skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's also a bad comparison for another reason. Bank holds limited goods. I.e. even if robbers break the security, they'll just get those goods, and all other robbers will have to go through breaking in again when they decide to rob it. That actually deters most of them.

Digital content is easily duplicatable. When DRM is broken, pirates redistribute it to all others without limit. In the bank analogy (to make it comparable), it's like becoming an infinite fake bank, so all subsequent criminals don't need to rob the original bank anymore, but can take from that secondary source as much as they want to. That's exactly what makes DRM completely irrelevant in reducing piracy.
It's a very fine line that is impossible to define for anything other than a machine.

Help from anonymous strangers can save lives. The flip side is that the potential for harm is greater than the aid of a professional or friend.

It's so tightly coupled to the scenario (nature vs nurture) that efforts to argue are probably futile.
Yes, they are.

The near-religious association devs have with frameworks seems to have almost displaced the association they had with languages. I'm not sure what prompts it, but frameworks die out even faster than languages. You don't have to work very long in the industry to see this happening.

Don't sweat that opinion, BTW. HN is not very kind to any sort of software engineering discussion. I presume this is a direct fallout of the Lean/"move fast and break things" ideology.
>ok living on a dime

Isn't that the perfect employee?
Every person's story is unique. Xah's is here:

http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

There doesn't seem to have been a deep bench for his support team for a very long time, if ever.

When I went to school in Gainesville, there was a saying: No matter how weird you are, there are a bunch of people who are weirder. The internet is that at scale. Thirty years ago, Xah would probably not have known people who he could identify with or that anyone identifies with him. The internet gets some people out of their isolation. It lets them talk about things that they find interesting or that matter.

I don't talk programming languages with the locals. The appropriate topics are children, church, and Auburn football - which runs from National Signing Day in February to the BCS in January.
I would say that it changed my life. However, I read it when I was 18, at that point where any number of books have the ability to change your life.
A note on nomenclature in the US: A $2,000 [or $5K] couch is "woodworking" or [furniture making] not "carpentry." The perceived value is based on a hugely different frame of reference. A carpenter can come to your house with a helper and a pickup truck full of tools and charge you $15,000 to remodel your bathroom with materials bought exclusively from home depot. sad.
Node.js performance tip of the week: scaling apps with proxies and clustering
And some kind of help is the kind of help that helping's all about

And some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without

- Shel Silverstein

Just, please, be careful in categorically deciding which is which.
> I can't help to think that no software project is ever going to so neatly conform to having a structure imposed upon it

That's the problem with prescribing an architecture ahead of time. That's why you learn the basics and improvise/draw on established architectures as the project evolves.
If content providers only tailor their views toward reader sentiment, what you will end up with is a self-pleasing knowledge bubble in which you rule out anything that doesn't please you as non-existence. That's more of a social disease than the path to a better future.

Think there will be and need to be a place for traditional type of journalism with more materials based on critical thinking. It just may not need to be on print media anymore.

The aggregation of other people's content and shameless attention grab can only last so long and it doesn't build toward any credible production of original content. Its primary purpose is to kill boredom and create marketing buzz. Shitty content may appeal to more people these days, just like Bieber might sell more records but there will always be room for quality content and engaging dialogues in this world. The challenge is all about finding a new medium and tending the old flames in a new form.
Patent application – Head mounted display
Okay:

Two small units

For the sake of argument, let's make everything otherwise equivalent.
We'll say the small units are 1.5kw each

When upstairs and downstairs call for heat, you use ... 3kw
When upstairs calls for heat alone, you use 1.5kw
When downstairs calls for heat alone, you use 1.5kw

Ducting/blower loss from this setup (assumes two completely separate duct runs): 0%

One large unit:

3.0kw to make life easy (in reality, if you use small units, you often need less)

When upstairs and downstairs call for heat, you use ... 3kw
When upstairs calls for heat alone, you use 3kw
When downstairs calls for heat alone, you use 3kw

Ducting loss from this setup: 25-30% (at least, it's just the way it goes due to longer duct runs, more tees, etc. If you have, say, flex runs, it'd be even more)

It is essentially guaranteed to run for more than half the time of the smaller units (due to ducting loss, etc), making overall cost more.

Note that if you had mini-splits as the small units, the comparison would be crazily in favor of that. you'd have no loss due to ducting, they would almost certainly be DC based, and would be completely variable to actual load (even a "variable speed blower" on a large unit isn't), not 1.5kw on/off. Smaller unit efficiency is also almost always greater than larger unit efficiency.

Also note this is all a comparison of efficiency. It may be more cost effective to do one or the other (though it depends how long you own the house, insulation, blah blah blah)
Visualization is language, but of a different kind. Take those who are born deaf and think in signs.
That's fine, but people need to eat. Plus, a lot of people simply don't have that support network. Gifts from strangers save lives every day.
That could increase throughput if you have a lot of crashing nodes but how does it improve safety or reliability?
Fast, isolated development environments using Docker.
Solving 'real problems' is hard. Some categories 'real problems' often fall in to:

1. Problems too trivial to expend energy and time solving once and for all. (It's easier to pay the small cost each time you encounter the problem). Not marketable.

2. Problems you can solve, but everyone else already have partial or 'good enough' solutions for. Competitive, no innovation.

3. Problems you think you can solve, but you really can't. Doomed.

4. Problems you know you can't solve on your own, or with the resources available to you. Expensive.

5. Problems outside of your area of expertise.

6. Problems you have, but really aren't problems to anyone else.
Fun learning about this stuff from Pingdom (OP here.)

I'm working onsite with a client this week and just saw someone submitted this to HN. Working on getting the site back up now.
TinyMon – Website Acceptance Monitoring
Source Serif Pro
It could perhaps be the effects of isolation (which, as recent submissions and discussions here make evident, can have a huge effect on a person).

I've had periods in my life where I withdrew from others, and every time I recovered, I was amazed by how much this withdrawal warped everything about me, and by how easy it was for me to forget simple social behavior. It was almost like I was a completely different person.
Baidu Hires Andrew Ng
Simplest API clients for distributed computing ever
If a behavior runs deep enough it can be really hard to admit that it's even there. After admitting it's there, it can be really hard to come to grips with how much an effect it has on your life. After understanding the impact it has on your life, past and present, it can be challenging to work towards changing the behavior.
>these young people are far better off than the generation before

Which generation are you thinking of? That doesn't ring true. Things started going sideways for my generation (generation X) and then globalization happened and now automation is happening. Tech has made things better for a small subset of workers, but not everyone is suited to tech work. Globalization and automation are significant changes.
Rust has 'Conditions', which basically allow the current function to run a closure when an error happens which tells it what to do on the error, and then continue the function call. I don't know much Rust or Common Lisp though, so I'm not sure if they're the same thing. Rust's condition functionality definitely doesn't unwind the stack when calling back though, because in Rust unwinding the stack isn't ever allowed because of memory safety issues.
When "Jennifer Lawrence Sports A Goatee On Jimmy Fallon" is top news on Buzzfeed, you know it'll def be very interesting for a long day.
Welcome to the Seven-Year Technology Pause
http://xahlee.info/perl-python/xlali_skami_cukta.html

Well, I think his criticisms are pretty well-founded. He just doesn't say it in a way you would enjoy.
Hey Zavulon, Chris from the blog here. Glad you found the link. I found their technology interesting as well, and so close to creating real human value, its inspiring.
Just because the concept was invented 40 years ago and applied in a totally different context, before the people who invented it abandoned it and moved on the other much better ideas long ago, doesn't mean that the concept is a silver bullet that should be accepted without question.
I disagree in some specific cases. For software that is focused around accessing shared data. Say, ERP, document collaboration, etc. for small businesses that can't afford or don't want dedicated IT staff cloud based software makes a lot of sense.
at cstross.

I have been part of RSS for many years. Calling it a violent anti-muslim paramilitary group is not even an approximation its outright false.

Also the whole Visa fuss is less reflection on Mr. Modi and more on US's visa policies. US will have not now eat the proverbial humble pie.
If your leg has a medical problem, get well soon, do everything medically needed. If your brain has a medical problem, people will treat you very differently. Voices like yours will hopefully change that over time.

I don't see any evidence of him having a medical problem, but he surely deserves our compassion.
Why I became a Philadelphian
Thanks spike, hopefully research comes a long way in the near future to understand the root cause and address it in some way.
I think it is just US "puritan" culture. In general it is not a good idea to let a potential employer know that you are actively watching porn ...

What you do in private is nobody's business, but if you do it publicly ... this could rise a red flag for an US employer.
> But first of all I'd argue that 'giving a shit' in itself is a skill.

Yes. No doubt. I think for intellectual people, the tendency is always to move to a higher level of abstraction and generalize. Works well for ideas, but not for people. A lot of times, the interesting thing about people or situations is in exploring the details.

(That's probably not going to make it on a motivational poster any time soon.)
"Working insane hours is a sign of commitment, of willingness to sacrifice for the job; the personal destructiveness of the practice isn’t a bug, it’s a feature."

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/three-piece-suit...
I have never heard of this guy, I popped open the JS tutorial, and I am very thoroughly impressed. This is actually one of the best introductions to JS I have ever read. I bought his emacs book because I didn't know how to donate otherwise.
> At some point, enough people within Rakudo decided that they didn't want to be tied to Parrot forever that they wanted an alternate backend.

Aiui Patrick read Larry Wall's 2001 Apocalypse #1 (http://www.perl6.org/archive/doc/design/apo/A01.html) and took it into account before he started Rakudo. It includes the following statement:

> "Multiple backends are a necessity of the world we live in today. Perl 6 must not be limited to running only on platforms that can be programmed in C. It must be able to run in other kinds of virtual machines, such as those supported by Java and C#."

That statement didn't require that any given P6 compiler be multi backend, but I would guess Patrick was thinking something like the following about P6 and Rakudo (first, my guess about his thoughts when he started it; then, about his thoughts a year or so later):

* Parrot would hopefully be a good host for a P6 compiler at the start and remain that way; OR, if not, it would evolve to become a good host (ie the convergence which you mention).

* After Rakudo on Parrot was "done", some P6 compiler, possibly Rakudo, would eventually be ported to JVM, CLR, and other existing VMs, as tuits and priorities allowed.

Later (2005?), as it became clear that Parrot was not a good fit architecturally for P6's / Rakudo's needs, he presumably responded. I'm guessing his thinking was something like this:

* Parrot and P6/Rakudo might sufficiently converge. This would avoid Rakudo having to focus, before an initial implementation was sufficiently "done", on porting. So Patrick should encourage convergence as best he could.

* Parrot and P6/Rakudo might not sufficiently converge. This would be an existential threat to Rakudo. So he should have developed a plan B. It should have been obvious to him that this would take several years and would best be avoided if at all possible, but he should have had a plan B.

Fast forward to 2009:

> "Putting Perl on JVM was always a kind of thought ... but was never really serious until summer of 2009 ..."

This is from the first minute of the video of Patrick's YAPC::NA 2013 talk "Perl on JVM". I found the whole talk interesting but the first 10 minutes are particularly instructive in relation to the things we're discussing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g&list=PLRuESFRW2F...
I'm talking about the requests people are concerned about, not nearly all the data requests that are made. I may be way off-base here, but I think that most people are not particularly uncomfortable with the idea that law enforcement could get a warrant to seize their data from a judge based on probable cause and would do so without putting the company under a gag order - that's what we expect from the constitution. I think people are much less comfortable with being caught in a suspicionless surveillance net based on a warrant issued by a FISA "court" with no transparency and no adversarial hearing process, and those are generally issued with national security gag letters.
facepalm because of him watching porn or because he uses same browser to log into his bank account (which is not a good idea) ?
The core problem is that it appears player-friendly, but in practice it is not, because it wounds developers. If you're an indie with limited resources, being forced to build a demo means you end up having to ship a bad demo (actually reducing your sales in many cases) or not ship on the platform at all.

In an ideal world, 'all games have free trials' is good. The realities of game development mean that even for games where it's possible to build an excellent trial, it may not happen. Budget cuts happen, resources you thought you had go away, your schedule slips or deadlines draw closer - in those scenarios, it would be unreasonable to make the core game suffer in order to have a demo ready by the deadline. Most developers would instead focus on the most important part - the core game, the thing people are paying for.

There are also games for which it is near-impossible to build a free trial. A recent example is The Stanley Parable; the nature of the experience made it impossible to have a 'free trial' version of the game, so they had to instead build an entirely separate game that they then gave away for free, and tried to use to convince people to buy the actual game.

That solution worked great for them, but it took time and resources. I wouldn't be able to bring myself to tell every developer they had to do that just to be on my store.

Note that demos and trials are great when they work: They help convert slight interest into sales. However, many successful games sell entirely on the strength of good reviews, word of mouth, and press coverage. This is part of why sometimes the wisest choice is not to have a demo.
OUYA engineer here (not PR).

Developers kept telling us that requiring a free component was discouraging them from publishing.

Since we changed our stance on that issue we've received a large influx of new and awesome games. So while it might not seem ideal from a gamer's perspective at first, the availability of a lot more games is pretty nice.
Spatial reasoning is absolutely a form of reasoning (it's right there in the name!). I don't have any references handy, but I've read a few accounts of musical and math prodigies who have a form of synesthesia that allows them to "see" notes and numbers, respectively, which allows one to reason about abstract concepts as easily as you or I could spot the difference between a circle and a square. Very interesting stuff.
I understand, thanks for the answer.
That's what our company does - we produce redirect loops for corporate sites.
Rust's conditions were actually removed. [1] They don't need language support, though, so you could re-add them as a library. When they existed, they were very close to Common Lisp conditions.

1: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/pull/12039
> (..) largescale backbone apps

Having built some what large backbone-apps, and then moving on to more mature frameworks, I personally think backbone apps just don't have the correct building blocks to scale.

For instance: data bound templates, computed properties, array/object proxies, controllers etc.
These things help tremendously with keeping the code maintanable.
> Xah,It really sounds like you need a bitcoin address.

Only on Hacker News.

This guy needs professional support for his mental health issues, food to eat and help in finding a steady job.
Or Bezos in retailing. First he beat Barnes & Noble etc, then he beat Walmart and Target (and everyone else). All from a guy that hadn't spent a minute in retail previously.

Both Bezos and Musk took advantage of an exception to what Thiel is talking about: inflection points in technology sometimes provide massive competitive openings that are better viewed as blue ocean because they're so different from the establishment.
In print, the production is handled by people considered to be proletarian subhumans who are paid almost nothing and disposed of at a whim. This was not always so: when printing was closer to high tech, it was also higher prestige. Manufacturing in general also used to be higher status than it has been since the 1970s.

There's been this change in US culture that provides a special aura to people who do nothing but write and speak. People who interact with physical things, and particularly machines, come to be seen as unclean.

With computers, you have to pay those people well and give them some authority so that they can do their jobs well. Socially, this does not play out well within traditional print organizations, in which the production side is invisible to the journalism side (the Times' manufacturing plant is not even close to its midtown office building), and the business side is ritualistically forbidden from contaminating the sacredness of the content side.

Stuff like labeling stories with appropriate metadata doesn't get done not because it's challenging (it's similar to slapping a Dewey Decimal code on a file folder and sticking it on there), but because writing an HTML element has the potential to make a religiously sacred 'writer' impure. A lot of print people see any sort of demand for learning technical skill as an insult, because technical knowledge is seen to be polluting.

Also you see a lot of knowledge silos in that report because it's clearly difficult for the organization to 'read' the skillsets of technical generalists.

We don't like to see it that way, but ordinary American business types see programmers as spiritually dirty people who do not deserve authority. At the Times in particular, business people are seen as particularly spiritually dirty, so much so that they must be literally segregated from the population of sacred scribes.

The change that the Times would need to make is less technological and more social: they would have to make coding not Haram anymore. That might be one reformation too many to ask for. This report is really good, but they would probably have to fire everyone over 40 to achieve its goals. Authority is zero sum, and asking the entire leadership to devolve authority is not likely to have a positive outcome.
So, in other words, you're creating another group with you at the top, pushing your PR agenda for the movement.

I fail to see the difference, other than the fact that you're doing it instead of those people.
Maybe ask on Twitter, or perhaps get your philosophy through a reaction Gif.

tl;dr you should read the book.
Well, what I'm saying is stuff that you would apply to yourself. So I don't know how you'd tell, but presumably, if a person had one of those disorders they'd already know.
Is this new? I feel like using Redis for locks is something that's been going around for a while. I've used Redis to make locks, and also used it to make counting semaphores. It's a fairly interesting use because it's frequently the the simplest, least overhead means to solve a problem that's reliable enough without actually being reliable.

The most obvious issue is that if Redis goes down you could end up with problems if the processes using the locks continue, particularly depending on when and what state Redis restarts.

Another is that you have to take an approach of re-checking out your lock so as not to let it expire if you can't guarantee strict time constraints. Once you do this, you run a risk of something not finishing but extending its lock indefinitely.

A final issue is that you can end up with a situation where there's no guarantee that a waiting task (or whatever you call something that wants a lock or in on a semaphore) will ever run.

I don't really buy those who talk about this being an insane violation 0 state/share nothing. When I've needed these kinds of primitives it rarely has to do with the application state itself - for example I've used the counting semaphores to control how many worker processes can be active. Likewise, I've used the plain locks (and lock-like structures) to do things like insure atomic/ordered writes for user sessions (I suppose session is stateful, but it's also not really shared application state).

In any case, there are some issues, but at the cost of a minimal amount of nursing the ease of implementation and integration often makes Redis a go-to choice for these kinds of things, particularly in resource (hardware) constrained environments. On the other hand if you're operating a scale where you've got multiple datacenters and such, it's a different ballgame.
Yup, in June.

In the meantime, I recommend Duck Game. A new 4-player 2D combat game that just launched exclusively on ouya: https://www.ouya.tv/game/DUCK-GAME/
NYC ROR AngularJS engineer? Code the future of commerce 
We are a team of three diligent, motivated and highly intelligible individuals currently building out an innovative new format for web commerce.

What started initially as a bookswap at our college two years ago has lead us here: the final stages of converting our codebase to a service oriented architecture utilizing; Breeze.js, AngularJS and Ruby on Rails.

You are a fullstack developer in NYC.
If your proficient in NG or ruby, breeze will be easy to pick up
If you'd like to learn more about the project don't hesitate to reach out!
-Please respond with any relevant sample work and include a description of your past experience.

Ely
Founder

Contact:
Ely@SwapDistrict.com