skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know that my comment not completely relevant to the article posted, and I didn't intend for it to become the top link. Unfortunately the second & third top link on this story also don't add any value to the posted article.

With that said, what value does the article's author add by creating content with such link-bait-y headlines?

Surely he must know that even Obamacare might be more relevant in remembering Obama vs. whatever he is doing to combat patent trolls. Infact s/he says so in the first line of the article. Given all that does the headline really add value? Will history remember Obama as the Slayer of Patent Trolls?
Interesting, but I'm not using Redis nor MemoryStore. I gave each machine behind HAProxy a different hostname (mapped to the same IP address), and I route the clients in roundrobin fashion to each of those before they open the page with socket.io javascript. It works like this:

- client opens a page on HAProxy load-balancer picked server

- the actual node server that receives the request, redirects the browser to its custom hostname using the same URI

- client opens the same page on the particular server and socket.io connects to that subdomain

This ensures that all future requests (if socket.io connection is broken) will go to the same server without Redis, MemoryStore, cookies or whatever.

Drawbacks:

- one additional HTTP redirect when page that contains socket.io is loaded (luckly, in games there aren't many of those)

- if you want to retire some sub-domain hostname, you have to be careful to allow existing clients to re-connect somewhere else. Not really a problem for my setup, but YMMV.
Textual explanation would be helpful...
He picked 1995 because of, obviously, Java. He was talking about Java :)
EMC SANs used to run XP Embedded.

Maybe a microserf would know better, but doesnt XP Embedded have Win CE and XP lineages?
Rack space is an ongoing cost while the hardware is a fixed cost. Presumably they've decided it's worth having a slightly higher fixed cost per GB in exchange for a reduced ongoing cost per GB. (There's probably other benefits as well, such as reduced workload and just getting the space online now.)

Let's take a look...

They do have an oldish post on hosting costs:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

A rack in 2011 cost them $2,100 per month (it's more now, guaranteed). Their racks look to hold about 11 machines.
Each pod is then about $191/mo.

Each rack thus needs 1.375 extra pods at "low density". That's $262.50 a month. Since you now need about 10% more pods, you're paying about $29 more in hosting costs per month per pod.

Your savings are not $688, since you also need to construct 1/8 pod later. A low-density pod will cost about $2719, with is $340 split 8 ways. So real hardware savings is $348. Hosting costs eat that in exactly a year, and they are certainly expecting a longer life than that. (That's 2011 hosting costs, which are certainly lower.)

So it's worthwhile to spend a little extra for the additional drives. (Of course, if they could get the extra five in with more modest hardware, as seems quite possible, that would be a sure win. But sometimes ease of development/assembly/spare parts wins over hardware cost.)
PostgreSQL updates 9.3.4, 9.2.8, 9.1.13, 9.0.17, and 8.4.21 released
Font combination recommendations from typ.io
Clang would beg to differ.
The Gates Foundation does not have a Board. It has Trustees, three of them -- Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett. All three positions are unpaid.

As for Berkshire Hathaway, Directors only get paid $3,800 a year.
Well, I'd say most of the time... Where I find laziness (or "laziness implemented via iterators") worthwhile is when working with collections. But I much prefer the bits that care about such thing to explicitly return an iterator, the bits which don't to be able to operate either on iterators or concrete collections, and me to have a better idea of how much space and time will be consumed.
Dont worry, you dont actually feel it when you hit 30. But I get the feeling you are talking about.

I started programming relatively late, mid-twenties, and started as a CS student when I was 28. For the first two years I had this idea that I had to be faster and better than the younger students, to have a chance. But the world doesnt work that way. What matters is to try and figure out what you actually want to do, and then spend the time it takes to do it.
0. VMs are fine to start, but you'll want a linux machine soon-ish; (Web!?)

1. Part of it is learning proper style and communication means
I resigned in protest an FTE job at Stanford because this was the exact scenario that was proposed (s/ATM/cash registers, swipe terminals/g). From VPN on a private network to a proposal to internet IPs. No f-ing way.
Yeah. I'm looking at it from a perspective of just making progress towards some sort of useful transparency. I would anticipate a lot less objections to what I proposed.
The entire article was not written by this blogger and seems to have been quoted from "Entrepreneur Magazine", so OP is blogspam:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/232341

I like the weirdly precise profit amount, mentioned twice: 966,803. As if the writer wanted to say "I made a million bucks the first year" but thought that would trigger BS detectors so he came up with a number just enough below a million to seem plausible.

Oddly, though the amount earned is highly specific, there don't seem to really be any details as to how he was allegedly so successful (twice!) other than by being highly motivated.

My favorite bit is the quote "A fall from grace such as mine can usually level a person." usually. Like he took a survey and discovered everybody that happened to got leveled, whatever that means.
I'm sure that's true (and Linux and Windows NT etc), but the headline and lede of this article strongly suggest that 95% of ATMs run a Windows OS that will be lose support next month. That's just not true.

(And frankly, I'd be a little suspect of any numbers sourced from a company in the business of upgrading old ATMs.)
Overview of useful tools for Startups
It's a great intro to Javascript. It's not going to teach you the most current webdev libraries but if you start with a strong foundation in Javascript (which you will get from Eloquent Javascript) you should be fine applying your knowledge to using popular libraries.
They've found they are making more money as they currently stand, than if they switch which is why they unfortunately haven't. HBO revenue is at an all time high.
Pretty cool, I assume it is possible to win because a good strategy in the original was to only use 3 directions anyway. I might try it soon, but unlike 2048 you can't wait to think once things get tight.
JWD is just a text editor. It is meant to be a platform for training people to complete writing projects. The un-distracted writing format was a big win for my friends. It was difficult to keep up with the project after NaNoWriMo finished and my friends weren't writing anymore, emailing me all the time, bugging me for updates :)

Some of the feedback I got early on was that some people really wanted to do some basic formatting. I think what they really meant was that they wanted basic organizing, the formatting was just how they knew how to do it. There is no point in letting them choose fonts, for example, because once the book is on the Kindle it will only be readable in a select few fonts, chosen by the user, anyway. Simple interface. Get the writer to stop futzing around with meaningless activity. Get them focused on writing.

I think the next "big win" in that respect would be to make the ePub package. It should be dead-simple for a user to go from editor to saved document to uploading to Kindle Direct Publishing. And they should have a reasonable expectation of what that document will look like.

Semantic markup in the back end, a default style sheet on top of it, and yes, perhaps a Markdown-style interface for the user.
I have problems with the 95% figure. Currently I work for the biggest player in the ATM game and every ATM I have seen in our lab has been running windows 7. I am not saying we arent running a crap ton of legacy ATMs but I would say many of our ATMs are running Windows 7 especially if they are for a new customer.

We have ~25% of the ATM market so I think 95% is very skewed, the other players should at least have some ATMs off XP.
Actually, Go's fairly successful melding of static typing and duck-typed interfaces was a useful new trick. (Which doesn't completely excuse the "C++ tried that and it didn't work for them so WE WON'T" foot-dragging on other matters...)
I got the point "Free" in Free Software. Whether it ends up in giving the software Free since we can modify and redistribute Free Software?
Oil Patch requests drone use
All of those professions are licensed and bonded so they are supposed to know where that legal cliff occurs and avoid going over it. Your average layman most likely doesn't know the boundary between completely public and public privacy.
This is wonderful advice and feedback. I agree with kirklove that is sheer wisdom. I know that "right on!" feedback like I'm giving here is adding nothing, but an up-vote is not enough. Thank you blindhippo.
My Experience using a Bitcoin ATM
I talked to a Diebold tech when I was Davis. The stuff they do and the customer network setups will make the hair on the back of your neck leap off, run and hide.
> I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating

I actually read the AGPL as driven by mostly pragmatic factors. It didn't even come from the FSF initially, but from a developer (Affero) who believed it fit their business strategy better than the existing licenses.

One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. People who are willing to GPL their own software may incorporate your code under the GPL's terms. Other people who prefer more traditional commercial terms can, alternately, purchase a commercial license.

In the webapp setting this approach no longer works, because the GPL only covers "distribution", and a webapp backend is never distributed. Therefore nobody will buy a commercial license. The AGPL more or less restores the traditional GPL terms in the webapp setting, where you have to GPL your product if you ship an app containing the GPL'd code: only now, deploying a public webapp is a form of "shipping" (which is how most software devs actually do see the situation... deploying a live webapp is a modern-day form of shipping software).

And in practice, it seems the most common alternative to the AGPL in this setting is to just keep your code fully proprietary, so competitors can't build on it. I think in that sense AGPL is helpful if it encourages more releases, e.g. if it encourages more companies to take the Launchpad approach with their code (AGPL) rather than the GitHub approach to it (proprietary). The other common alternative is to release the source but under a non-OSI license like "free for noncommercial use only, commercial users must buy a license". The AGPL seems at least more generous than that.
Absolutely correct that if you hit help twice, it pops up a live chat 24 hours a day.

EVEN cooler is that they have some machine learning in the background that routes your query to the best department to answer your question.
But, there's a small gap in-between bleeding edge and end of life.
Does anyone else notice how ridiculously bloated theguardian.com is? It seriously takes 5 seconds to completely load on my modern machine.
The first sentence doesn't say the company being sued hasn't produced a commercial product, but rather hasn't embodied the invention described in the plaintiff's patents in a commercial product. I.e. they have a commercial product, but have no reason to believe it incorporates anyone else's invention.

> It can be a very clear and precise patent on something so glaringly obvious that no one else bothered to patent it because a normal thinking person wouldn't think it should be granted in the first place.

In practice this is a lesser problem, because a very clear and precise patent on something really obvious will be quite easy to invalidate using prior art. It's not free to defend such suits, but cheap enough where a nuisance settlement isn't particularly attractive. It's the vague patents that aren't clearly applicable to your particular problem domain that are the greatest concern, because litigating the meaning of those patents can be very expensive.
Anyone see the Strandbeest in the video?
On Twitter’s 8th birthday, find your first Tweet
I have seen that, which is what made me more convinced we need better pot hole repair and road construction. Those systems are expensive and complicated. What I envision is something even easier and fool proof than a large piece of equipment you need extensive training on. It should be dumber than cutting the pavement and filling it with new asphalt.

I'm imagining essentially a self leveling cement that untrained people can use that has the same lasting properties of the infrared repair solutions.
If win8 can run programs in compatibility mode for winXP what is possibly being run on these ATMs that can't be run on an updated OS? Also I don't think the fact that winXP has "support" makes the ATMs more or less likely to be at risk.

Also can people stop posting links to articles that immediately have popups that try and sell you some stuff and doesn't even let you view the article without signing up for some nonsense?
> Tango, Viber (which finally got stickers a few months ago), and Whatsapp are all exclusively about communication

That's not quite true. Tango has a limited selection of games too.
It shouldn't be allowed to happen. It's almost like letting public infrastructure fail.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk?view=mobile
Any links to see a demo?
I don't see any advocate of "learning to code" saying we should force people to code.

Perhaps not. But anything a teacher tells a learner to do is basically force. What choice does the learner have? They don't know any better.

This would be fine if what they were teaching were worthwhile. But it won't be: it will be "How to use Rails" (rather than, say, Ruby) or "How to use Bootstrap" rather than actually learning CSS.
The distinction between Open Source and Free Software seems increasingly silly to me (as a user and someone who has to program for his job, but is not a developer, and is not terribly interested in licenses). Both are open source (lowercase) as in, I can see the source openly. That's what's important for me, personally. Then there is the question of Copyleft or not, which is partially orthogonal to that. Copyleft is this neat hack of the copyright system where you can make people who use your code (and care about copyright) share their code, too. I think the real question Stallman is addressing is copyleft vs. non-copyleft.

) In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source", that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive license a la: "You may not use this for anything."
He doesn't miss it; he outlines it specifically in the linked article. He correctly identifies it as a philosophically different approach to software, and to licensure.

He hopes to communicate to those who have that short-sighted view, that their interests are not best served by focusing on just the code.
It would also be great if people would refuse to buy items with anti-consumer clamshell packaging. That stuff is a waste in addition to being a huge annoyance. Let's kill two birds with one stone!
It's almost instant on my 3 years old machine (Win7 + Chrome)
This is true even for the BSD licenses that are not GPL-compatible. "Free software" doesn't mean "GPL-compatible only."
I think there are some errors in the final solution code, as it doesn't do what you describe.

Were you aiming at something like this?

var generated = function(value) {
return new Function( "return (" +
function(valueToSwap) { return { prop: valueToSwap }; }
+ ")(" + value + ");" );
};
Fairly easily.

A relatively small number of syscalls are used as part of implementing other functions. Most if not all of these are made via macros that expand to inline syscalls; by replacing them with a call into your own function that implements the equivalent of the syscalls you need "on the metal" rather than calling into a kernel, most of the work is done.

Some syscalls are made directly from assembly source files because C is unable to represent the work that needs to be done around them (e.g. clone and vfork) or simply because their usage is arch-specific. These obviously use the trap-to-kernel instructions directly and cannot be re-routed as described above. Still the number of files is so small you could just rewrite the asm.

One future direction (albeit with lower priority than further functionality/quality improvements, unless somebody funds it) is making it easier to port to bare-metal and documenting the process.
Twitter Launches Easy Tool That Finds Your First Tweet
Musye – Let's bring education into the digital age. Coming Soon.
Airbnb In Advanced Talks to Raise Funding at a $10 Billion Valuation
Hack attacks battled by net's timekeepers
I'm surprised not to see Aloha editor [0] in their list of "Existing Solutions".

[0] - http://www.aloha-editor.org/
At this rate somebody needs to create a 2048 homepage with links to the various versions.
500 error.

must of been hosted from windows xp.
Ms should open source xp and let the community fix it
That exists, it seems to be a popular civic hack-a-thon project[1]. I'm not too worried about identifying pot holes, I'm more interested in road construction that avoids them completely or makes them easier to fix in a better way,

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=pot+hole+detection+app
I like to see one of these for web languages / frameworks
The Hacker looks at the 'general public', and believes their ways are somehow dumb, and inadequate. His own eyes, however, have been opened, when he understood the power that the Computer holds. His kind – the Hackers – are the only ones who understand how the Computer works, and he believes his mission is to use this power for good – rather than evil. His mission, hence, is to use the weird, esoteric ways of the Compiler to deliver his tribe – his 'general public' – to an upgraded way of living. If he does this, he would have vindicated his sin of possessing forbidden knowledge. The tale goes that the Gods of the tech world – Google, Facebook, eBay or PayPal – may become interested in the Hacker's work and his courage, and hence acquire his start up. Then, the Hacker may finally be given permission to rejoin humanity, as a Prince of the tech world; and he may then do anything he wants.

This is the 'Hacker Script', and it is one script of the many that people have lived. This script's directive is: "Build something great, and then you may have permission to rejoin humanity." The script blocker, as it is generally the case, comes through an insurgency against the authority that tries to tell you what to do. Do what you want, be independent, don't let someone tell you you've failed. Be creative, be independent, be spontaneous, be aware. Good luck.
Let me diverge for a moment:

Everytime I see this, I wonder why browsers (and the W3C) don't add more functionality to textarea.

ContentEditable always felt like an ugly hack for me. A rich set of API on textarea could move the web forward. Imagine building an IDE in a textarea. That should be possible.

</rant>

Great work nonetheless, very clean code and very nice documentation!
There should not be any XP at this point in time.
beautiful, they must send down at least 75% less data down the pipe compared to their desktop version.
Python/C#/R API for financial index performance data?
Anyone know of a respectable, free API for querying financial index performance data? My company has access to Thomson Reuters and Ibbotson, but I want to compare some of the data in these reports for consistency. I have used gdata with the Google Finance API, but it is no longer available. Anyone have any good suggestions?
Driven by Facebook and Google, Mobile Ad Market Soars 105% in 2013
Data. Data everywhere.
Your site has downloaded 25 invoice pdf's to my computer automatically. Not functional.
The candy weighing demonstration, or, the unwisdom of crowds
Both HN and Facebook are not regular forums (they have distinct features). If you are trying to change politics with software, perhaps a good way to approach the problem is to try solving something specific, then build the community and write the code to do precisely that. One example is gathering support for specific campaigns. I live in Bulgaria, we have active protest movement against the current government, and a lot of the coordination and debate happens on Facebook. I had a specific campaign in mind that didn't happen for legal reasons, but it would have been very interesting otherwise. Send me a mail if you want to know more.

I think it's a mistake to think about real and virtual world as separate things. We live in a single world, and the online part grows more important with time. There are bits that are quite independent from the offline part, like interacting on HN with pseudonyms. Other bits, like Facebook, are typically much closer and interconnected with our offline life. Some mobile apps are even more integrated with the real world, although they are not very social.
Could throwing fireballs with your eyes be the future of PlayStation?
Is the distinction between "advanced interrogation techniques" and "torture" also silly to you? How about the distinction between a republic and a democracy? Or the distinction between socialism and communism?

Copyleft vs non-copyleft is not the distinction between free and open source. The distinction is about the emphasis in the language, that's all. Stallman wants people to think about their freedom. The open source initiative wants to sweep this freedom talk under the rug.
Microsoft's Online Services agreement (covers Hotmail)[0]:

Does Microsoft disclose my personal information outside of Microsoft? You consent and agree that Microsoft may access, disclose, or preserve information associated with your use of the services, including (without limitation) your personal information and content, or information that Microsoft acquires about you through your use of the services (such as IP address or other third-party information) when Microsoft forms a good faith belief that doing so is necessary (a) to comply with applicable law or to respond to legal process from competent authorities; (b) to enforce this agreement or protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers; or (c) to help prevent a loss of life or serious physical injury to anyone.

Notice the bit about "protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers".

[0] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-live/microsoft-se...
You probably visited the site before, and had some information cached. Clear your cache and get back to me on the results. I'm curious.
http://guardian.github.io/scribe/
Along this line, you might find "cogs" (a toolkit for developing command-line utilities in Python) useful to build upon, it's an internal tool we use at Prometheus that's MIT licensed: https://bitbucket.org/prometheus/cogs
At around 1:00 minute the CEO says "All of us live and work here."
In microsoft's defense, they've given plenty of time to prepare for this. It's time to move on. If operators can't afford to upgrade their machines, it might be time to replace them with better operators.
> One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach.

He actually does like it:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
I believe the idea is feedback that invoicing is a flooded market, like bug/issue trackers.
Netflix, Philips, and the fragility of APIs