skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of tuning that can be done on a ZFS setup to improve performance. I'm not a pro, so others will have more feedback and knowledge, but some things off the top of my head to get you started:

Add a flash memory based (SSD) ZIL or L2ARC or both to the box. That'll help improve read/write performance. I believe the ZIL (ZFS intent log) is used to cache during writes, and the L2ARC is used during reads.

You might want to look into disabling atime, so that the pool isn't wasting energy keeping access times on files up to date. Not sure if this is relevant with the architecture of HN or not. This can be done with

zfs set atime=off srv/ycombinator

Finally, ZFS needs a LOT of memory to be a happy camper. Like 3-5GB of RAM per TB of storage.

I actually think you'll probably have a lot of fun with ZFS tuning, if that's the problem with news.yc. FreeBSD's page is pretty detailed: https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide
Towards a VC code of conduct.
I dunno, you should have heard my dad after I upgraded him from Office '97 to Office 2007. Until that point, I was convinced that the ribbon was the some of the best UI Microsoft ever did...
It's the middle class, not middle income quintile. It would seem to be pretty ridiculous to me that more than 5-10% of America were doctors, lawyers, etc.

Perhaps in the US it's the middle class includes the working class but in my estimation middle class means you still derive most of your income from working but you own a decent portion of the means of production.

If the middle class means households making 100K then I would estimate that a couple working as tech support and a caregiver are middle class rather than working class.

To me it works like this:

You derive your income from capital: Upper class
You work and own a decent portion (5%+ unless public) of your employer: middle class
You work: working class.

eg. My mom was a phone operator, my dad was a mechanic, they're working class despite making more than $100K inflation adjusted.
A way to use Twitter for comments on your Website
Thanks for the pointer. It's quite insightful. For the record, I did not grow up in a poor family, though a couple of my relatives are like that Cracked article describes. I now perhaps have some understanding as to why.
I would add that with tablets and smart phones, it is now possible to bring your apps on the fields. A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your computer on a construction site.
Some startups (for instance Aproplan http://www.aproplan.com ) are already jumping on these new possibilities.
Snowboarders sue to ride with skiers at Alta resort
What's really going on with the Starbucks mobile app information leak
I spent only one week in SF: I found the vibe horrendous. The existence of a caste system based on ethnicity and culture is incredibly evident just by taking a stroll in the city -- it was disturbing, and it made me feel unsafe (please note that normally I live in a rough London area, I am no shrinking violet).

I agree with the author of the post that successful entrepreneurs have a social responsibility towards the territory; otherwise they are just exacerbating the tension between 'classes'.
It would be too much to hope that he would make the public aware of why he decided to change his opinion, would it?

Government always thinks it knows better.
OK, I understand how this could allow more interoperability, and maybe lead to a few new features in browsers.

But could anyone summarize the real interest of such a project? I really cannot see it.
Natasha gives a fair shake on the situation - we're incredibly delayed, folks are really frustrated and we've done a sloppy job of updating our timelines. That said, we learned from the few units we shipped out that "kicking the can forward" with firmware updates to add core features (namely Bluetooth) was a poor choice and delaying Lockitron until the product was right was the best call.

While we’ve had most of the firmware in a prototype stage for a while, a few crucial last minute embedded changes were made late in the game (pushing out our fab) and once we put units in the field we found most of the firmware had to be rewritten.

A couple of things we overlooked. When we saw delays on the horizon we committed to updating folks on a regular two week basis via our mailing list and our blog. We added a community where we could answer questions in between the two updates.

But all folks understandably care about is “when will it ship.”

It would be foolish for us to commit to shipping timelines only to slip again - once our Bluetooth is in place we will lay out a concrete timeline for the most delayed units (earliest) and adjust the estimates for later units for which we may not have yet stocked components.
"The multiple innovations in both the Prius and Wii are two high-profile examples."

Those examples reinforce the point that big innovations in Japan happen at big, established companies, not start ups.
Gullible senior citizens? In my experience, the "millenials" are just as bad, if not worse. Not that we can blame them... they have the attention span of a twitter post.
How Natural Language Processing Makes Our Lives Easier & Improves Your Business
"Even though one can argue that source codes of programs, web pages and XML files, OS file names and other computer-to-computer text interfaces should never have existed, as long as they do exist, text is not only for human readers."

I'm a little confused by this statement. Can someone clarify?
Am I the only one who want's to organize and clean up those racks? :)
> At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, just how far the surveillance had gone.

If this is meant to be taken at face value, and it's at least plausible given how the US government seems to operate, how can Obama not follow it up with at least a strong commitment to making the American security apparatus more clear and transparent?
Keep scrolling, it's only the first image.
Rebol, Smalltalk, Perl6 and Io are some other examples that have the capability to (easily & cleanly) extend the language itself.

re: uplevel - Interesting Perl5 has this feature via a CPAN module! - https://metacpan.org/pod/Sub::Uplevel Also another variation is https://metacpan.org/pod/Scope::Upper
Personally, having moved twice so far in the crazy, corrupt rental market of Manhattan, I've been dying for someone to solve this problem. For those who aren't familiar with renting an apartment in NYC, the turnover is so fast and vacancy so low, that you can only start looking for apartments the month before you want to move.

In addition, the landscape is filled with predatory brokers that add no value to the process. In some cases landlords hire them because they don't want to deal with the process themselves, and in some cases the brokers will re-list apartments they find on Craigslist or other websites to make it seem like they have an exclusive listing, then try to get you to pay their fee if you rent the apartment. In almost all cases, the renter winds up having to pay the broker fee of one month rent to as high as 15% of the annual rent. Finding a no-fee rental is extremely rare. I would love to have a transparent system that was easy enough to use for landlords/management companies that resulted in two things:

1) Owners don't feel the need to retain brokers to deal with prospective tenants, passing the ridiculously high bill onto them.
2) The market for these no-value-adding middleman brokers that re-list no-fee apartments and other brokers' listings dries up.

I believe that the only case that a renter should have to pay a broker fee is if the renter him/herself retains the broker to show them apartments because they don't want to do the work.

/rant
I may be the only one excited about this, but I think it's awesome. I imagine a future where a "web browser" is just a WebGL + Networking + JS API, and you just load in HTML5.js.

The benefit of something like this is that it puts the power back in the hands of the people. You don't have to worry about Microsoft ignoring standards, you just load in the HTML5.js that you know works. Want a new feature? Fork HTML5.js on GitHub.

One other benefit that interests me is for games. Games badly need a free, standardized way to do UI. Porting v8 + WebGL is far easier than porting an entire web browser. There's a chance for greater performance too, since frameworks like ChromiumEmbedded typically only provide a memory buffer of the rendered frame, which you then have to copy (back) to vram.
Introducing the Google Drive Android API
To reinforce your comment:

Some of our customers have been bringing iPads to showings and asking prospective applicants to fill out digital applications on the spot.
Linux still has a lot of trouble with hardware. My Logitech trackpad doesn't have tap-to-click support in Linux, for no apparent reason. This doesn't bother me (in fact, is preferred, since I'd be looking for a way to turn it off), but it's the single greatest complaint you'll find online with the trackpad and Linux.

But it's not just shiny newish hardware: my motherboard uses some audio chipset that was immediately recognized and used by Ubuntu, but it has various wacky issues: plug in headphones on the front panel and there's audio (after 10-15 seconds) through them, but when you unplug them, it doesn't switch back to the speakers plugged in the back. I can eventually unmute my speakers by playing around in alsamixer, but I'm not sure how, even though I've done it two or three times.

Also, Skype doesn't play well with pulseaudio (again, long-time known issue), so to ensure Skype working, you have to stop pulseaudio and start Skype, but then nothing else that uses audio works until you start pulseaudio again.

Lots of issues, still.
Horizon: You shouldn’t have to care on how you hold your phone
Naivete is an arguable excuse for Obama's statements prior to his first election. But he continued his anti-surveillance rhetoric during his second campaign, and there is simply no explanation for that other than lying.
I'd argue that the central mistake was the decision to radically change the desktop experience to conform with the touch experience. I.e. the radicalism was itself the mistake. My feeling is that Apple made the right call here: Desktop and touch interfaces are different enough that you just have to write different code for each.
Now firefox can run chrome inside firefox, but chrome can't run firefox inside chrome.
My point was, Netflix does not work. It can be made to work, but by default, it does not work. If someone on the street stopped you and asked "does Netflix work on Linux", would you tell them "yes, if you install Pipelight and hack your user-agent string" or would you just say "no, not really".

I can't imagine that conversation. "It's trivial! You just go to fds-team.de... no, that's .de, not .com. Yup, fds-team.de slash cms slash pipelight... you know what, just search for Pipelight. It's like the third or fourth result down, just look for whatever doesn't have boats or trailers in the name. You'll install it with the command there, the sudo... no, that's sudo with an S, not psuedo. Ah, there's directions there, you can follow them. Now let me tell you about the user-agent string..."

No thank you. Netflix does not work on Linux. It can merely be made to work.
I addressed the repeated nature of the code in the post. Fact is I was under a 2 day deadline, and that included both hardware and software.

I would have loved to abstract the code so I could not only not repeat myself when addressing multiple strands, but there are a couple routines where the lights go in one direction then immediately switch to go back where they came from. That also could have been refactored, but with only two days to do it all I had to cut corners.

But hey, it shipped!
[ insert obligatory Atwood's Law quote here ]
Right... just because an organization has been caught doing things in the past, and lying about them, doesn't mean they'll continue to do those things, and lie about them... especially now that those things have become too easy to do, and therefore probably too boring to bother with.
I think the author wants to say that a) computers should use appropriate binary formats for communication between them (e.g. from a web server to a browser), b) they don’t and use plain text in many cases (e.g. HTML) and hence c) text is not only read by humans but also by computers.

I am not entirely sure whether that makes any sense, though.
FWIW, I recommend www.rentshare.com for this.

I use them to pay and receive rent (I'm a landlord and I rent my residence).

Additionally, whenever landlords who use Rocket Lease (my rental application company) inquire about rent payment online, I typically recommend Rent Share.

They'll even accept electronic payment from the tenant and mail a paper check to the landlord on your behalf, so if you want to have it autodrafted for your rent, you don't even require landlord opt in.
Apartment discovery is already well served. There are a dozen new startups that apply innovative methods to search. http://www.apartmentlist.com/, https://livelovely.com/, http://42floors.com/ come to mind.

Software for estate agents needs to be become more modern though. http://nestio.com/ just rebranded themselves to do that for example.

There's a German property portal (number two in the market) which released an iPad app for estate agents. Property management, contact list, calendar etc. Something like 50 USD/month for the app or $100/month for the hardware&app.
Website is in German, but there are screenshots and video http://immonetmanager.de/produkt/
Exactly. Donors of non-profits like to see where the money is going. If you're doing an arms length transaction, then it's ok to say "No need to look behind the curtain, and feel free to buy from someone else."
until gecko.js
5 Reasons Why The Wealthy Prefer Swiss Bank Accounts
Yup, author of that post here. I was pretty surprised to see the vaporware of 2 years ago come alive this morning. http://badassjs.com/post/73526882798/webkit-js-its-happening...
The original: http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luf7d6TKj01qzvxbko1_1280.j...

(Isn't it a shame Larkin is no more?)
Well, you found a scientific discipline that mentions "art" and I agree that one may do so for any subject, but I don't agree that the scientific approach is adequate to answer all important or interesting questions.
Looks like you could buy maintenance.com which might be a better url. Then you could host it on auto.maintenance.com and branch out to other products as well.

Conceptually its a great idea, and the monetization is pretty straightforward, forums for covering maintenance issues/techniques, sponsored stories by people selling replacement parts, etc.
A few months ago, I was trying to figure out what this Snapchat was all about, so I signed up with a fairly common username.

Sure enough, in a few days, I received several topless pictures from a random account. The girl typed in a name which she thought belonged to her friend, but instead entered my new profile name.

I thought this was hilarious, my girlfriend however, didn't. Just one random situation.
Speaking of blinders, this sentence illustrates the pair you are evidently wearing:

> I can only look at the result, which from my perspective is quite good relative to what I know about the world today and in the past.

You are judging the state of the entire system by the level of personal comfort you experience and your heavily biased view of history.

It sounds to me like you are judging America's actions to be morally superior simply because America enjoys a high standard of living. I'd argue that a high standard of living out to result in a high moral standard for our institutions and officials.
I agree with the main conclusion here, but it's a stretch to reduce technology choices to a simple "new or not" dichotomy.

Let's say you're writing a new web service in Java, because it has features aplenty and is also the language your team is most familiar with. You're confident the JVM is a platform you want to build on.

Now you need to:

1. Choose a set of libraries or a framework. Do you go for Spring or Java EE, or for something newer like Play or Dropwizard?

2. Choose a build tool. Maven? Ant? Gradle? Maybe we'll write some scala, so SBT?

3. Choose tools for deployment, config management, etc.

4. A database.

5. And so on.

All of these tools have different trade-offs. There are so many trade-offs that I don't think blog post comparisons (or whatever) cut it. And so you have the "magpies" who try and figure out some of these trade-offs for themselves by experimentation. (That is what, in my opinion, hack days and 20% time are for, not your new production system.)

But don't listen to me, we wrote our new web service in Go ;)

More seriously, it was a major decision and I couldn't possibly write a few hundred words on my blog to justify it. I may write a few thousand, though.
Buying and selling real estate is up there with the most miserable experiences I have dealt with as an adult. I think there is definitely a lot of room to make a lot of change, improve people's lives significantly, and make a lot of money. But I think it will be much harder than you realize. 1. Regulations: this is a HIGHLY regulated industry. Anything that is regulated doesn't have any motivation to improve, because the regulations artificially keep their margins high. 2. Entrenched parties: Improving the technology behind real estate transactions will but lots of people out of work. Lots of people who will likely find it difficult to match their current salaries in other industries. These people will fight against your technology like Luddites.
I wish you all the best and please for the love of God make this work!!!

Edit: spelling
Rent payment companies are a dime a dozen. The problem is no one wants to pay to process a rent payment (landlord or renter) and renters appreciate the control they have in writing a check each month.

Plus, your bank probably offers free bill payment. Have you checked that out?
I might mean that. I tried it, thought it was just what I needed except that text looked horrible. I attributed it to lack of aliasing and some quick Googling indicated that it could not be fixed.
Hmmm, I think SmartOS uses a different SSH. Might be misremembering though.
Padmapper is really awesome. I think one of the reasons it were so successful was that it gave an alternate (better) UI for apartment search.

People are visual and they know maps, but seeing lists is harder to parse.

The fact that nobody else at that time had put apartment search on a map is a great example of how low the bar is for excellence in this space (no offense, @padmapper).
I'm sorry, but that is just absurd. Some of the servers in question are coming up on 20 years of age. We didn't have the power-conserving hardware back then that we have now. Those old SPARCstations put out heat like a hair dryer. That stuff uses a lot of power and remember that ever watt of power you put into a server needs to be cooled. So, basically double the electricity costs for any given piece of gear. This rack is not cheap to run or cool, and definitely not in a home basement without access to highly efficient (and huge) datacenter-class cooling and power infrastructure. There are reasons that this gear needs to stay at Theo's place. If you don't like his reasons, you don't have to donate. He didn't email you and ask for a donation; you read the story here.
Nimrod: A New Approach to Metaprogramming [video]
This is one very obvious instance I failed to anticipate though.
Ask HN: Review of getlambda.com?
Hello,
I've seen many comments here at HN from getlambda.com (especially on freelance related topics).

Does anyone here got a job through this service. If yes, can you tell us your impressions, thoughts about it?
Have you thought about opening an account with a bank or credit union that will automatically cut and mail a check on your behalf?

If you haven't, you really, really, should. Finding such an institution is life changing.
Fieldlens is also tackling that space.

http://fieldlens.com/
Somebody from the Foundation said on misc that they were going to do that.
> Javascript is UTF-16

No it isn't. Javascript is no different from any other text. It can be encoded in any encoding. Where did you get the idea that JS is UTF-16?

EDIT: I misunderstood the intent of the comment I was responding to. JS uses (unbeknownst to me) UTF-16 as its internal representation of strings.
Asian donation is negligible?
Because Theo.
You're really stretching the definition of "truth" here, much like a Pyrrhonist would in that nothing can be 100% certain.

Of course it can't. Classic example: I can't prove the entire universe isn't just a brain in a vat.

However, we have to draw some lines and reasonable expectations. If a belief cannot be tested and has no evidence backing it, we discount it until we find supporting evidence for it.

Science can't say something is absolutely and undeniably true, but it can say that something is true beyond a reasonable doubt. You're setting very philosophically pretentious standards about truth here.

Science is certainly not the only way. Yet it has consistently shown itself to be the most reliable and effective way.

In fact, the scientific method is such a fundamental way of reasoning that if a supernatural realm is ever discovered, it will be likely thanks to the scientific method, even though science by default discounts supernatural explanations.

Science has unearthed a lot of observable, tested and verified counterexplanations to supposedly supernatural occurrences, which no one has been able to refute other than setting higher and vaguer standards.

Ultimately, the burden of the proof lies on the person making the large claims. If they cannot back them, by default we exclude their claims until conclusive evidence is found to support otherwise. Just because there are alternate ways of interpreting the world does not mean they are legitimate or that they should be given respect or credence automatically.
No. In either of the two elections.
I'm confused. Does the space junk need to be cleaned? If it's on low orbit, it will suffer atmospheric drag and will eventually fall back on earth; if it's on higher orbits then it doesn't differ much from other "natural" junk that existed since before space age. Am I missing something here?
Don't Bet Against Tech
Thanks for linking it here and would be better if it was linked to an article providing additional details other than electricity costs. Other users have posted the relevant links.

On another note, the readability of the font was a turn off for me. Fortunately, there is an option to view it in plain text. adding &q=raw at the end of the URL.
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2&q=raw
Another "What have tech companies done for SF post" huh. I still don't understand when it became the obligation of private companies to do anything other than run their companies to the best of their abilities?

Situations such as this is why people formed a government that is able to tax corporations and people to fund homeless shelters and public housing and drug rehabilitation programs.

Clearly there is a MAJOR societal problem in most of the United States, but I don't see how people can lay it at the doorstep of Twitter.
I don't mind having playlists for albums but the biggest problem is that enough playlists impact performance and slow the client to a crawl, especially on Windows.
Read further into the thread -- specifically the messages from asshat Theo. He is absolutely opposed to anything like that.
Payments Startup Balanced (YC W11) Is Processing $370M a Year