skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's definitely very bursty. On weekends and holidays things are much more quiet. During peak load we'll be in the hundreds/sec. Also keep in mind that chat messages don't actually make up the majority of the traffic we serve; it's presence information (away, idle, available), people connecting/disconnecting, etc. (I'm one of the HipChat co-founders.)
Never Mind the Résumé. How Hot Is the C.E.O.?
The only problem with Steam Machines TODAY is just that so many of the games right now are Windows only. That is changing FAST, but there is a whole backlog of Windows games that is not moving to Linux soon.
Does their TOS really say you can't embarrass anyone? That seems totally retarded, some people get embarrassed about the stupidest things.

I guess as a DO customer I should have read their TOS more carefully =/
I imagine a problem would be to determine exactly what the level of this salary would be... Enough for an apartment? single room? Food and Clothing? Or would the economy evolve to make the values of money such that you can just live from the basic income?

What stops people from wanting more and more making just sitting at home gaming more and more attractive?

What would I do? Start working the absolute minimum to keep my house, feed my kids and start something or my self? How many people would do that?
Which wins, the TOS or the law?
The most important lesson that we should draw from experiments like Mincome is that we need more experiments of this type.

Dauphin, Canada was one town in one country in an era that is now forever gone. Since 1973, the politics has changed, the economy has changed, and culture, religion, ideology, and (of course) technology have also undergone tremendous changes. The Internet alone should be a total game changer. Mincome serves as a good anecdote and inspiration, but it is largely meaningless to argue (for|against) basic income based on that data alone. We need more data points, and we need them to be more up to date.

Because right now, all we have are a precious few data points from 40 years ago and/or from the other side of the globe, and a bunch of hopeful statements that haven't really weathered any test of evidence (e.g. economic efficiency will increase, or not; people will be happier, or not). Without solid evidence, statements like that are little more than expressions of ideological preference, both on the left and on the right. </edit>

The experiment should be repeated, as many times as possible, in various times and places, and for longer durations (5 years, 10 years, 20 years, long enough to study a generation of children who grow up under the scheme). Accumulate enough data to support arguments (whether pro or con) that are based more on actual evidence than on anecdotes and ideological assumptions.

Will it be possible to implement a basic income of $20,000+ per year in the United States in 2014? Absolutely not, the political environment is not ready for it. But will it be possible to run basic income experiments on a smaller scale (Vermont, are you listening?) throughout the next two, three, four, five decades? Of course it's possible, and at the end of it we'll be a lot more capable of 1) making informed decisions and 2) squashing the opposition. It doesn't matter whether you support or oppose basic income today. Show me data or GTFO.
slander... the guy he was blogging about is not famous, not a public figure, talking trash, about someone by name in a public way is slander - perhaps this helps explain further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

DO - TOS is like a slander clause
Ford was showing more potential with OpenXC, but that was last year's CES hype generator that has pretty much fallen into the background:

http://www.androidcentral.com/ford-announces-openxc-sdk-andr...
RAF jets fly with 3D printed parts
You are your life, and nothing else
Are there successful oversized entrepreneurs?
Someone like Reid Hoffman or Gabe Newell would fit the bill, but I'm of the opinion that they're more the exception than the rule. There's no doubt physical activity affects mental processes, usually in a positive way. I wonder if this translates to the entrepreneurship world as well.
`make` allocates and initializes `a`, setting it to nil effectively uninitializes the variable. See below, where I declare `c`, but don't initialize it. From the Golang spec, http://golang.org/ref/spec#Map_types, the value of an uninitialized map is nil.

http://play.golang.org/p/J46-8OEWYS
Apple: $10B In App Store Sales In 2013, $15B Paid Out To Developers To Date
>We haven't reached that stage with NSA, as far as I can tell, though the potential is certainly there.

We HAVE reached that stage, and worse. The NSA - and other spook agencies - are actively engaged in warfare with various social/peacenik groups, and has been demonstrated time and again as a constant source of infiltration, provocation, and so on. Agent-Provocateur isn't just the name of a knicker factory - its a real tactic deployed against enemies of the regime, which include civic groups (unions), churches and other citizen organizations.

We simply cannot have this power out there, in the hands of these people.
WordPress is less worse than every other blogging solution of the same feature level.

If you don't need all that stuff, use something lighter-weight. But for the general question "I need a blog", it's the least-worst answer.

The only serious downside is 'sploit-of-the-week and hence need for staying right on top of updates.

Speaking as someone who desperately wishes his company didn't require a custom theme, I wish we could just outsource our blogs to wordpress.com - which is even more the right answer for most people. But, oh well.
I don't do PR, but I've managed our relationships with PR firms. Rule #1 about dealing with the media: do their work for them.

The practice of getting PR pieces presented as news can be quite simplistic. One way to go: A company hires its own press agent or uses a PR firm (typically the latter for smaller companies). PR firms' specialty is in cultivating relationships with reporters, editors, and the like. It's no big trick; mostly just human relationships and the ability to provide the newspeople with stuff they can use to get their job done. In other words, they understand the "domain" of news.

Then the original company funnels information about stuff its doing to their PR firm on a regular basis. The PR firm takes the stuff it thinks might be interesting to the outside world, helps put some spin on it, and shops it around to the contacts they think might be interested in the stories.

If the newspeople bite, what happens next can depend on a variety of factors. But the hard work's been done at this point.

It should be noted that this isn't the only path things can take. This story has been making the rounds for a week or so now. It's quite possible that the WaPo was never contacted by any PR folks; instead they just saw it on other news outlets and wanted to follow up for themselves.
Netflix: The Red Menace
Uber has already done helicopters, http://blog.uber.com/2013/07/02/uberchopper/
Viral marketing cracked?
Hosting Minecraft Realms on AWS
Sure, I think I was referring to time scale rather than accuracy. cstross in particular complained on twitter recently that plot elements of novels he's working on annoyingly started to appear in the headlines.
I've seen some quite good examples of this in some things I've read. A poem I know was written incorrectly in order to force people to read it in a particular accent[1]. Also, "Feersum Endjin" by Iain M Banks has some chapters written from the perspective of one of main characters written in non-standard English[2].

Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

[1]: http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate-voice...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn
It made me less productive; I rely on it for motivation and have found it to be a crucial routine. Seeing how I got nothing done as a result.
You can reduce working hours while increasing revenue if workers are using this to train in and land better paying careers that complement their skill sets better.
"backup storage is something you never regret paying for"

Indeed, but the time and CPU it takes to do backups can be a very nasty trade off.

For that matter, as I write this, due to a mistake I made after a 85 minutes power outage yesterday, I'm just now doing my daily incremental backup of my home machines to an LTO-4 tape drive. Keeping that drive fed fast enough to prevent "shoe-shining" took some effort, Bacula spools up to 100G at a time to a partition on a single 15K disk on a separate controller. But if I had a LTO-5 drive, from what I've heard there's no single disk in existence that can keep up with a drive (not counting SSDs, which are a very poor match for this use case).
He is a dickhead and Digital ocean might be a bit contradicting when allowing harassment on the forum.
That was however harassment towards his alias/username not to a specific individual.

I still think digital ocean did the right thing and contacted him, And asked him to fix the ToS breakage he committed.
T-Mobile CEO Legere ejected from rival AT&T's party
link to the original paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2963
It looks pretty nice. I think that "taste" is a very subjective word but I get it. Maybe it is just not for everyone but a lot of people might find it useful. Congrats!
REALLY interesting idea - tell me you'll be blogging this?

It might be of use for people considering taking you up on this offer (and I'm one of them) to know roughly what your skills are - I know you say you're versatile, but no-one can do everything.

Or is the point that you want to do things outside your current comfort zone?
I love this idea. I live in Germany, and (as pointed out in the text) carpenters can still be seen from time to time during their journeyman years (which is called "Wanderschaft" or "Walz" in German). Slightly OT but here's a picture of what it looks like when they walk across the country [1]
I always found this concept deeply fascinating because these people get a chance to see many things from different perspectives simply because they move out of their local village, which many people never do.

The application of this concept on modern trades like software development is certainly very interesting. I'm tempted to think that the biggest gain it might have is that one (as the journeyman) can get quick insights into the deep differences between workflows and company culture in the various companies one approaches. I mean, we all know how different the current employer compared to the previous employer can be, now imagine having such a switch every 1-2 weeks.

[1] http://www.berufsausbildung-bau.de/images/Wandergesellen.jpg
I had heard from a few friends that they had good experiences with VAs from the Philippines so I googled something generic and found Pepper. This was years ago. I tried them out and they were adequate for my needs.

I'm on the "20 hours for ~$300 a month" plan. This is, FWIW, within striking distance of what you'd pay to hire a college graduate full time, but I find it easier to go through a company to avoid the headaches of that.

The VAs are pretty amenable to doing anything reasonable with a computer, which includes phone support. I haven't asked for it, both because I don't offer phone support for Bingo Card Creator and because the US workday would mean anyone offering it from the Philippines would have to be up very late at night, which I do not feel is a reasonable thing to ask of freelancers/employees under most circumstances.
Good advice! I recently moved out and I'm definitely considering buying one of those timed slow cookers. A lot less input for the tasty output.
I certainly don't think a 9% drop in working hours is a 9% drop in GDP.

Doesn't make a single lick of sense to me. The real world simply doesn't work like that at all. Not everyone in a country contributes exactly the same figure to GDP.

Also, a couple of lines down listed a huge number of cost savings and higher earnings and new employment created.

So.... Did you just not read on a paragraph more?
I was making a little over 120k a year when I was still in the states. (on sabbatical currently). Not a huge amount moneys sure but I can vouch for being more than happy to see a portion of that going to programs like this as I believe programs like this will have the best long term outcomes for the states economy and therefore myself as well.
One good earthquake will cause some real problems...

I find it interesting that the GPS is even receiving signals inside of a machine shop. One would think that the interference from the machine itself, not to mention the typically metal building, would attenuate the already weak signals pretty badly.
Why modulus converts floats to ints in php
Here's something I didn't know - you can use unicode escapes outside of strings. Code like `\u0061\u006c\u0065\u0072\u0074(1)` translates to `alert(1)` and runs just fine.
Oh I understand what slander is, and whether or not the blog post actually is slander or not is debatable. My point was that, in this case, DO has decided to use the 'slander' clause in the TOS to ask this person to edit his blog post. I don't necessarily think they should be doing this, but I am saying that they are perfectly within their right to enforce their TOS how they see fit. If the OP doesn't agree with them, there is nothing that says he can't move his content to another provider that may not make the same decision DO has.
Yes, sorry it was a regular comment (new in ycombinator). Thanks for it and Looking forward for your table :D.
So it has monetary value?

Just making sure. You're saying that HN makes you productive. Helps you produce more than normal. Not that it is entertaining or that you enjoy it.

You produce more. So it is worth something, yes?

I don't mean to mess with you personally. I'm just curious as to what the average reader thinks.
September 2013 - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/theslowwi...

[Can't edit for some reason]
I think it would be nice if tech recruiters knew how to work computers. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really not.
Not at all, I love IRC. I hang out on Freenode, consistently in #rit-foss (I'm an RIT student) and I jump around other channels.

Whatever you're interested in, there's most likely a channel on some server which focuses on it, whether it's math, literature, jailbreaks, python programmming, security, torrenting, etc. Here's a list of EFnet channels[0].

[0]: http://www.efnet.org/?module=channels
Especially since he doesn't seem to have an opinion on anything relevant to the extremely important change the article brings to light, but would rather discuss the editorial quality of the article itself.

An analogy would be people on the sinking Titanic discussing the poor command of the english language by those lads who asked them to get in the boats.
App Store Sales Top $10 Billion in 2013
Learning from Experience in Software Development: A Multilevel Analysis
I was just reading a book last week on working memory (can't remember the name for the life of me), saying that remaining active helps working memory tremendously. They found that running while bare foot was the best way to increase working memory.
"Wins?" I'm not quite sure what you mean by "winning." In this case, DO is enforcing _their_ own TOS, on content that is served from _their_ servers. That seems legit to me, whether or not I think it is the right thing for them to do. Is there a law stating that they don't have a right to do this?
>no-one can do everything

Anyone can be taught to do (pretty much) anything if they're willing.
I spent several years traveling only by public transit and running into beggars at least twice a day. During that same period, I also once had a cop pull up to a bus stop, start harassing me and actually threaten to arrest me for standing there (I was waiting for the last bus of the night). Guess which experience was worse?
I do not have a lot of strong opinions
Show HN: Localize your android apps
Not sure if this comment is visible or not because I'm under a partial ban here, but I'll amend the post, thanks for the feedback.
It is absurd to say that because someone augments their benefits with $300 a month in child care, their problems are over.

Can you point to where in that PDF you got that 80% number? Like, if you're going to cite a link, could you use a number I can ctrl+f? instead of "about 80%"? Because I suspect this number includes children and people who may be better off not working due to medical or other problems.
I sympathize with the Googler, in that his comments may not have been written and polished by a PR person, but they weren't at all as offensive or insensitive as the OP hyped them to be, especially given the constraints of the "meatspace".

But look at what you just wrote. That complaint has been raised against Google many times, because Google's index captures not only what you say in public, but what others say about you, even if you feel that it is misleading. For example, if a news story comes out about me being implicated in a crime, and 1 week later, I'm completely exonerated...but whoever wrote the headline used poorer SEO, and fewer people cared 1 week later...Google, via algorithm, may rank the outdated story higher.

There's very little recourse because, on technical grounds alone, it is tricky to do. But in a "moral" sense, once you make that move for someone, how do you argue that you don't do it for someone else in a similar situation?

The Googler spoke in a place that would not legally be considered private and he is not naive about technology. Is the OP a jerk? Sure. But that's not the topic here....the topic is, would Digital Ocean have been a jerk to say "Sorry buddy, but we can't just take a blog down because you regret your comments"?

IMO, No. And it's not because DO is a jerk. Anymore than Google is for not taking down clearly harmful -- but not illegal -- results. As Matt Cutts put it:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/remove-page-from-google/

> *Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web....There you have it. People usually aren’t happy to hear that reply, but I hope they can understand the reasoning behind it.

So if you're talking about ethics, what DO did here, IMO, crossed a line, because now it sets a very low bar for what is privacy and what is defamation. If the OP quoted the Googler correctly...and the Googler offered his opinion knowing that it was being read...he may not like how his comments were interpreted or published, but he doesn't have legal recourse.

For the record, "off the record" has no real legal standing. It's a term reporters use to set the boundaries with their sources...if they break it, then it's unlikely sources will talk to those reporters again. In this case, of course, the Googler can exercise that right to not speak to the OP again. But it really shouldn't be up to DO to intervene on his behalf in such a ham-fisted way.
MongoDB ist the DBMS of the year
Show HN: Handpicked useful resources from the web
I see it, and I don't have showdead on or any special features.
The Vagrancy Act was passed in 1824.
.. and it led to the opening of other programs, now much more sinister and nefarious in purpose, which means: the war is still being fought.
When companies decide to get into personal matter of two unknown individuals which could have been easily went unnoticed, DO did a disfavor of putting them both on face of social media bringing bad words for both themselves and Travis Collins.
Pixel Scalers
If someone else is paying for food and travel, why limit yourself to a certain geographic area? If someone wants to pay for you to fly to and from Australia, I say let them do it - it would only add to the adventure.
In reality however, OWS and other activists are under surveillance to avoid exactly that outcome.
Everything popular is wrong.
This is why the established powers are fervently against proportional representation.
D3.js:Drawing many-to-many relations with a simple blog-post-tag example
Sharing d3 code for a simple blog-post-tag relationship diagram to exhibit svg generation and transitions. Posts are shown as circles with radius based on number of tags; tags as displayed as rectangles with height based on number of posts; lines represent the many-to-many links between them.
Richard Sennett's excellent book "The Craftsman" has a lot about the history of guilds and the training they gave, as well as relating it back to software. Well worth a read.
Not really, but they'd certainly make it easier.

However, high precision CNC machines are useful in a wide range of high-tech applications, and keeping Iran poorer makes the rate at which they can gain power slower. Harder to make smaller or more powerful jet engines, harder to make centrifuges for nuclear enrichment, harder to make more advanced computing fabs - and so on.

If you can make it more expensive for Iran to advance to a particular level, then your investment in your own technologies puts you further ahead when they get there. If you get to cheap anti-ICBM defences first, then the threat of nukes is somewhat neutered, for instance. If you get to jet engines small enough for high performance combat drones first, then the threat of whatever airforce Iran can muster matters less. And so on.

I would imagine that the reasoning behind such embargoes covers more grounds than just whether you can stop someone getting nukes or the like ever and has more to do with balance of power in general.
Interesting, you get as "Did you mean..." the word with accent. I hope that translating from chinese you will not get this kind of tricks I don't want to walk 10km insted of 10 yards when looking for a hotel!
I'm pretty sick of all high-level languages actually. I even wrote my own functional programming language "Fexl", and I'm sick of it too. Here's a totally general purpose quicksort:

# (sort keep compare xs) sorts the list xs using the three-way comparison
# function. It keeps duplicates if the keep flag is true, otherwise it
# discards them and returns only the unique entries.

\sort =
(@\sort\keep\compare\xs
xs [] \x\xs
\lo = (filter (\y compare y x T F F) xs)
\hi = (filter (\y compare y x F keep T) xs)
\sort = (sort keep compare)
append (sort lo) [x; sort hi]
)

I'm tired of all of it. The language I really like is plain old C.

To handle arbitrary strings reliably, I can just use this code:

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/str.h

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/str.c

To deal with dynamic allocation, detecting any memory leaks upon program exit, I use this:

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/memory.h

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/memory.c

For high-speed buffering of data, one character at a time, I can use this:

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/buf.h

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/buf.c
One nitpick, journeyman doesn't mean "on a journey", it's journee man, from the French as in, a person paid a day rate for their trade. The next step up, a master, would be paid for completed items, and could employ others.
I think his bus is an integral part of this, so it might take a long time to get to Australia.
Female Founders & Women in STEM
Ok, thanks for confirming. So the ban really is limited to posting articles. Interesting. That's a first probably, to be able to comment but not to be able to post.