skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree.

Like many others in the industry, I've had network applications which have run for years without unscheduled downtime. When I'm hosting my own application, I can architect whichever failover/redundancy solution I see fit. If my application does go down, I have physical access to the server and the data. My dependencies are all local, clearly outlined and easy to manage (from a risk perspective).

On the other hand, if I trust your SaaS application I'm also trusting that your backup and resilience procedures are at least as good as mine. I'm trusting that your dependencies are all managed in such a way that a failure can quickly be remedied or a contingency plan activated. I'm trusting your providers in the same way I'm trusting you. The opaque black box of your application frankly scares me. I can manage what I can see and what I can understand.

Not to over generalise, but there is a trend in SaaS application design towards the school of "let someone else worry about it" dependency management. This is clear in both infrastructure and libraries/frameworks. Many even outsource critical functionality to other third party SaaS services altogether (push notification, messaging, queue management, transcoding). Besides core application architecture, we also have to worry about connectivity (mine, yours, all of your dependencies). That's a lot of moving parts which can (and do) fail.

I trust my transparent, well documented system with its clear contingency plans much more than your opaque SaaS application, its unknown dependencies and its myriad moving parts.

And as we see all too often on HN, it's not just about downtime - SaaS applications shut down and disappear. If you're lucky, you get a chance to export your data. I'm certainly not suggesting that companies should continue to operate them at a loss for years, but given the choice between relying on someone else's SaaS product and depending on a locally hosted application, I'm going locally hosted every time when it concerns critical business workflow.

I'm not anti-SaaS at all, I just think we should be clear in our own minds about the risks introduced by relying heavily on third party providers (and I mirror that awareness in dependency management in my own software).

(On a side note: I find it interesting that while many of the users on HN ardently support SaaS, they condemn always-online DRM.)
uu, a lifehacker article! :)
Why Bill Nye the Science Guy is trying to reason with America's creationists
Lots of people mention New Relic application monitoring - One of the alternatives that I've created is App Enlight - https://appenlight.com - giving you application level visibility
Often, you need IPC merely to communicate with a child worker process. I've seen quite a number of projects that needlessly roll their own solution when one can just use the built-in process.send() method.

Of course, this doesn't cover all the use cases of this particular library, I just think it's worth pointing out.
App Enlight will do this - but for now only python client supports this officially.
Bat bomb: USA in the WW2 created a bomb that used bats
I'm pretty sure Windows at the time (before monopoly) was a preferable platform than it's competitors.

Problem is that there doesn't exist a platform that can be made and satisfy all possible use cases present and future alike.

Wishing Google descends from the heavens and make a perfect Web APP platform/protocol, is akin to believing a God will descend from the heavens and grant all people's wishes (even if they contradict each other).
That's a good idea. I used to be under a project manager who had never written code and was not technical in the slightest, in a software company. It was a frustrating exercise, as he glazed over when you were explaining to things, and would also leave design meetings as he didn't understand what was going on. The questions were mainly "when will that be done by?" rather than trying to understand why there were difficulties.

Having said that, the company seemed to do alright, albeit with massive slippage on deadlines.
Are you suggesting there being a connection there?
I've convinced a few people who were fans of rock guitarists like Blackmore, Malmsteen, Rhoads and EVH to listen to teh Prelude #2 in Well tempered Clavier and describe the commonality. A couple of them opened their eyes wide and went "Woah".
Possible insider information on close to come hit on BTC. Or big players want to secure their money after a good profit from BTC value raise and move to avoid a burst on the BTC speculation bubble.
see also landis's haunting piece "the melancholy of infinite space" [http://www.geoffreylandis.com/infinite.htp], which starts off:

We live at the very beginning of the Universe.

As we peer back with our telescopes toward the beginning of time, and measure the age of the universe, we are beginning to find that the universe is closer to ten billion years old than to fifty; that the oldest of the stars we see around us are, in fact, as old as any star can be; as old as the universe itself. Looking outward, we are finding that the gravity of the universe is not enough to pull it back together in some future cataclysmic big-crunch. The universe will expand forever.

Ten billion years. A mere eyeblink in cosmic time. We stand at the beginning of time, looking outward into the void of infinite time.
Any article on procrastination that contains a to-do list is a procrastination-feeding item itself.
If I remember correctly there was even a special clause in the C standard definition of union types which allows you to write:

struct A { Data header; ... }

struct B { Data header; ... }

union AB { Data header; A a; B b }

and then access the header field in AB. If this is syntactically the first field in each of the constituent records the result is well-defined.

This is a great solution if you need to map to a specific wire format. If you do not have that constraint and have code which uses algebraic data types a lot you should probably switch to OCaml or Haskell. There are specific optimizations to work with complex matches and for representing algebraic types in a compact and efficient way. In C++ the compiler has to work with reinterpret_casts and cannot change the representation of your data types (much). Doing the optimizations by hand is possible, but chances are that a simple-minded OCaml prototype will already perform reasonably well.
Can Power of the Mind Control Chronic Pain?
You need market power in order to restrain trade.

First off: that's not what the statute says. And again you've failed to provide any documentation for your claims (as adventured has also failed to do).

So I'll leave it there.

As for Wharton's making statements elsewhere: it's my recollection that he had. I haven't looked for them ... and no, don't see anything that's a specific match, though you can certainly place Wharton at Intel and having met with Gates while there.
Good one for Start up developers as this is clean and the challenges in last of the Github Page are fair for them. Good to see that old html tags are not used.
Challenge: $100 to $50,000 in 90 days
I've been running a virtual dice roller site for pen & paper roleplayers for about ten years. I get these kinds of emails all the time. "Your RNG is faulty, I just rolled three 20s in a row!" and stuff like that.

It's probably not fixable psychologically, we're just seeing patterns everywhere. This also happens with physical dice by the way. If a player rolled two or more abysmal results in a row it's common to say "hey, you should really swap out these dice".
My account and all the funds seem to be frozen, I kept them in $. When I log in it shows me:

Your account has been restricted from accessing funding options. Please contact support@mtgox.com for additional information on why your account has been restricted.

I've tried contacting their support, but no luck so far.
I have never used BitInstant and I was verified before.

Anyone else having similar issues?
I haven't seen any sites that require it yet. Minor breakage of random features, yes, but then I can whitelist the specific domains without compromising privacy and security.
If in doubt, I'd reject the offer rather than end up somewhere with the expectation of a suit.
Supposedly there is a filter already on HN for NSA articles, each vote only counts as 1/3 of a vote if the title contains the string "nsa", severely penalizing those articles.
Around here, web development appears to be the new window-cleaning.

It is a shame.
looks like a lot of data have not been indexed yet, the concept is extremely useful, and would like to see psychology as one of the categories, they are my favourite type of content on HN.
Keep in mind that uranium is also a limited resource. Might last us another thousand years,but it will run out eventually. Unless by nuclear you meant fusion power,but we are not quite there yet.
The linked poker vulnerability article is really worth a read.
Hi exolxe,

I'm working on an open-source framework for code challenge web apps, so I'm really happy to see such a website done right :-) !

Sent you a mail asking for some help, hope you'll find time to answer.

Good luck !
Gotta love American hypocrisy: "Proving yet again what a fabulous idea it was to stage the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, NBC has discovered that all the Games' attendees can expect to immediately get hacked as soon as they get to Sochi."

Wouldn't the US do the exact same thing if it was in the US?
I thought that when I bought my Bravia EX but it's a pain in the ass. iPlayer is poorly maintained and it barely plays anything on a good day, the thing is impossibly slow for the first minute when you turn it on and it's the fussiest thing I've ever seen when it comes to media playback. The TV bit is pretty good but I didn't really buy it for that as there is literally nothing on TV in the UK. Oh and it randomly decides to inform the watchers that it's going to turns itself off even though every option in it is set to not automatically turn off.

It's no Triniton to make a comparison.

I've had zero experience with other smart TVs so this might be the best user experience out there -- please feel free to confirm this or not as I was thinking about getting rid of it.
If you're interested in something more scholarly, read John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism.
There's more rigging involved with people who can't throw dice properly than there is with the seed of a RNG on a server miles away with you. :P
Me too, I bought the first and would not have minded paying full price for again for an ebook of the second. It's up to the authors of course. They seem like very nice people online so it's a shame they're getting so much criticism. Nevertheless, here's my bit of criticism: This is obviously BS and so a bit annoying to include: "In addition, the feedback we've gotten has been that technical books are generally better to have in print than as an ebook."
I've had similar experiences with everything Samsung I've used apart from their SSDs. They just don't seem to put much engineering effort into their products.

Acer knock out some good machines. I miss their Timeline series. I got 12 hours out of one of them once and it was super-cheap.
How To Create Buzz Around Your Startup At No Cost
I'm afraid this will always be the case. Any runtime or VM will have bugs, and the fact there are multiple instance in the world of web development only exacerbates this.

One day something new may come out, and the web will become a wasteland and web standards will stop being worked on. Then you may finally get a stable consistent target, but alas there will then be no point...
In retrospect it looks that way. I have better tools at my disposal now, but I don't feel like I'm any better a programmer than I was five years ago - and in some ways I feel like a worse programmer than I was ten years ago.

But I don't know how fair those memories are. Presumably companies have a reason for paying more for experience...
I would say I am pretty visual. I like to draw ER diagrams of database design so I can see whats going on. I usually have a visual representation of the tables in my head with positions when I am thinking of queries. The tables stay in the same position (probably based o the ER diagram I drew ages ago).
It would be useful if each article could have its tag displayed. In that way when looked at "all" I could start to get an idea of what the tags mean to the system. At the moment I'm reasonably often finding things tagged other than I would expect. Showing tags next to items would help me recalibrate.

Other than that - good job. Thank you.
R-Rated Subway Sandwich Commercial?
Man Subway Sandwich got it going onnnnn.
> Well, there are some ground rules…

A while back I noticed some people use this phrase "ground rules" to talk about rules without making them seem so rule-like. Another one is "rules of the road". Thank you for demonstrating this phenomenon.
Mega-patent-troll's first court battle ends in mega-mistrial
When you get to Apple scale, worrying about sets of customers with cardinality less than about 5M is a pointless waste of time.
It's only a surprise if you don't understand it. Every Perl programmer needs to fully grok and embrace it because it's a core language feature.

For others, this is what EdwardDiego is referring to:

my %hash = (a => 1, b => 2, c => 3, d => 4);

# list context (plural)
my @keys = keys %hash;
my ($key1, $key2, @rest_of_keys) = keys %hash;

# scalar context (singular)
my $number_of_keys = keys %hash;
say scalar keys %hash;

# An example of iterator usage
my ($first_key, $first_value) = each %hash;
my ($second_key, $second_value) = each %hash;

# void context
keys %hash; # resets iterator
Thanks. Lets not forget to test pricing as well:

http://bloggerkhan.com/relativity-of-price-as-explained-in-p...
The issue is that if you run the same program twice without selecting a suitably random seed you will make the same 60 million rolls.

If you can somehow control, predict or influence the seed you can predict or influence rolls.

For example if the game uses JUST the system time as a seed, I can shift the system time back to a specific position and run the application again to get the same random number generation.

If you know the algorithm, for example you're playing an open source card game, and you can determine the time (offset) on the server or the other players computer you could cheat by calculating their random variables.

Now it really isn't an issue in games, but it's incredibly important in security. Randomness makes up a huge component of encryption.

That's why you have applications that require you to move the mouse a bit, hopefully randomly and they take in a whole bunch of other entropy fed in by the system.

In Unix-like OS's you have /dev/random and /dev/urandom. /dev/random requires a certain amount of entropy and environmental noise, and it blocks on reads until it's satisfied with the output.

/dev/urandom does not block, but it gives pseudo random output. For the purposes of security, /dev/urandom should NEVER be used. However neither are truly 'random'.
Second World War Code-cracking Computing Hero Colossus Turns 70
Why 22?

If you got everyone making < $100 an hour, you would cripple the nation and have a greater bargaining position.
Nice! Assuming I couldn't use this with another language, correct?
I figured women out.
But the flip side of that is that optimizations that were made when resources were tight may bite you in the ass when resources become available. For example, the declaration for the WinMain entry point that still persists to this very day in Win32 and Win64 applications looks like this:

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpszCmdLine, int nCmdShow);

Note the hInstance and hPrevInstance bits. Back in the day Windows loaded the code for a Windows application's .EXE once into memory and then maintain several pointers to a separate data section for each running instance of the application. The hInstance and hPrevInstance are actually pointers to such datasections. One of the reasons for this was so that the program needed to only do certain kinds of initialization once; if future instances needed that data, they could copy it into themselves from the previous instance (remember, no protected memory!) with the GetInstanceData function. In addition, it was a simple way of telling if you were already running; window classes, for instance, were registered once per program, not once per instance.

Of course in Win32, instances of a program are their own processes with their own address spaces, so you can't do the kinds of clever tricks you could in Win16 to save time and memory. And hPrevInstance is always NULL. Win16 programming is full of hacks like this that made sense in their day, but are counterproductive now, though their vestiges remain on in Win32.
Very useful! Would be good if you could adjust the time-range with respect to the category i.e. for a popular category, 1 day of news is great but something like jokes - currently there's just an empty page - http://newshack.io/by-categories?category=9&term=day - here a month is more interesting - http://newshack.io/by-categories?category=9&term=month
Maybe but that is what people were saying about Sony couple of years ago too, they have great products for e.g. their headphones are the ones I use Sony XBA-4, their top of the line in ear headphones.

Just something for house keeping, Sony managed to sell more than the Xbox One beucase Sony is selling the PS4 in 54 countries vs Xbox One is only available in 13 and is $100 more expensive.
4 million PS4s vs 3 million Xboxes. I think the victor is Microsoft over here, if MS does open Xbox up to more markets it will clearly outsell, then again maybe not.
Approx 200 btc.

Note the issues the parent mentioned were with 4k+btc transfers

FDIC would not have saved them in USD
Lyft bumps up driver insurance and joins a new insurance coalition
For the dashboard of your utility usage broken down to individual items, check smart impulse, a french startup http://www.smart-impulse.com/. They do exactly this.
I notice this kind of article a lot these days. I feel like it's trying to come up with something to write out of nothing.
I think it was renamed modules between versions? I never got to the bottom of it. In fact, I aborted migrating it and ended up leaving it running, but instead virtualised the machine (that was fun!)

If I had known what I was doing with Perl, it might have been better. I was a bit harsh on Perl, apologies. But it still stands that migration on Linux boxes isn't massively easy or fun (not that Windows is either)
I'm sure the US is doing the exact same thing at Sochi, though likely with a bit more targeting.
Learn to code, but don't stop there. Aspire to write good quality stuff.
Agreed, but my fear is that unification allows for consolidation of power in a way that current nation states prevent.
You can tell it's going to be an excellent article when a flight to Sochi takes 75 hours.
I wonder if you clustered HN articles to find categories automatically. That may not be useful, but I'd be interested in seeing how HN articles are naturally categorized.
Hmm? I disagree. I have built very large systems using exactly this technique.

As I mentioned in a comment above, lots of on the wire binary protocols start with a type identifier byte (or word). You then have a wonderful switch statement based off of that.

Heck I had an entire inter processor communication system running based on what was essentially this very idea. The switch actually had two layers, your first byte gave you a subsystem to jump to and the second byte was the command within that subsystem.

You sent data down the wire connecting the two processors together (a UART connection in this case), read straight into a buffer, and just pop right into a switch statement. The main disadvantage is everything is set at compile time, but for a lot of uses that is a-ok.
حافز الصفحه الرئيسيه – تسجيل حافز 2 المطور من حافز
Well, if at all someone doesn't want to waste time ever, he/she won't be either on HN, or reading pg's endless writeups, or on that guy Babauta's pointless articles (I subscribed to his blog for some time). He is one the guys writing blog posts on minimalism made up of thousands of words and tens of glossy high resolution images.
Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?
Ask HN: Front-End Technology in 2014
Feel free to disregard this thread and move to the next. But for those starting new projects in 2014, this might be highly valuable.

This is a very dangerous question, I fully understand that this might very well explode into a thousand directions and would most definitely be shut down on Stackoverflow right away. But me searching the web only returns unweighted link lists that I do not nearly value as much as opinions on here.

In 2014, what's the status-quo on best-practices for front-end development, API-based, moderate traffic (10k to 200k daily visits) websites, with authenticated user dashboards?

I've been doing this since Perl/CGI times and have evolved through technology and done every and anything from html/html5/php/yii/js/perl/ruby/rails/python/django/angular/css/css3 and whatnot throughout the years. I feel most tools can get the job done either way, some are more comfortable, some are more reliable, some are more flexible, some are more resistant against high traffic.

If you would go about creating something like a small Google Analytics front-end, which fetches ALL it's data through a private API backend (JSON) and has user authentication to reach those dashboards/analytics --- what would be your weapons of choice, and why?

And please, don't pick by passion only (looking at you, Haskell, Scala, Go guys) - don't forget your business objectives - developer scarcity/availability, failure-recovery (and knowledge thereof), long-term experience with stability and maintenance resources on the web, etc.

Go!
Precisely. Windows-C for the charm etc. isn't obvious. It isn't even obvious what this charm thing is either, or why I need to move the cursor over to the edge of the screen.

This will completely confuse most Windows users who are used to clicking on things that they see, not magically waving the cursor around to make things appear and then clicking on non-obvious vague silhouette-style icons.
Programmers write code.
I think outside of the box by avoiding cliche.
Yes, I noticed that some time ago and ended up rewriting parts of the application (and also avoiding generics, instead opting for HPPC). What annoys me a bit is that Dalvik has dramatically different performance characteristics from normal Java which necessitates relearning all this stuff. Nice article though and I wish I had found it sooner.
On that site it says you've attended PyCon Finland. What was it like, any good? (Obviously, I'm from Finland and I'm curious about what you think of the Python scene in Finland, I don't hear about Python much generally.)
How to be below API rate limits from multiple servers
Well, actually chrome was consuming about 1 gig of ram (if you're counting all the "Chrome helpers" processes) and 2% constant CPU when i had absolutely no page opened. So pretty much anything else is better (i'm on safari right now and it feels extremely light). Note that it's not just me : https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/y8VTVH...