110607/how-do-they-do-it-google...
I am not sure if we understand formation process of such stellar objects in general (Or possibly many processes). According to wikipedia one theory is slow orbit degradation of binary system containing neutron star and red dwarf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93%C5%BBytkow_obje...

This makes me want to see a simulation of this happening.
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/368957329200271360

Being worked on.
A better title would be "This thing I don't understand that measures stuff I also don't understand beeps at me when I am at the beach."
See my comment below about ToffeeScript which compiles to JavaScript.
original paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1989ApJ...346..277E discussing the concept. Fusion would happen on the surface of the neutron star. An interesting concept. I suppose if a neutron star entered a gas cloud you could get one of these.

Edit: Not the original paper but a follow on how these stars would work, refuting other papers that said they were impossible :-)
Just negative feedback, i hope that is what you want ;-)

- Clicking a video/slides breaks your navigation, perhaps a modal/dialog instead
- Try variation (text interchange left and right)

For the rest, yeah, like it :)
HN needs categories
for each story in the titles so we can filter out what we do/dont care about...
eg

Euclids compass [MATH]

New version of python [PYTHON]

Java is slow [JAVA]

Bitcoin will fail [BITCOIN]
I agree there's a reasonable amount of that, but in technology research specifically, my impression has been that publications trump degrees. If two people without any recent impressive publications are being compared, then the person with a PhD gets to pull that card. But if you're looking at graphics researchers, say, if and how recently you've published at SIGGRAPH is often a bigger factor than what degrees you have, when it comes to whether other graphics researchers consider you a legit graphics researcher. Industry guy with a BSc who publishes there regularly is seen as more of a real graphics researcher than PhD-holder who used to work in the field but last published there in 1995 (unless what they published in 1995 was truly revolutionary, maybe).
Brief description of different methods of Anti-Aliasing
If only there was a site where you could follow channels of selective information. You could call it "Read It" pronounced like red.
It's easy to imagine that the damage from following a poor diet is harder on those with lower levels of income and education.
You still immediately get regressions from separate repositories, you just don't find out until later. Possibly when you're no longer in the right mental space for dealing with it.
>When a bad guy uses torture, we get the message that he's a bad guy. It doesn't really matter if the information the bad guy gets is good or not because the viewer is not sympathetic to the bad guy.

But if the bad guy gets good information from torturing the good guy, the viewer thinks "hey, he's an asshole, but torture sure is a thing that works! Maybe the good guy should use it on him!"

>you have a great case for torture being legitimized IF the good guys are using it and are portrayed as heroes for doing so.

You're applying too strict a standard. The article isn't talking about legitimizing torture. It's talking about normalizing it.

In other words, TV isn't necessarily telling us that torture is good. It tells us that it works, and leaves us to fill in the gaps (if it WORKS, we should use it on BAD PEOPLE!)
3 Under 3: Entrepreneurs, Intellectuals, Toddlers
Both. Red giants exhausted supply of hydrogen in the core, so fusion is switched to shell. This causes pressure/temperature of red giant to drop dramatically and radius to balloon. Neutron stars are incredibly dense, so under certain conditions collision of red giant with neutron start could work out.
Found more detailed explanation of what they are: http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~ogelman/guide/tz/
> GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil.

It explains why some people in the FOSS community think of them that way.

There seems to be a problem here of people not being able to understand that it is possible for people to have a different point of view, and no amount of "explaining" is going to fix that.
Bosch Shows Automated Park Assistance At CES
My POV is... look, you get to be as contrarian as you want. Feel free to never jump on the Dictatorship band wagon. But understand you're in the minority. The Dictator is that big, and is that established in our culture. So, feel free, choose your own path, but then stop whining about the hassle of being in the minority. Nobody cares about your freedom concerns.
You're talking about the core/userland boundary beyond the origin tick, and we're both right. Promises coerce caught exceptions occurring on the origin tick to errors (bad), while allowing non-caught async errors to be handled in a custom manner as you point out.

The comments following your linked comment address this nuance. I agree with Raynos that the core of the issue is as I point out here, 2 divergent incompatible error handling mechanisms, with both of them fundamentally broken:

* error passing fails because we don't have CPS due to lack of Proper Tail Calls

* throwing fails because we lack async try/catch or at least with async generators we lack a performant try/catch or with bluebird-like optimizations (hacks) we lack typed catch and Error.create

The latter is far closer to a consistent error handling pattern than the former, which promises implement (poorly and verbosely IMO). Additionally, async generators also nicely address the issue of slicing your userland stack away from core, so you get a two for one.