skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do the terms have to be ridiculous? What's wrong with offering 10Mbps service for one price and 1000Mbps service for a higher price that reasonably takes into account the capital investment that went into being able to deliver it?

Politics forces the terms to be ridiculous. Most U.S. cities are political battlegrounds for socioeconomic and racial conflict. Say you were trying to build fiber in Chicago. What would a private company do? They'd start in the Loop, and build along north Lake Michigan going through the dense upper middle class neighborhoods. In a city bitterly divided by racial and economic conflict, such a project would never fly. So you'd end up building infrastructure through the whole city. These "build out" requirements are a basic part of nearly all the terms municipalities impose on companies. Okay, once you do that, what do you charge? It doesn't cost much less to build slow service than fast service, if you're starting fresh with a fiber network. How much do you charge in all those poor neighborhoods the city forced you to build out to? Can you charge enough to the richer folks to recoup your capital investment in the unprofitable parts of the network, bearing in mind that the more expensive you make it, the more people will just stay with the basic tier? Especially if the basic tier is as fast as 10 Mbps, high enough for 95% of users.

> OK sure, all we have to do is make the incumbent ISPs stop damaging any attempt to do such a thing through lobbying and litigation. Easier said than done.

People lean on this trope too much. It wasn't Comcast that tanked FIOS in Wilmington, it was the city. LA can't get any takers for its municipal fiber project. The ISP's weren't able to stall Google fiber in the cities that were willing to make the requisite regulatory concessions to Google. People have this idea that companies are chomping at the bit to build fiber, and would but for ISP and cable lobbying. This is a fantasy. Companies aren't building fiber because there isn't enough money in it under existing regulatory regimes.

> If Comcast can turn a large profit then there is no reason a municipal ISP couldn't break even without consuming any tax dollars. Pay for the initial roll out with a bond issue and then repay the bond over time from subscription fees.

The states and cities are totally bankrupt. Their credit ratings are in the shitter, and almost all are facing unclosable budget gaps due to pension and healthcare obligations. Limited funds are available just to keel core infrastructure, like bridges, from crumbling. Issuing hundreds of millions in bonds for fiber is utterly untenable.

Not to mention, as shitty as Comcast's service is, do you want your municipality as your ISP? Most can't even get busses to run on time, and only manage to supply power and water because that infrastructure was built before their governments became broken.
Yep, I'd love to try it but no way I'm authorizing access to every repo :(
I would argue that they aren't so much "separate communities" as two sides of the same coin. And to the extent that that isn't entirely true, I'd argue that it's becoming more true over time.

Of course, I'm biased, as I went to school and did a degree specifically in "HPC" back when the NSF was pouring money into the field in the mid 2000's and pushing colleges to implement degree programs on the topic. But my background prior to that, and what I mostly did career wise even after getting that degree, is largely focused around the Java / Open Source / Hadoop / etc. world.

So now I build data warehouses using Hadoop and friends, while being informed by the things I learned writing tons of MPI and OpenMP code back in the day. And now that YARN has positioned Hadoop and a general purpose cluster framework, not tied specifically to Map/Reduce (you can implement MPI on top of YARN now), it starts to look more and more like these world really are just different aspects of the same thing.

Where there is a noticeable schism, to me, is the point made in TFA about how some jobs are more about IO and some are more about CPU cycles. IOW, sometimes a job is "big data" because the actual amount of data is literally very large, but other times it's "big data" (or "HPC") because of the nature of the calculation being performed, even though the actual data might not be that big.

I think there will always be a place for the Beowulf type clusters and MPI-CH and OpenMP and their ilk, but I am really excited about the things that you can do in Hadoop and Friends world these days. With the new found flexibility in Hadoop with YARN, and things like Hama (for BSP) and Storm / S4 (for streaming data), SAMOA & Mahout (machine learning / analytics), it's a fun place to play.
Actually, it's a Backbone.js application. It uses the browserify library to load other modules, which is what the "require('blah')" bits are. this confused me too when I first read it. so essentially you can run this on a static file server like GH pages.

As far as I remember in order to get the GitHub authentication piece working you need to use an external app simply for the authentication with GitHub. DevelopmentSeed also wrote an app for this called gatekeeper (I think) which I believe is a node.js application.

impressive stuff.
I agree that breakdown should be more anonymized. Readme permission/gitignore/license/code should have different end permissions
I think maybe we might have been mis-reading Moore's Law for years, or rather, Moore himself might have mis-stated it.

The radical changing reality that it describes is the number of transistors a person could economically employ at any one time to perform work on their behalf.

So yes, physics and economics might provide us with a limit (or increasing slope of difficulty) for the construction of single chips, the practical effects of the Law continue unabated, at least as far as I can see. The average person continues to be able to employ more and more electronics to perform work for them. This is increasing geometrically.

I'm not trying to dismiss either this DARPA guy or Moore, just point out that the specific details of Moore's Law may not be as important as we make them out to be.

In my mind, the big obstacle we have now to continued growth is small-system, imperative thinking. Systems of the future will be massively parallel. I have no idea how long it will take the IT industry to truly transition, but that's the next big hurdle, not counting atoms inside a switch.
The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease
>space exploration applications

Doubful, since they are not radiation hardened.

I could rather see a market for smaller size SSDs which contain lots and lots of chips and thereby have their own RAID subsystems.
Working on The Witness: The Nebraska Problem
The Role of an Advertising Agency
correct, gitcafe is the real clone writtin in ruby
Also, Chipcon, sold to TI [1].

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipcon
Bitbucket also has awkward URLs, where my fork of someone else repo appears as a subdirectory of their project. I still can't get over the fact that the Bitbucket website won't let (easily) visitors search without creating an account. That's a terrible user experience and I'm sure many potential users or customers just choose the tab and go to GitHub.
Who would be the counter-party in that bet? If someone said, "I'll bet you a hundred thousand dollars that I won't blow up that lighthouse", I'd say, "No thanks.", since the outcome of the bet is entirely in the hands of the person making it.

Well of course. Why do you care if the lighthouse is destroyed? The counter-party to the bet is anyone who actually wants the lighthouse destroyed and are willing to pay to see it through.
This is untrue. AWS is used for some things, but not all.

I've heard certain details I'm unwilling to share, but some of what they do is public (https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware).

Also, they pay developers to work on optimizing network performance of FreeBSD for this custom hardware.
Which is better, leaving your front door open or leaving your back door open?

It is better to spend your time finding and fixing problems than to fool yourself into thinking that trying to hide them will make some kind of difference.
Solid throughput or random IOPS?

Latter looks pretty good to me, particularly if you're used to spinning rust.
The worst train accident ever
Very cool game, indeed. Currently on third level. And I don't even know JavaScript!
And an even slower page fault mechanism. PPC generally ends up relying on hugepages to try to match pagefault speeds on x86
I wrote about something similar in in 2010 because these sites are walled gardens: http://kev009.com/wp/2010/10/stop-distributed-version-contro...

I was hoping for something like Diaspora (https://joindiaspora.com/) so we could use our choice of repo or self-hosting but still interact with a global community.
> Since "$" is used by CSS preprocessors for variables that work in a different way

A complete perversion of priorities. CSS generator languages change and go in and out of fashion all the time but CSS itself will be around for a very long time. They should make the best decision for the future of CSS. Generator languages are inevitably going to need to change to take advantage of any new feature anyway.
>>page views and ad sales should not be the metric by which we measure journalistic success.

That idea may have some merit, but journalistic success requires investment, which generally requires return, and page views and ad sales (ad sales aren't some new internet thing, either) are generally the fastest ways to generate that.

>>there's still enormous merit in having news sources which attempt to present news objectively.

He never claims otherwise. He explicitly qualifies his excitement over increased subjectivity in journalism with a claim that objectivity isn't the only worthwhile pursuit. He is simply excited that objectivity isn't the only form of journalism being pursued, not advocating its demise.
I am blessed with a dead end job where I can love what I do almost everyday, see progress everyday, and work with smart people.

I have flirted with 10 of millions of dollars in wealth, but I don't seem to have the timing to make it stick.

But at the end of my life, if my kids can say he loved what he did, he loved us, and he loved life. I will be a lucky man indeed.
Honestly, it is expensive, but not enough to offset the insane salaries, at least for devs. If you're going to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for everyone else who lives here.

Programmer salaries are not "insane". A half-decent programmer is worth $500,000 to the business and costs about $100,000. A good one is worth over $3 million, and only costs about $150,000.

Programmers are actually incredibly fucking cheap right now, if you know what to do with the talent.
"The cashier made a big deal about it when I went through the checkout line, laughing loudly at my stupidity for purchasing such an expensive model and actually exhorting the cashier in the next lane to do the same.[..]I was really embarrassed;"
I'm sorry you experienced something like that. That is a positively horrible thing to do to a customer. I would have gone straight through to the manager to complain. And then I would have told him I'm not buying it, and he can thank the two cashiers for that. That would have probably been quite a chunk of their salary that they wasted for the store. They would have probably gotten fired for it. It's one thing to give advice, and a nudge if a customer is misinformed by the sale staff. It's something completely different to mock/embarrass him for whatever smart/stupid buying decision he makes.

On the plus side, at least you're glad about your purchase now and have gotten a good deal for your money 12 years later.
the only web site that has open hours. I find that amazing that half the time I look for something there the web store is closed for some Jewish holiday - of which there are many.
I'm pretty much just addressing career progression after you enter the profession, not barriers to entry (since the author seems to be addressing those who have cleared whatever entry barrier there is).
I remember learning in my machine learning class that translation is a solved problem. However, the reason it appears to be bad is because it is computationally expensive. There are different levels of translation, each of which are increasingly more difficult to compute. There is word for word translation. As you can imagine, this is the lowest level, easy to compute, but overall has poor quality. First, word for word translation, then syntax translation, semantic translation, and finally interligual semantic translation. I took that class a while ago, so forgive me if I'm not 100% accurate, but that is generally the issue: the higher level translation you want, the more expensive the computation.
It is a valid point of view and the same argument can be used to many other websites and services across the web.
Professional snuggling company sends workers to "platonically snuggle" with you
Who said it was? And what's wrong with having a standalone CC terminal? That's how most very small businesses (food delivery, auto service, tables at shows/markets) still take credit cards. Their wireless terminals aren't "integrated" into anything else, it's just a swiper/PIN pad with a 3G modem, and Square is the modern version of that.
> And I'm not sure who's offering interchange rates without any markup

I'm not a payment industry insider, but I made my best effort to be accurate based on my own experience with several merchant account providers and with Square.

Those were per-transaction cost comparisons using the actual rate my CC processor charges (as I said). That's interchange plus 0.04% plus $0.10, not interchange rates without markup. "Interchange plus" pricing has seemingly become pretty common the past few years, at least in what's advertised to new businesses, and now there's a couple of ISO/MSPs offering interchange plus $0.10 flat to small businesses out there, which would be even less than those costs I quoted.

That "boutique retail" store a relative of mine opened that I mentioned in another comment -- the first MSP to walk through the door to try to sell him credit card processing offered interchange-plus pricing. None of the constantly-shifting "downgrade tiers" stuff anymore. It makes cost comparisons like this possible for once.

There's still some BS costs like "statement fees" and "daily batch fees" with some companies, but that kind of thing gets overshadowed by the per-transaction savings pretty fast. If I'm overlooking something else, I'd love to know, I don't want to be giving bad advice.

> And I suspect the debit card stats are skewed by things like groceries and gas which aren't good proxies for independent retail

The study those stats came from breaks it out by merchant category. Cards were the preferred payment method at all types of retail stores they listed (grocery, department store, drug store, discount/warehouse, etc). Cash was preferred only at fast food restaurants, coffee shops and theaters. Debit was the preference over credit at all but department stores.
You're right. I just completely abused math and did previous^x rather than x^previous. Fixed the code and it does become 2. Thanks.
"I use it all the time" - you might find it more economical to buy a car. I fail to see how anyone could be addicted to something as basic as transport. It's like saying you're addicted to using BART or MUNI.
Best Practices of Combining Typefaces (2010)
Imagine all the time wasted here that could be spent on research, charity, and product development.
The Censorship Effect
while you might be willing to pay for Twitter, if that happened, you'd quickly not want to since it would become a ghost town and any value you get from the service would be wiped out.
For the talk by the DARPA guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15
More than 15 years in the job I've also experienced a lot of situations that were similar. Probably mostly because in the early years I was doing quite a lot of web development for small companies and always had direct contact with the clients. One of many, many funny situations was the media agency that needed to send me digital pictures of their team, and they didn't send me the jpeg files, no, they send me a Word .doc files with the pictures placed into the doc. They didn't know that you could also just send the images. They only knew how to send docs.
It is not a security measure, per se. Security by obscurity is where you rely upon some fact which you think is not known to an attacker. The problem with this type of "security" is that, once the fact is disclosed, the security scheme is rendered entirely useless.
Ask HN: a WinSCP alternative for OS X
Anyone know of a good app for working locally and having a remote directory automatically updated upon file saves? WinSCP does this very well, but I am looking for an OSX version as I just bought a MBP.
It was a lot of fun to run the clock back to the point where neolithic cultures predominated and see how much the colored areas shrinked. A long period of time in human history. A blink of an eye in geological time.
The link/story about the winning horse's owner is not bad either, if not nearly as gonzo ...

"I went out there and sat for 21 days, 14 hours a day, waiting to shoot a tiger that had killed 117 villagers in the surrounding countryside."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1...
This is plain wrong.
Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have parallel tracks for programmers and managers. You can progress all the way up to Senior VP equivalent as an engineer with no management duties. These roles include compensation equivalent to traditional CEO level roles.

It is a lot harder to make "Director-equivalent programmer" in those companies than to make Director. In terms of skill, hard work, and intelligence, the competition is a thousand times tougher.
Zidisha (YC W14 Nonprofit) P2P microlending virtual volunteering, internships
You bring up a really good point. Being a bit younger, I hadn't seen much of HPC. I recently attended Big Data Innovation Summit and saw a joint talk between Intel and Dell.

It didn't surprise me that a lot of the stuff hadoop did wasn't really newer per se, but it was great seeing the 2 converge and understanding the differences in the philosophies.

YARN as a whole is going to be a great enabler for many kinds of platforms.

It's a great time to be doing distributed systems. I might be biased in that I have a few cards on the table as well in that space, but I like getting up every morning so..meh.
I've never found a remotely balanced article about the history of smartphones. The best reading is Wikipedia.
I think that the popularity of portal sites in East Asian countries is tied to their high-context cultures, so I doubt they would be very popular in the low-context West.

The use of highly cluttered web designs is also a distinctly East Asian phenomenon, but I'm not sure what the cultural explanation for that would be. It's especially odd to see it in Japan, where a more sparse aesthetic dominated the traditional culture.
why did you write this?
http://cyberduck.io/
Since this is HN, I would guess most people will respond similarly to me: A LOT. If you are looking for a number, I would say about 12 hours a day.
Transmit

https://panic.com/transmit/

It's incredible. Most of what that company makes is very high quality actually.
This is a terrible article that glosses over Apple's history of exactly the same sorts of actions including even taking the name of their product without proper authority.

The Reality Distortion Field of 'ooh shiny' strikes again.
This seems like a great product, but the fact that they include no product details or information doesn't meet the high bar that should be met for someone to provide OAuth access to GitHub.
Yep! The Kentucky Derby piece as well as the Strange Rumblings essay are both in The Great Shark Hunt as well as some really interesting political commentary and hilarious stories about the NFL.
This would only make sense. They bought the "app store" to OSX and then brought "apps" as well (for some odd reason, people thing apps are different than applications)......

Bringing the two OSes closer together would mirror moves by MSFT where W8 and Windows Phone 8 have similar looks.
I'd use RF from the controller to the different layers then you would only have to run power. Could even have 2 or 3 transmitters in phased array with little islands of storage on layers of silicon. This would also enable redundant storage (multiple recv) and simultaneous read and write (mimo). The distances in are cm and the signals wouldn't leave the drive package. With each layer exposing power and ground to the layer above the architecture would be scalable in Z just by adding more independent wafers.

https://eeweb.ee.ucla.edu/publications/journalVwaniRoychowdh...

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.159...
FilePreviews.io: Generate image previews and metadata from almost any file
There ought to be more awareness and communication on both sides [business and journalism], so that decisions can be made with full knowledge of the financial and journalistic impacts.

Statements like this suggest to my mind that we're in a new gilded age, where journalism becomes a marketing channel.
I follow Twitter and Facebook accounts that usually link to a story posted on HN as well as the link to the discussion page on news.ycombinator.com. Ideally I want to be able to open that directly in the app.

The HN site is unfortunately not readable on mobile devices.
You can't discuss the quotes though. What if you want to find out what it means, or the context it was said?
What do you consider Watergate? Isn't that usually held up as an example of a check on government?
They've even got their own StackOverflow clone, SegmentFault: http://segmentfault.com/
yeah, it's more of a starting point. it can go really quickly in either direction.
And they already have a money bleeding segment : smartphone class SoC.
Bandwidth can be stored in this manner only for as long as qubits can be stored. At present, most quantum memories realized in experiments have a storage time of well under a second. Some last slightly longer, but with big tradeoffs. Stopping decoherence in quantum memories is hard enough that it will likely be a very long time before classical bandwidth becomes the bottleneck!
Yes, McChesney looks behind the biases that "objective journalism" hides, with the history which puts Andreesen's article in context. (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McChesney/Problem_Media_in...) and (http://monthlyreview.org/2000/11/01/journalism-democracy-and...)
You reminded me of the sheer abominable genius of the website for Ling's Cars http://www.lingscars.com/ which is one of the finest examples of this in the UK.
Too bad the site doesn't work on my phone at all. Xperia T using Dolphin Browser. Gives me all kinds of floating boxes and a useless progress spinner.
Yeah its a bullshit line. There are certain class of functions in Haskell that can be completely derived from their signature (see djinn) but Haskell's type is not strong enough for automatic formal verification.

I would prefer is people just said "I program faster in Haskell"
Especially the... DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
great post. i'll add that it's not just term debt or capital leases, but other contracts too - even your first commercial real estate lease can require a large security deposit and personal guarantee. and if you're not careful, this personal guarantee will continue carrying over even as you expand into larger and larger offices...

and of course let's not forget operational credit cards (you are exposing yourself if you don't use an amex to pay for certain things) - that's the owners'/founders' credit on the line (at least at first).