skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting that you brought up ES actually as I've just been toying with it as part of a project I'm working on (I usually use Solr). Unfortunately, I hated it so I guess we just have very different views on what constitutes a good approach to software.

Things I didn't like with ES include:

- Awful documentation (even the newly released guide) and too much marketing speak. I constantly felt like I was reading a brochure rather than a man page.

- I found it opaque and difficult to get clear, concise info on how it's put together and what it's doing under the hood.

- Marvel was nice but it's a shame they charge for it (it's not _that_ nice)

- The install routine (in an effort to be super simple I guess) just felt wrong and needlessly over simplified (I didn't like it making decisions without telling me what it was doing).

And more...

I will concede that working with ES's config files is a lot nicer than dealing with Solr's XML though! And in case you're in any doubt, I am by no means an enormous Solr fan either.

Anyway looks like we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one :)

Edit: also, I am occasionally prone to a bit of sentimentality for good, older software (it took me far too long to give up on apache and embrace nginx for example) - so there's definitely a little bias on my part!

Edit 2: If you could get Salvatore Sanfilippo and Igor Sysoev to team up and build a modern MTA, that would interest me :D
To be honest I nuked Facebook at the height of farmville spam (I don't remember it being filterable at that time but could be wrong). Just couldn't care about Facebook anymore so deleted the account. So if its better now great, but I just have a finite amount of time in life to deal with computers and Facebook was becoming too big of a timesink.

Theres a reason I'm looking to replace gmail after being a "beta" invitee from ages ago. But its a long term project as I have to migrate both to new email account and also update countless logins to use it. Pretty much on the back burner for the moment.
The AMA is, I believe, the largest lobbying organization in the country.
Google uses a combination of GPS and nearby wifi signals to figure out where you are, and it is astonishingly effective. I enabled location history for a day and could see data points for different rooms in my apartment. If any random app can access that data, I wonder why they don't integrate it with the E911 feature that's already built into android.
> ... surveillance propaganda. I think it reads that way because of strong implication that cell phone technology is bad because it does not allow authorities to obtain quick geolocation fix on a cell phone.

That may be, but not being able to locate people in an emergency is a legitimate problem, and it's happening because people are ditching their landlines (which did have known locations).

I live on the shore of Puget Sound in Washington State, right by the water. This means my cell phone is much more likely to connect with a cell tower on the opposite shore -- and people on the opposite bank get connected to cell towers on this side. This means depending on a cell tower for location is totally misleading for all these people. The only people who can be automatically located are those who (a) have smartphones with built-in GPS, (b) the GPS location is set to be included with each call, and (c) are outdoors when they make the call.

It's a mess, and conspiracy theories aside, it needs to be fixed.
I'm definitely a fan of the brief 'About Moves' section they have at the bottom of the page. Too often these acquisition posts offer no details about what the app/company actually does, with the main website either not accessible through any links on the page or just gone completely.
ZBoard rolls out the San Francisco Special for the hilly city by the bay [video]
I would say you have more than sufficient numbers to do all the testing.
Actually, most of the logic is done in the server. They're running some fairly sophisticated machine learning code that's beyond the capability of an iPhone. (It's pretty hard to distinguish between brisk walking, cycling, and driving in slow traffic.)
How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm
this reminds me of a government agency that permits access by IP addresses whitelisted in IIS. Can't put fancy caching or load balancing in front because it can't understand X-Forwarded-For, etc.

tl;dr build your authentication into your app, not the web server layer.
FIPS is actively harmful to security by virtue of being an empty and ill-conceived certification. Removing FIPS from an otherwise best available option is to the benefit of the industry at large.

By comparison, glossy marketing of a security effort offers no security benefits, and plenty of room within which to hide bad ideas such as FIPS.
Using an online service means you're participating in the current market system. Short of a popular global scale non-profit that wouldn't be up for sale, I'm not sure there is a solution to the problem of "how do I get warned if someone buys my favourite service". It's generally not a problem for most -- you put your data up, you took the risk, and most are just fine with giving up their privacy for convenience (I know I am).

Beyond privacy legislation (unlikely and probably draconian), there is only one solution to the problem that I see: help build the next generation of open web protocols so people can host their own private services and talk to one another without anyone having your data.

This would be the most private/open/free way to go, though the problem with that is there's basically no money in it yet. And no one has figured out how to make it a compelling user experience.
Microsoft Surface Mini to debut in mid-May?
Director of Engineering at ShopKeep here. Happy to answer any questions. We're also hiring (like everyone). Checkout our careers pages[1].

[1] http://www.shopkeep.com/careers
I speak British English, and I see a distinction. "Fired" (or "sacked") to me is getting told to leave. Now. Usually because your work is crap, or you have done something wrong.

Letting someone go like this (when the work is fine, but not needed) is usually referred to as "making the person redundant".
As TI phrased it in their press release back in 2012, they were focusing on "embedded" instead of "mobile." The way I understood it was that this covered everything mobile: not just phones, but also tablets.

In any case, TI makes almost all of its money on analog chips. "Embedded processing" was less than 8% of profits in Q1 2014. And that division includes microcontrollers.
This is a long post, with a wealth of information that will take some time to digest. The comment section also has contribution from well targeted participants, and replies from Timothy Gowers himself, so it's probably best to comment anything substantial there.

However, I would just like to say that I am very happy to see Timothy Gowers is still on this case.
I come from one of the towns mentioned in the article, Thetford Mines (they somehow misspelled it), which is about 45 minutes drive from Asbestos. Reading the local newspaper is always entertaining, it seems everyone in town has an opinion about the fibre, and most of the time it's a positive one too. If some MP dares speak against it, everyone gets mad.

Anyways, people live there and as a child it's normal to go play in the dump sites, which have a strange white-greenish color due to the mineral. You pick up a "bearded rock" as we call them, the beard being the asbestos fibre, and stash them in your bedroom or whatever kids do with rocks.

Needless to say, living now in the States and telling people about those stories (which I considered normal, who wouldn't play with an asbestos-laden rocks?) always brings up interesting reactions. I was told (by the local newspaper) that you can't breath the big fibres, that it's once they're processed that they're dangerous, so I do wonder if I still have some it in me...
Curious: why is this limited to ClojureScript? I can see this being useful in JVM Clojure in projects which do not need real or full Datomic.
Well, that's how avalanche work in the mountain: you don’t really get any less gobbledegook than pack of snow crushing you or not.

In the case of social networks, the idea is to make sense of how people start adopting a behaviour. For that, you have many models, from ‘susceptibility’: a user adopts if it pleases her, as soon as any of her neighbour adopt it; to avalanches: one can’t tell the benefit without using it, so, as a proxy, they use a number of friends using it as a threshold. There are variants, including where users can stop using it; a more obvious one is using the weight relations; a more significant is considering the structure of the network: can one potential consider that their friends using it might be part of the same group (a ‘facet’ to re-use Field’s vocabulary) and does it encourages me to adopt or no, on the contrary.

When you talk to people about adopting trends, they usually explain that “every body is doing it”, but if you dig using several examples, “everybody” ends up being a form or another of those model. It might be ‘influencers’ that may of may not be a stable or identifiable group, too.

If you are concerned in targeting ads to the right people, understanding which case work for you is key. This is why Facebook tried (controversial) ads indicating that some of your friends were using the service already.

But even without that creepy factor of expressly indicating that, you might want to measure whether you have better conversation rate for people with no friends, one friend, two or three, four to nine, ten to twenty, or more than that already using your service. Cases include situation where those friends might know each other, or be part of clusters or cliques (respectively, groups where everyone knows almost- and everyone else). That would allow you to target your advertising to the specific behaviour of your service.

I’ve been studying that for the past ten years (so not exactly when Facebook started, but initially on other networks); since, I’ve made considerable efforts to make a complex and counter-intuitive discipline clear enough for any marketing intern to grasp it; I’m not sure “gobbledegook” is exactly how I want it to be described to me.
they pay you for a bug free product

A nitpick but it's really important that HNers understand it: users do not, in fact, pay for bug free products. They pay for products which achieve the benefits promised to them, bugs and all. If they wanted to buy bug-free products, they'd a) make decisions about software adoption driven primarily by externally visible indicia of bug-freeness and b) pay prices similar to that paid by e.g. the Space Shuttle or flight control systems. Users do neither of these things for most software.
what's the difference between collective intelligence artificial intelligence? because most of the examples given are collective intelligence. other peoples input scored and summarized.
Facebook Invests in the Future of Wearables With Fitness App Acquisition
How is that book? It looks really interesting.
IFTTT is more web+data oriented - e.g. sharing pics, location, etc. + actions based on them. Look at the featured recipes.

Tasker is for your inner geek to control your phone like you would with a shell script - volume, wifi, etc. to name a few.
Someone who is calling 911 (or 999) should have no expectation of privacy from the government as to their location.
Jack Parsons: Occultist involved in early rocketry
From the workarounds tab: "Do not open more than 70 copies of Visual Studio..."
Congrats to IFTTT and Jordan Beck for shipping this product. I'm seeing more and more apps on iOS which are ported to Android only to be met by an incumbent app that is on par or superior to the iOS offering. I love IFTTT but the iOS restrictions make it difficult to enable the types of recipes I really want to create.
A good explanation!

I made a rather long (2 hours) YouTube video that explains the fundamentals of our current economic system - perhaps it is helpful to someone who wants to get a better understanding of the issue:

http://youtu.be/t8_sjmRBGPE
Then I probably shouldn't introduce you to The Daily WTF[0]

[0]http://thedailywtf.com/
> You wouldn't have to if there were a standard initialisation interface, would you?

My point is, even right now with sysvinit (and aix doesn't use it afair), i have to adapt a init script to every single unix/linux distribution i want to use my software on. At least, if i want to comply with that system's best practice.

With systemd and other init replacements, it's likely a few lines of config file i have to rewrite. Its much less effort to ship or adapt to a few of these than have a init script that works everywhere.

About other unixes: calm down, this is some process that supervises other processes, this is in no way comparable to making libc incompatible.
I assume we're talking about servers here that run off the shelf distributions. For (virtual) appliances and embedded devices / firmware everyone will roll their own images with whatever init they're happy with. We don't have any influence on what commercial vendors do. If AIX feels like an 80s system (i know it's modern and powerful at the core) that's IBMs decision, but i don't hear any complaints that Linux distributions don't ship ksh in vi mode as /bin/sh anymore.

So, in this particular market and with the problem at hand, i don't see how and why Linux should wait for the sysvinit replacement that is able to make everyone happy and will magically be adopted by everyone.

And if some day illumos will succeed Linux, I'm sure people will manage to port their 10 lines of service config over.
No. It is an experience. In bad design. Almost as criminal as the 'Design Museum' or a Flash landing page (I wish we still had them).
Theoretically they could just spam every active email address they know about with that message and it would still be true.

Obviously bad policy, but are you really going to attempt to sue Microsoft?
Google+ Head Vic Gundotra Leaving Company
They don't want more apps, they want more exclusive apps. The more exclusive apps the harder the lockin to the platform. Apple and Google both remember mid nineties Microsoft. Lock users in and ride that to dominance. It's seems like something I should be furious about but it's hard to angry when it helps to line my own pockets with cash. I can and have written native apps for both iOS and Android so that makes me very much in demand. I'd prefer an open web to win out but IMO native apps still give a much better user experience.
Live? Chapman guy is in front of me now and says it will be live later
I think that's more of the fault of iOS, not IFTTT though right? I mean iOS only gives an app access to so much, where as Android apps can get all those access from the get go. I'm not 100% sure how permissions work for iOS, but I have a feeling it's more locked down that you would have to be a partner with Apple to get the type of permissions they allow on Android devices by default.
I have not tried runit. s6 is actively maintained; I don't know about runit (on the other hand, runit is in Debian while you must compile s6 yourself). The author of s6 has a (very biased of course) comparison or various supervisors:

http://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html

The big feature s6 has that runit lacks seems to be the ability to wait without polling on some event (process started). I haven't used this much myself, but even given that some process has started, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's initialized and ready to do what you expect.
Thanks, I will try this, it looks like it will work.
You just answered your own question. It is generally accepted that Facebook and Google derive a large source of their revenue from advertisement, which is in such high demand at these companies precisely because they control so much of your personal data.

It isn't so much of a leap of reasoning to think that a company willing to sell some information about you isn't willing to go further than you'd like them to. Again, it's not that we're worried about them 'leaking' it - we're worried about how they're going to sell and make money off of it.
That sounds pretty awful!

I've never worked anywhere that promotions were just not given. And I'm including retail/fast food jobs from high school!
Sure I hace quite a few programs that run in 64mb of ram (default) jvms. Probably could go lower for those but I never even looked at improving those. Java programs can use very little ram if appropriately designed for a problem. I.e. don't forget java 2 me
It appears to be either live or live-ish. (On the other hand, according to the schedule, Jaron Lanier should've been the first speaker, and he doesn't appear to have been from the perspective of the stream. Did he speak and it wasn't broadcast, or what?)
The Rise and Fall of Internet Explorer
Call the police...
"The pt. Is that nothings changed in the financial system"

Actually, a ton has changed in the financial system - some good and some bad. Banks are larger than ever (bad - more potential systemic risk), but they're being more strictly regulated (probably better). Mortgage rules now exist that didn't exist in the housing bubble (generally good) - but Fannie and Freddie are the only game in town. Our bailout of Fannie/Freddie has now paid back the invested capital. And we haven't hit the hyperinflation that Peter Schiff and other similarly ill-informed pundits said would happen. The notional value of the derivatives contracts says nothing about the risk - just total exposure.
Average Is Over: Why The Skills Required For Great Jobs Are Changing
good numbers, but the post felt lacking...there's just enough to start to really compare the two, and not enough to get a strong feeling one way or the other
> That does not mean you need to do anything like that to get good performance.

Please contribute your Haskell regex-dna program that does not do anything like that and get's "good" performance.

Here's the task description: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/performance.php?...

Here's "How to contribute programs": http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.php#contribute

GHC 7.8.2 installed, cabal 1.2 stuff available as-needed.
An Almost Foolproof Way to Achieve Every Goal You Set
"joins" is quite an interesting word to use for being acquired and answering to new bosses.
Yeah I agree with you. iOS is pretty locked down compared to Android and I'm not sure if even a partnership would help. Unless your a company the size of Google, Apple will probably just swallow you whole.
This is a bit of a tangent, but does anyone know a reliable way to download and install Android APKs from the Play store for a device that does not have Google Play itself installed (and intentionally does not have a Google account associated with it)?
Moves.app was free up until November of last year when they released version 2.0. Here are the release notes http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/moves/
It is awesome and with great performance.

Do you have some examples of this performance claim? Particularly games of the sort built with Unity? I've searched around and found no examples, though maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.

The other "walled garden" comments are curious, especially given that we're talking about Unity which can target just about anything with equal ease. Even going to raw metal, a significant portion of a game written for iOS can be easily ported to Android and the NDK, or Blackberry OS, or various other systems. The basic standards of C/C++, standard libraries, and OpenGL, mean that there is very broad "standardization".

For those who want cross-platform targeting, a cross-platform tool is critical - build an HTML5 app for Windows Phone and you have built an app that is just for Windows Phone. That it is built on web technologies is no more magical than being built on C++/OpenGL. There are tools like Intel's XDK if you want actual cross platform HTML5 support.
I have had problems using rewrite in this way. The URL that rewrite analyses may have already been changed by `index` or some other command, and this will lead to redirect loops. To avoid that problem, I have used:

if ($request_uri ~* "^(.*)\.html?$") {
return 301 $1;
}

The above is a safe use of "if", and can be helpful since it operates on the actual uri, not the internal uri.
Bad chemistry: How fake research journals are scamming the science community
nothing that you said is actually true. There are probably 10,000 Unix systems for every windows system now, and all of them support far greater granularity and flexibility than any windows device has ever offered.
> Is it possible to go to Everest and climb the mountain without the use of Sherpas?

Perhaps, but in modern times it's more complicated than that. People who arrange their own expeditions often come into conflict with established tours and organizations. You often hear stories of someone who doesn't belong on the mountain for one reason or another, who can't keep up with the traffic flow -- in certain places on the route a weak or unprepared climber can produce a bottleneck that prevents people from completing their summit, on one of the few days of the year when that's even possible.

It's not as though Everest is a big cone with dozens of available routes where people can choose to walk up to the summit any way they want. There are serious traffic and coordination problems, and the more independent agents, the more ways things can go wrong.
> My suggestion for learning software architecture is to practice. Obviously you can't practice it by doing hundreds of projects, because each one of them takes too long, but you can easily design a hundred architectures for problems which only exist on paper, and where you strive to just get the solution to work on paper.

But, how do you get feedback to tell you if you're making the right or wrong decisions?
Actually, there isn’t anything in that (kind of) contract other than the fact that the contract is with the company (Moves Oy, WhatApp Ltd.) If Facebook buys out that company, then the contract is the same, but with a subsidiary.

Even promisses to destroy in the contract wouldn’t be enough — because the entity that would promise to delete your data wouldn’t exist as soon as there is a legally binding event.

At the moment, the only thing protecting you from that are competition authorities. If you can file a request for consideration saying that this would harm their users overall (not just isolate case: Competition authorities deal with economic policy, not individual cases), then you might block the overall sale.

As someone who’s digged for years into current principles, I can say taht we are not even remotely close to having proper understanding by the lawyers of what kind of harm is at stake, let alone measuring it; from there, wait ten years and a couple of controversial cases to make it into effective policy.
Your comment's fine, but I should probably respond to:

> it seems as if dang would like us to share more about our thoughts on comments

I wouldn't say that, no. We should share our thoughts about the topic at hand. Commenting about comments is mostly off-topic.

(I've been doing it a lot, of course, as a way of providing transparency and feedback to the community. I fear this has the side effect of stimulating off-topic meta-comments in general. Hopefully this will straighten out over time.)
Vic Leaves Google
I had heard rumours that they were bad to work for (yet they still get lots of smart nerdy kids applying). You heard the same, or actually worked for them?
There are several larger; the US Chamber of Commerce is #1 -- AMA is big, but not even the biggest healthcare lobbying entity (BC/BS and the American Hospital Association are bigger than AMA) [1].

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=s&showYe...
I certainly support healthcare on-demand for anybody in this country.
Vic Gundotra leaving Google after 8 years