skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote the EC2 inventory plugin, so yes, I am a big fan of Ansible. I however, now use Ansible almost exclusively to build AMIs. Do your application code deploys require downtime, or do you have a technique to keep the service online while making changes?

I highly recommend you start using ASGs. It is only a matter of time before things go bad if you don't.
The Semicolon in Rust
Yes, start by writing a confusing question. One that starts talking about average up moves and average down moves and then switches to asking about the standard deviation of moves. Then publish a paper showing that people were confused by your question. Now you have "research" to back up your claim that everyone is confused by "mean deviation" and "standard deviation".
Right. So the question then is not whether the premise is correct or not, but whether the information Sam is putting out is accurate, which is a different thing entirely.
But you've just eliminated 97% of the internet!
That would be a dream come true.
Why Gmail & G+ Are Slowly Merging
"Leave The Company" Marissa Mayer's Failed Attempt At Straight Talk
And provide more fodder for the botnets? Fun!
Vamonos: Interactive Algorithm Visualizations
it models the game as a magical artifact of worship that grows more valuable simply by being older,

Sounds rather similar to funding a startup. Those who get in earlier in the cycle take on more risk but usually get to invest at a lower price. If you got in on Minecraft during the beta you had no idea if it would actually make it to release. Every time the price went up it was closer to release and less of a risk. Sounds like his game follows a similar path, no one wants to play an MMO with 2 other users. Rewarding those who take a risk of being an early adopter\community builder doesn't sound like a bad idea.
VMUG Virtual Event – January 21, 2014 – Join Us
Psst, Want to Know What Bank of America Spends on Mobile?
I wonder if there shouldn't be a place for an activism Kickstarter where an NGO could pitch projects, such as financing a radio station or releasing these balloons, and get them financed by a wider, worldwide audience.
By that logic, John Dillinger hacked banks.
Impermium protects SaaS application users from account hijacking and account compromise.
"Monoid" also has the advantage of being very searchable. First result on Google (from a private browser window) is the Wikipedia page with the snippet "In abstract algebra, a branch of mathematics, a monoid is an algebraic structure with a single associative binary operation and an identity element". DDG gives similar results, though the Doctor Who aliens are higher up...
I'm no expert but some thoughts: That's an interesting point: could people be accused of anti-trust violations by agreeing to collude and not work under certain circumstances?

The difference boils down to what the purpose of laws are. Ultimately they exist to sustain a reasonably egalitarian free society. Obviously there are times and specific situations where we deviate more or less from the "ideal" society but the law shepherds us back toward an agreed-upon path.

Basically the root of antitrust law is that concentration of power is anti-democratic and therefore must be controlled. In a situation of people colluding around work standards, there is a parallel to some extent but there isn't a clear power-player who emerges (except for the "Union" itself but that's made up of all the employees in a different way than the corporation is owned by its owners because individuals in a union are all essentially equally important to the union's strength, where in corporate ownership it's very clear that some individuals wield significantly (orders of magnitude) more power through wealth and control.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1239985?uid=3739560&ui...
Why do birds fly in a V?
I've recently seen interesting arguments that optimism creates luck by enabling you to recognize more opportunities.

E.g. http://www.damninteresting.com/you-make-your-own-luck/
Skip the blog and go right to the source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...

"To help organizations complete their migrations, Microsoft will continue to provide updates to our antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP users through July 14, 2015.

"This does not affect the end-of-support date of Windows XP, or the supportability of Windows XP for other Microsoft products, which deliver and apply those signatures."
From TC: "[Impermium] had been building a risk-evaluation platform that would improve account management by identifying fraudulent registrations, compromised logins, and risky transactions"

I think they were used by Tumblr for anti-spam and catching bad registrations.
They likely only extended support in the fear another company snaps up their corporate customers. There are plenty of alternative supported distros that would work on older hardware, different methodologies (IE BYOD), or virtualization strategies that could cause a domino effect in corporate environments in which they become less dependant on MS products.
That's true, but not, IMO, a valid criticism of the article. This article emphatically does not say that if you do the stuff on this list that you will become successful. It makes the implicit claim that if you don't do this stuff you won't become successful. Remember that those two statements are very different, and the second one is valuable even though it doesn't prescribe a path to success.
They will only update antimalware signatures, nothing else.

Direct link: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/01/15/microsoft...
Hijacking the thread...

I'm from Brazil and would like to get jobs elsewhere (the rates here are just sad). I've looked into oDesk and Elance, but the jobs / conditions suck. I've also tried getting in touch directly with companies when I see job postings, but it seems there's a barrier to hire from this side of the hemisphere.

Does anyone know any good site focused on remote job postings?
It's pretty depressing they spent all that money on apps and seemed to go nowhere with any of them.

If you have something hot then what can Yahoo possibly offer you to go and work there, knowing that everything else they touched went nowhere?
> Citizens of North Korea -- and not the State -- own property?

Semantics. They undoubtedly live in dwellings surrounded by land that would be associated with them. A jailed criminal does not legally own his cell, but he does "own" responsibility for anything that happens to it or is found in it.

This said, the people that are doing this undoubtedly have a better understanding of the situation and the potential consequences of their actions than we do.
"POS devices", ha!

Actually, they have my sympathy. Somehow I doubt the POS OS does any sort of signature verification. We might see that soon, however!
I'm skeptical that there are very many lights that would take more than a few minutes to change even without a car.

Maybe cyclists should just be allowed to proceed through a red light since they are unlikely to hurt anyone besides themselves... But the rule does kinda make sense. If there are lights that rely on car sensors then obviously fixing that would be the right thing to do regardless of the law.
Sorry 'bout that. Deleted the old email and forgot to add new one :-(

Updated now.
The usual way to do this is to take the natural log, so an up 1% day followed by a down 1% day (or vice versa) will always net out to a 0% change.
You are correct, he never explicitly said anything about working long hours, but implied that only those that work "after 5" and don't indulge in entertainment such as netflix are motivated and "doers." I don't know how else to interpret that paragraph.

And I was a founder and worked for seven years for the still-successful company. we made it a point to set good examples of working only while productive, allowing remote work, and not making any hourly demands on employees. knowing when to NOT work is more important than working hard constantly, especially when you are in a leadership position and don't want to set implied expectations on employees.
For those who haven't gotten the update yet, it looks to be purely cosmetic:

http://i.imgur.com/pRed41l.png
I suspect Microsoft is planning to have Windows 9 available by then. I have a computer that is too old to run Windows 7, and was going to retire it. I'd rather not deal with Windows 8, and was considering replacing the old computer with a Mac or with a Linux machine. If Windows 9 is out by the time XP finally dies, I can stick with Microsoft Windows.

Update: It's just anti-malware signatures, nothing else :-( I really hope the new Microsoft CEO decides to extend XP support until Windows 9 is out so I won't have a tough choice come April.
World’s Smallest Memory Bit Stores Data Using Just 12 Atoms
> They've been doing this for years.

Which makes the title of the article even more disingenuous.
Enjoyed the read, but not so sure that "caffeine is a zero-sum game." - http://www.futurity.org/caffeine-stimulates-long-term-memory...
I recently moved back to FreeNAS after iXsystems took over the project. FreeNAS includes Time Machine support:
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Apple_%28AFP%29_Shares#Usin...
>> Mr. Kan [...] said he planned to take a few months off after the sale.

Is it normal / common for founders to sell their company but not join the new parent company themselves?
That reads as "Less than $1/day" to me...
The Unwritten Laws of Engineering (1944)
> Are there any actual programmers or former programmers occupying high-ranking decision-making positions at these tech companies?!

Why would it matter if the leaders had ever programmed before?
I run FreeBSD on a microserver with 4x3TB in raidz1, and it was simple enough to set up, and NAS4Free is even easier. I believe it's supported time machine for a long time, though it'll be the annoying disk image based time machine (same as used on the time capsule). It'd be really nice if there was a nice way to do timemachine backups and use ZFS's snapshots. I'd love to see rsync with this ability without needing to write a script to form the snapshot after the sync.
That's really interesting. They might use Bitcoin somewhere in the backend to move funds around. If it's cheaper and faster to route everything through Bitcoin than exchanging currencies and dealing with bank transfers, it might be a good solution.
Good point. I interpreted it differently, since in a different life I used to leave at 5 and spend hours watching Netflix / playing COD.

When I became a founder I clearly worked quite a bit more, but also found myself watching less TV and doing more reading, exercise...productive things.
Dara Ó Briain - I love videogames
OUYA Founding Team Member And VP Of Product Development Departs
You seem to often conflate the world of programmers with the world of VCs. It looks like tunnel vision or myopia.

I know plenty of people who are 30 years old, and are making 20-30k, or don't have a career and are still working in the service industry. We are fortunate.
Relay outbound email through GMail on OSX Mavericks
The problem with laws like this is they're very difficult to prove because you can create fairly arbitrary criteria for what you want in an employee and claim that one of those things you want is for them not to have been significantly molded by a different large bureaucratic entity with its own culture and processes.

It's trivial to prove this is going on, but what I mean is: difficult to reach the legal burden of proof of collusion.

Also ultimately a law suit like this will send $$$ -> lawyers more than anyone else.
From Crunchbase:

Impermium is a cybersecurity technology startup that protects over 1.5M sites and has processed over 8B total transactions in its 3-year history. The company’s advanced risk-evaluation platform improves account management by identifying fraudulent registrations, compromised logins, and risky transactions. It has proven successful at stopping fraudulent user account registrations in real-time — using a blend of machine learning, statistical anomaly detection, and a proprietary database of malicious actors — for hundreds of transactions per second from many of the largest consumer Internet companies.

It looks like it was founded in 2010 by a few ex-Yahoo! spam guys and had raised $9mm in 2 rounds from the typical list of tech VCs. LinkedIn lists 20 employees, so probably 30ish total.
+1 for Dan Carlin. I only listened to the history of the Mongols.
I would do this but the monthly cost of co-working space in my area is astronomical. Like around $500 per month for a desk.

The next best thing is to do a small co-working space plan. Something that's around 20 hours per month. On the other days alternate between your home office, the park, the coffee shop, etc.
Ask HN: Best place to look for Jr Developer jobs in NYC?
Hi guys, I was looking at a bunch of job boards for junior rails developer positions in NYC, and I was wondering if anyone knew better places to look. I've been looking for about two weeks on WhiteTruffle, Craigslist, and Zip Recruiter, but most seem to be advertising for senior developer positions. Any ideas would be awesome. Thanks!
In 1D, L_2 = L_1. But if you are talking about 100 sample points, the data has 100 dimensions.
No, I was simply providing an example of how your thinking is flawed. People simply ignore externalities when it comes to driving safety.

I'm sorry you feel alienated because I'm not sympathetic to unsafe drivers. I feel correspondingly alienated by your lack of concern regarding pedestrians, and the dangers cars pose to small children.

Traffic calming would probably be unsuitable to my road; it's about 1/4 mile long, and only wide enough for two cars. When cars park on the street, it makes it a swerve event when two cars come from opposite directions. Speed bumps might help to some degree, but from what I've seen of the drivers behavior, they'd probably just enjoy that.

I think you're giving drivers far too much credit for making rational judgements regarding speed.
Well, it is good for a few laughs. You get a bit worried if someone walks around calling themselves CEO of a startup with 2 or 3 people in it.
Hey Hox, I'm one of the lawnstarter guys(although I didn't write the post)
Just wanted to say I definitely agree with the work only while productive, and I do sometimes catch myself doing useless work. I personally get off on trying to build something bigger than myself though and really enjoy the work.
I'm curious about what you said regarding implied expectations. Do you see it as an issue if I choose to work that much but don't by any means reprimand an employee for not following suit?
You can use Facebook to identify people by their email or phone number
Nice! This should be fun!
Secret State of North Korea [video]
I didn't know anyone liked using Windows. Especially when you can get almost any UX under the sun in linux, assuming any proprietary software you need runs under wine.
You seem pretty uninformed about ZFS so I'll try and help. As other have mentioned, there's the zpool scrub command which checks the integrity of the drive.

Also, I'm not sure where you got the "ZFS keeps previous versions of files around" idea from, it only does that if you make a snapshot, and only modifications of the file cause the file to be copied; this is waht copy on write is. It means you can have the whole history of your file system with almost no space overhead except for changes. Apple's time Machine does the same thing, but in a different way: each directory that hasn't been changed since the last backup is hard linked to the previous backup's version (which might itself be a hardlink). this makes is quite space efficient (and a pretty easy to understand hack to get versioning on a file system that doesn't natively support snapshots)
I thought that this issue was already well known? Paging of virtual memory causes keys to be written to disk...

But this article. Wow:
"This is a risk that suspects have to live with, and one that law enforcement and government investigators can capitalize on"

I love it. Only criminals use TC so let's call all TC users 'suspects'.

What about people who have portable devices and want to store sensitive financial or medical information? What about people who want to backup this information into a cloud?
I guess we also just learned the release date for Windows 9...
The book Every Man Dies Alone[1] by Hans Fallada deals with a very similar subject. At the height of the Nazi Party's political power in Germany, an elderly couple left postcards to be found in public spaces with subversive messages like, "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world."

They're eventually tracked down and executed after two years and hundreds of postcards, and the question remains whether their campaign had any effect. Evidence of just how monolithic the regime was, comes from the percentage that were immediately turned into the authorities being something like 95%.

On one hand the postcards absolutely terrified the people who found them, but on the other, when a society is in a state where everyone is informing on each other, they may have been the rarest of moments when anyone who doubted the regime would have seen any proof that they were not alone.

I doubt that the DPRK regime could control the entire population without a relatively high level of acquiescence and even complicity of the people it is controlling. It's probably similar to how organized crime survived in communities by convincing people it was better than unorganized crime, or by building up the mythos of it having something to do with honor. In other words they have an information monopoly, because they are certain that small challenges to the official narrative do propose a real threat.

[1] some reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t... http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Every-Man-Dies-Alone-by-... http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/07/hans-fallada-al...
I have a feeling this guy is going to appear somehow, somewhere in the Portugal Telecom / Oi merger.
Until linux can compete with an OS old enough to vote, we'll still need XP.
Get list of email addresses used by airlines to send you booking confirmation?
I make complete AMIs with packer, configure them entirely using environment variables in userdata, configuration data in etcd, and shell scripts, and run all services in docker containers, which I also build using packer. With all services in containers, AMIs are almost never rebuilt and there is no need for configuration management/mutating infrastructure.

Building containers with packer is easier than switching to Dockerfiles for existing builds, but does not support fast, incremental build and deploy or tagging. Even without those features, I see no advantages in traditional CM other than the convenience of familiarity and legacy.
Cheap coach bags
cheap coach bags
> that's not an intuitive expression based on the problem statement

That's the danger I'm talking about when you start using the word "intuitive". Intuition is relative, and someone who works with mathematics or statistics will develop a mathematical intuition about things. Just like if you're an experienced driver you'll intuitively know when other drivers are about to change lanes, even before they signal.

I think of L_2 more intuitive because it physical space uses the L_2 norm.

The other thing that makes L_1 counterintuitive is that if you measure the absolute deviation from the mean, then you aren't minimizing the deviation—in order to do that, you have to choose the median.

In other words, you say "this is the center" and "this is the measure of how far away everything is from the center", but you could have picked a different center which has a lower distance from your data. Counterintuitive.
About a century, actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_leaflet_propaganda#Ear...

Aerial leaflets were first used on a large scale during World War I by all parties.
> The problem with laws like this is they're very difficult to prove

Not when the DOJ has subpoena power.

After a Google recruiter reached out to an Apple engineer, Steve Jobs in an email to Eric Schmidt:

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would
stop doing this,"

Schmidt, forwarding that email to his team:

"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?"

Google's Staffing Director:

"[The recruiter who contacted the Apple Employee] will be terminated within
the hour."

"Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-i...
I use to ride the train from San Francisco to Sunnyvale and was able to read a lot of books. I had to be careful though because if I got too into the book I would miss my stop.

Audio Books:

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by
Charles Darwin -- https://librivox.org/the-origin-of-species-by-charles-darwin...

The Art of War by Sun Tzu -- https://archive.org/details/art_of_war_librivox

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift --
https://archive.org/details/gulliver_ld_librivox

Podcasts:

Ruby Rouges (ruby programming talks/programming in general)-- http://rubyrogues.com/

StarTalk with Neil Degrasse Tyson (Space, comedians, science) -- http://www.startalkradio.net/
You are not thinking from an average user point of view. They don't know what any of those words mean, and even if they did they couldn't handle them; even installing windows is impossible for most people.
> Why is the valley crowd treating distributed systems engineering like it's a new fad?

There's certainly been a lot more interest lately in building distributed systems, and in certain models mostly related to databases. I think a lot of this has been pushed by a few companies with an interest in either pushing these fields forward or being known as experts. A good example might be Basho, who've generated a lot of buzz around the Ricon conferences and the Think Distributed podcast.

To be clear, I think this is a good thing. I personally think distributed systems are a really interesting topic, and a big swell in interest generates discussion and lots of interesting reading material. :) Granted it also generates a lot of faddishness and crap, but that's the price of any kind of wide interest in a topic.

And really, while there's some crap out there, a lot of it's actually really good. I've been enjoying aphyr's recent blogging about Jepsen, a lot of the recorded talks from Ricon West were really interesting, and there's been some good discussion on Twitter and lobste.rs related to these topics.

So sure, the valley might be treating this like a fad. They also do that with *.js and obscure editor plugins. :) But in this case I think that's not a bad thing.
> So let's say you read a full RAID-5 stripe including parity and the parity does not match because of a silent error.

If you have an "iffy" sector that is on th eway out you might get a decent read after a few attempts. You can then make sure that the blocks on the other drives are OK and (assuming all the failures are in the same device) drop the problem device when done.

In reality most drives these days do this for you: a certain number of sectors are reserved for reallocation in the case of small surface failures so the drive itself will retry a few times to get a reliable read (each sector on a disk has checksums that allow error detection) then the controller will remap that sector. This happening once or twice is considered normal wear and tear, this heppening beyond a certain threshold or a certain rate is a sign of imminent failure and is measureed by SMART indicators - so running the scan will not let md raid do much directly but will give the drive chance to remap data that is in danger (and if you have mdadm setup right, email you a warning if you shoudl consider dropping the drive immediately and replace it).
I wonder how many these XP users are customers in any sense that involves money, it appears (from the outside) to be a worry about losing theoretical marketshare.