skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was once in charge of running an A/B test at my work. Part of the test involved driving people to a new site using AdWords.

After the test was complete, I forgot to turn off the Adwords. (Such a silly mistake...) Nobody notices until our bill arrives from Google, and it's substantially higher than normal. When my coworker came to ask me about it, "are these your campaigns?!?" I just sank in my chair.

I think it cost the company $30k. I suppose it's not that much money in the grand scheme of things, but I felt very bad.
If you care about your children, then hugely benefitting them is both selfish (changes the world in a way you personally prefer) and rational. Whatever the OP meant I think it's important.
Another tip: IAM roles for EC2 instances.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/06/iam-roles-for-ec2-instanc...

Basically, the apps you run on EC2 often need to access other AWS services. So you need to get AWS credentials onto your EC2 instances somehow, which is a nontrivial problem if you are automatically spinning up servers. IAM roles solve this by providing each EC2 instance with a temporary set of credentials in the instance metadata that gets automatically rotated. Libraries like boto know to transparently fetch, cache, and refresh the temporary credentials before making API calls.

When you create an IAM role, you give it access to only the things it needs, e.g., read/write access to a specific S3 bucket, rather than access to everything.
grey-area's summary of the WSJ article isn't accurate.

GS knowingly sold AIG junk CDOs days before the collapse

GS didn't sell CDOs to AIG. GS didn't actually sell anything to AIG. GS bought insurance (in the form of credit default swaps) on the CDOs from AIG and apparently sold at least some of those swaps on to other banks for a profit.

If Goldman had done something to accelerate the deterioration of the value of the CDOs (something like insuring a house and then burning it down), then you could probably claim GS was in the wrong. AIG would have known it was insuring subprime mortgage CDOs. There also isn't anything in the article asserting that GS misrepresented the quality of the loans or anything like that.

It's hard to get from that WSJ article to fraud.
He got fired for the cardinal sin, proving the idiot boss an idiot.

In theory you are supposed to be able to tell your boss he is wrong (and a good boss will appreciate this) in practice it depends on the boss.
You mean the libraries whose funding seems to be steadily under attack in the UK and US? And I don't know about your neck of the woods, but in mine green belts and public parks are under costant seige from "developers" who want to privatise them.

(That said, good luck to the GP's business disruption plan which will involve paying a lot of money for renting or owning real estate in the most expensive places on the planet, in order to let people who don't want to buy anything use it.)
I'm appalled by your objection to the use of 'appalling'.
Venmo got bought by Paypal. Maybe this will replace them before they go downhill.
This is like the holy grail for domain squatters - hopefully they don't read HN.

Also, mad props on the "domain hack" feature.
My problem with them is they keep getting hacked and then try to hide it.
There's evidence that power can change how the brain functions - tending to make those in power less able to experience things from the perspective of others. This guy is clearly another corporate sociopath
By that argument, ownership of possessions is not a right, but a privilege provided by the government, and if a tough guy comes and takes your laptop away from you - tough shit for you.
Burn it on site for electricity. Imagine it like distributed solar, just with natgas as the power source. Power lines, even low voltage (120-480V), are everywhere.

Worried about cost? Sell carbon credits for the destruction of the greenhouse gas, and use the funds to pay for the generation equipment.

Want someone to manage this huge distributed system of generators? Call SolarCity. They already manage an enormous fleet for distributed solar generation installations.
It doesn't say whether it's a corporate policy, but it is in the first line of the article.

> The kerfuffle started when word spread that the police were repeatedly evicting elderly Korean patrons from a McDonald’s in Queens. The Koreans have been milking their stays over $1.09 coffees, violating the restaurant’s 20-minute dining limit.
It's not only unaesthetic, but also ^makes it harder to distinguish when people are actually asking questions^.

For example, when someone says, "So, we're going there" with the high-rising terminal, uptalkers have polluted that resource which is spoken language to the point that it makes it harder to tell if the sentence was a question or an imperative.
Most debt dies with the company. Tax debt (especially employee payroll withholdings) is really the only kind of I know which carries on, along with any personal debts which won't get reimbursed (which I got burned by, on credit cards, several times).

It's all surprisingly easy to walk away from, at least in the US, and particularly with normal professional investors.
Swollen Finger Tip Drained After A Few Weeks
Here was the HN thread on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197081
I like how just 30 seconds prior, he mentions somewhat off-handedly that he doesn't care if anyone leaks anything to the press.
And that's why you can't connect directly from my desktop networks to the production environments, but you can connect to the dev facilities. Firewalls: they're not just to protect against outside threats.
I bet this woman was really upset that she had to layoff that many people at once (she probably lived in another state so she couldn't do it in person). I imagine that's the reason she said it like she was ripping off a bandaid.
This thread could be renamed "How I Lost My Job at Twitter"
My what a contrarian you are.
You say "coldly professional" like it's a good thing.
>May be I am overreacting but this is when Capitalism starts to bite

what on earth does harsh layoffs have to do with capitalism?
Yes they're a really useful feature. You can use them to allow both downloads and uploads. The latter is particularly cool for creating scalable webapps that involve users uploading large content.

Rather than having them tie up your app server resources during what could be a long/slow upload, they upload directly to S3, and then your app downloads the object from S3 for processing. If your app is hosted on EC2 you can even have the entire process be bandwidth free as user-to-S3 uploads are free and S3-to-app-server downloads to EC2 are free. Just delete the object immediately after use or use a short lived object expiration for the entire bucket.

I've made a note to add an example of this to my next post on this topic.
I gotta say, that's a pretty awesome story. Didn't expect that to be the seeds of transformation.
I think that's more in the sense of "oh sorry, I didn't see you!" Which is an admission of guilt.
Up in the air anyone? :))
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1193138/
It seems that Abel was part of Patch and Tim Armstrong is CEO of AOL. This second call was from some time last year and not related to the OPs link other than it's the same set of companies, and another dubious action made on a conference call.
Test runs on the server were taking several minutes for me on this one, and it wouldn't even compile locally due to java version issues, which installing java 7 didn't help. It was so painful I just rewrote in golang (result - remote compile time less than a second!), so it's not too painful to rewrite, the interface is quite well defined, just adjust build.sh and replace start-server.

Do Scala compiles usually take this long?
Potentially profitable too, if you're a recruiter looking for job candidates...
I'm a Linode customer, and I like them.

But everyone fawns over their support ("I got a response in 3 minutes!"), and while that sometimes happens, it often does not. I've found recently the typical response time is around 15-20 minutes. I've had other tickets (including one that was critical) go for over an hour with no response, and finally I had to call them to see what was up.

Not saying they are bad - I'm a customer, after all. Just saying their support, in my experience, is not quite as amazing as some make it out to be.
Great discussion about microsoft, powershell , c#... and emacs :)
I ended up as the architect for a new live show we were putting on. You could either pre-purchase some number of minutes, or pay per minute, it was like $4.99/minute or something insane.

The billing specs kept changing, as did the specs for the show itself. New price points, more plans, change the show interface, add another option here, etc. The plan had been to do a free preview show the day before to work out the kinks. That didn't happen.

The time leading up to show start was pretty tense, lots of updates, even a few last minute changes! Then the show actually started, brief relief. The chat system built in started deleting messages, one of those last minute feature changes had screwed up automatic old-message deletion. We had a fix though, update the JS, and bounce everyone out of the show and back in so the JS updates. Fixed!

Then the CEO pointed out that the quality just kept getting worse. Turns out that while the video player had both a numeric value and a string description for the different quality levels, it assumed they were in ascending order. So once it confirmed it could stream well at a given level, it automatically tried the next, which worked! Poor quality for everyone. Fixed, and another bounce.

Then it was over, time to go home. Back in the next day to finish off the billing code. I decided to approach it like a time card system. Traverse the logs in order, recording punch in time, when someone punches out, look up their punch-in times and set that user's time spent to the difference. Remove punch-in and out from the current record so they're not used again.

Now two facts from above added up to a pretty serious bug.
1) I _set_ the time spent to the difference between the two times. Not added, set.
2) We bounced everyone from the show twice to update their JS, and video player. So everyone had multiple join/parts.

I under-billed customers by tens of thousands of dollars.

Things I learned:

- Don't just argue that you need a trial run, make sure management understands the benefits. Why, not What.

- Duplicate billing code. After that a co-worker and I wrote two separate billing parsers for things, 1 designed to be different, not efficient.

- Give yourself ways to fix problems after they crop up. The bounce killed my billing code, but not doing it would have damaged the actual product (which later became a regular feature). Wish that thing had been my idea.
A long time ago while working on a *nix box logged in as root, I executed a simple "!find". Basically execute the last find. In root's history, the last find command was something like "find ... -exec rm ...". The command was run at the root of the content directory of a CMS, deleting all the content (major media website). CMS was down while backups were restored.

I now never execute ! commands as root. Actually, nowadays I simply use CTRL-r.
One can avoid outpourings of faux sympathy without treating their email account termination as a higher priority than saying thank you.
I see that, let me rephrase: was abel being fired anyway, or was he literally fired for the impudence of taking a photo?

I guess it must be the latter, or the clip wouldn't be so interesting.
I wanted to point out that investing in AI research could be viewed by many as more lucrative than investing in anti-ageing research and life extension technology. If we solve AGI, we will have a super-human intelligence capable of solving health and ageing problems for us (and hopefully inclined to do so).
While awesome this is not a screw-up.

The screw-up is the boss in this one.
Around 2000 my team was responsible for installing and maintaining a larger amount of servers in 19" racks in a data centre.

Most servers had those hot swap drive bays for convenient access from the front while the server was running. You only had to make sure no write operation occurred while you pulled the drive out of the bay.

So, I had to exchange a backup disk on a database server running quite a few rather large forums. The server had two disk bays: One for the live hard disk and one for the backup disk. I was absolutely sure at that time which one was the backup disk so I didn't bother to shut down the database server and incur a minimal downtime. Of course, I was wrong and blithely yanked the live disk from the drive bay.

I spent the rest of the night and most of the following day running various MySQL database table repair magic. It worked out surprisingly well but having to admit this error to our forum users was embarrassing, nonetheless.

Lesson: Appropriately label your servers and devices.
"Hey guys, so we have some greeeat news!(tm) and some not so great news (sad face)"

I'd rather have it straight quick like shots at the doctors office.
Man, for some reason that double 'ls' made me laugh for 5 minutes. Just tried to imagine the surprised look on your face.
(1) work for someone else, (2) start company, (3) run company into ground, (4) goto 1.

So true, it hurts.
Show HN: I made an iOS remot control app for SpeakerDeck and Slideshare
Use wordpress? Just install the photodropper plugin.

I'm not associated with the project, I just discovered it last week and it does exactly what I need.
Julia has very little (more or less zero) symbolic manipulation library work right now.

If I were to write a Wolfram Alpha alternative in Julia right now, I'd do all of the symbolic manipulation using PyCall and sympy.
Two screw ups come to mind.

1. First day at a job. I need to get familiar with a legacy system and get a SQL dump from it to create a local copy of the database. After some SSHing and MySQLing, I confuse my two split terminal panes and end up importing my local dump to production server. Of course database names and users were the same so I end up dropping the database. No biggie. Backups were available from previous day.

2. Similar story to the first one. I got a new shiny Zend Studio IDE. Want to set up sync with remote server (just a static company website with no version control). Fill all the settings, press the sync button - and what happens? Zend Studio somehow figured that I want to force sync my local folder, which is empty, to the remote site, and it just deletes everything on the web root and uploads my empty folder. Wat. Should have read the settings twice.
Yachts are also good for committing manslaughter[0]. This is coming from the wealthy man who thinks focus on the wealthy means a Kristallnacht.

"Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich," Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers, wrote in a letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

[0] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/5-things-to-know-about-the-k...
Serious question: What is the benefit of Node.js over other server-side platforms? Is it just because client-side developers are already familiar with JavaScript?
Quite a lot here on why Stackoverflow is on windows http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html
Most VPNs can be configured to only route certain subnets over them (so all work related networks, for example) instead of everything. This is very simple to do with OpenVPN; can't speak as to the Mac builtin solution.
I agree, and if I were the one losing my job I'd prefer to hear the cold hard facts rather than artificial consolations from someone I've likely never met before.

The fact that those cold hard facts were disseminated via conference call, however, is not something that I find professional unless we are talking about the layoff of remote workers etc. - and even then I'd prefer a personal phone call.
>who can find the time time to work for you day-in and day-out, every week

It's not like they do it out of good will. They get paid for it. That said, I agree that it should be done face-to-face.
That's fine by me as long as those "biggest corps" actually do something and aren't just patent trolls.
Buy early ;)
Good point, so let's make sure the simulation engine also demonstrates curiosity, independence, autonomy and the ability to learn and assimilate new experiences. In short, a true virtual human brain starting a new life with the memories and personality modules of a deceased brain. Would that be a comfort to their loved ones?
I dropped two units of equipment, ~$1.5Mil a piece. Each unit was dropped in separate incidents. No damage at all, but management didn't care. I blamed myself despite mitigating factors such as impossible schedules, vicious multi-tasking "to compensate", and less-than-ideal support equipment. At the time, I didn't handle it very well but I ended up living through it -- first job//assignment ever in the worst environment I've ever had before or since with the worst coworker I've ever had before or since, and I mess up in the millions of dollars. "Lasting Impressions", tonight at 8/7 Central.

I left that job about 3 years later when the metaphorical train stopped at a nicer place. My name is still known in certain circles for this ["Oh bah, how could I forget?" one former manager recently stated], but I don't plan to go back there at this time.

I learned that life's too short for assholes and working in an environment you don't like. If you don't screw up, your soul will die and you'll become that former coworker you hated so much and who hated you in return. It's worth picking and choosing where you work.
Understanding the GitHub Workflow
Neanderthals Leave Their Mark on Us
That's what happens when lawyers and HR people get involved. Can't get sued, so read the script...
Added some additional logging for an edge case, rolled it out to production and then went camping in the remote wilderness for a week. Two days in, the edge case got hit and the logging wasn't sufficiently tested. It logged as intended... and kept logging and logging... until out of disk space :(

Oh yea, I run a proprietary trading firm (still at the same spot), as a result of that bug we went down and lost about $250k over the next few hours. Testing is important in automated trading :)
I find that for simple apps, a lot of the hybrid frameworks can get you 95% of the way there in terms of user experience. And if you don't plan on using any native UI stuff, then you might be fine. But then you'll run into some weird CSS issue or something that breaks your heart (and your design).

I tried AppGyver's Steroids offering (which is based on Cordova) and was quite impressed, but ultimately decided it wasn't quite up to snuff, which sucked because I really wanted it to be.
It definitely triggers a 'Fear Of Missing Out' response.
>Being upheld by a court does not mean something is a good patent.

The only good patent is the one that stands up in court.
...or in an even more cynical view, let's big corporations and trolls to file patents for things that have long been in use but nobody even thought about patenting.
Because in socialism you go on pretending to work and they go on pretending to pay you.
> just providing a better product at lower prices to a larger, poorer market has proven to recoup costs just as well as charging $10,000 per dose on a patent drug.

Unfortunately, it's not alway possible, there are sometimes very few people in the first place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_drug
Honest question, why is a phone firing such an insult? I may need some sensitivity training, but putting myself in the shoes of the person being fired I think I'd probably prefer phone. Maybe someone can help me see the other point of view more clearly.
I am not sure if it's a good thing that I saw this headline and immediately thought of Dwarf Fortress.
Low-voltage power lines have high transmission losses (though I'd have to look up just what that is).

The reason for high-voltage lines is that it reduces the total current transmitted, which reduces transmission losses.

Building out T&D infrastructure is expensive and a concern for distributed generation methods (solar, wind).
> Given Africa's status as a developing country

Africa is not a country.
I think it was more likely that she was simply reading from a prepared text/script.
I couldn't figure out how to filter by .com

Are all .com dictionary words simply taken?
Our apologies! We'll be adding in a FAQ very soon.

In mean-time, email me if you have any questions? hany@ribbon.co
I'm not sure I follow what you're talking about. Operating Systems are tangential to the point, though. When I said all useful programs halt, the kinds of programs I meant are the kind used to prove things about computation. Those programs are simplified abstractions of real programs, and they generally compute one result and then halt (if they halt). Being simple makes those programs easier to use in proofs than real programs. However, the proofs still generalize to real programs; a real-world program with multiple functions is equivalent to several single-function programs glued together together.

So my point in saying that all useful programs halt was really to argue that all useful programs must have the constraint that they their behavior is always predictable, or controllable, in some sense. In a trivial way, computers are always predictable, but Turing proved that there are cases where it's impossible to predict the eventual outcome of a program in advance, i.e., the halting problem. In precise terms, the outcome (halt/not halt) of some programs is said to be undecidable or uncomputable. Undecidability is a hallmark of Turing machines. But since real programs are written by humans, who can't solve undecidable problems, real programs will never be able to gain any advantage from undecidable behavior.
Outer space clouds and/or nebulas would have extremely low density I think. Imagine the vastness of sail collectors (or similar) needed to yield significant amounts!
"Oracle support actually called me asking if they could redistribute my work to other customers!"

What did you tell them?
> If nothing else, 2001 - A space odyssey very clearly has information devices with almost exactly the same shape of the iPad.

Apparently it wasn't.

>The Star Trek PADD is not too far off either.

Neither was this
The ads started on January 2 and took 6 days to hit 98% statistical confidence.

No! You have to pick the time first, wait that amount of time, and later analyze how much confidence you achieved. With random variations, you could have a run of any size of positive or negative results, and you could just wait until you get the result you want. Sorry but tons of people make this mistake with A/B tests.
Researchers Develop Lithium Battery That Can Charge An Electric Car For 27-Years
Doh! Um. I'm going to fix that.
Astrophile: Jellyfish galaxies found spawning in clusters
Those ads are confined within Google when you are searching. This is an ad that pops up when you're not using the app which to me sounds more like a classic toolbar add-on type of deal.
Anecdotally, I've found it's quite common with alot of European ESL speakers. I have worked with quite a few other people from varying countries, and it's somewhat common that they end many sentences sounding like a question.
One man, one vote.

One Big Wallet, one heck of a lot of votes.