skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate big cable companies as much as the next person, but I really don't have a problem with this as long as a few things are in place:

1) Network isolation, according to the article there is some isolation. Not sure what this means exactly but if it's a private subnet routed to Comcast on a separate IP for security/privacy reasons. There is no technical reason this can't be accomplished. I do question how much Comcast (or their vendor) engineers care about security though.

2) Doesn't affect my speed, article states this. Assuming it's true, modern DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem can support an absurd amount of traffic, way more then most WiFi APs can handle at any reasonable range.

My biggest concern is that WiFi is already slow, if I'm streaming Netflix videos and it now starts to drop segments due to a person in a car on a tablet streaming the latest Gangnam style, I'll be upset.
MAYDAY.US – Kickstart corruption reform, save our democracy
Just tried to opt-out. Took about 20 minutes because "something is wrong, please try again later", rinse, repeat.

Finally I was able to do it, but now the page where you opt-in/out won't load so I can't confirm (and of course my neighbors all have it enabled so I can't tell if the network is mine or not).

Shameful but totally expected. ANY option for high speed internet would be better than this (except every other cable provider as they're all just as bad).
Diamond teleporters herald new era of quantum routing
I can’t think of another platform (in the sense of programming environment) which is being optimised to be read milliseconds before execution from a networking socket, with more code being loaded on-the-fly from remote servers. In C++, you have all your code at compile-time and even in Python/Ruby/Perl/Bash etc., it would be highly unusual for the shell to anticipate the equivalent of wget -O foo ${URL} && . foo.

Given the constraints, having to add some hints doesn’t seem all that bad to me.
Heavybit Launches Library for Developer-Facing Startups
nice catch.

so is this site just piggybacking and creating custom portfolio's through motif?
They've been doing this -- at least here in Philadelphia -- for quite some time now. The idea is nice, I suppose: it's nice to be able to walk around the city and have a wifi signal in most places. But the reality is, the connection is almost always so poor it almost never makes connecting worth my while, because it actually results in a POORER experience.
In the case of Java, I believe it's because the underlying JVM only supports bounds-checked array indexing. So even though the iterator APIs in Java could in theory eliminate the bounds checks, the high-level information is compiled away and the JVM has to prove on its own that the bounds check is not necessary.
> You can't answer the question "where do the performance benefits come from?" by saying "look, the performance benefits exist".

I think he is trying to say is that the parent poster's observations must be wrong. After all, we are talking about an unsubstantiated claim ("there's no benefit to fanning out files") that directly contradicts another claim which we have data for ("HN is 5x faster after fanning out files").
It is a car crash of a UX. The claim of 12,000 hours is highly suspicious.
Hi there, yeah that looks like a bug good catch. We'll take a look at this and see if it can be fixed.
It Cost to Get Your Mobile App to the Top 10
I just don't get one thing.. Don't you have dev and staging server, where you could develop, test, and pre-deploy everything without shutting down the website?
You can follow along here: http://seven.centos.org/
From your phrasing you work at Netflix right? Is it possible to get a full list of your Open Connect partners in a marketplace? In the competitive UK marketplace this could pretty easily be the difference in a purchasing decision for me.
Assuming you're talking about unchecked exceptions, correct.
There is a basic problem with socially conscious investing. Let us take the Kantian/golden rule perspective and imagine that every "good" person invested with a social conscious and avoided evil companies. The stock prices of "good" companies would go up, and the dividend yield/return on investment would go down. Then bad people could invest in the evil companies and earn a much higher rate of return, because they would be under-bought, under-valued assets. In other words, socially conscious investing is a way for good people to allow bad people to earn more money.

If you want to be socially aware with your money you can either a) own a normal stock index, but donate a share of the profits from bad companies to charity and/or b) boycott the evil companies as a consumer. Boycotting is the only way to actually hurt the evil company and prevent people from profiting from evil.
It's a single machine.
It's definitely snappier and now looks responsive too! Thanks for the hard work kogir et al!
What people fail to take into account is the self-driving car future where Uber takes 100% of the profits (since there is no driver). It will start taking a chunk of the people driving themselves market as well when Uber becomes more convenient and cheaper (removing the human allows them to be more competitive with every day driving).

To get to this point however does require it to start operating its own fleet (unless small regional companies form to manage the fleet and just loan out their self driving cars to uber). Either way Uber is in a good position. If it manages its own fleet, it can better negotiate the price of each car than any individual can. It will also have more data than anyone else on how those vehicles operate and can then buy it's own insurance for its entire fleet, cutting costs there. If the alternative occurs, then Uber will own the buy side of the market and have most of the leverage relative to local companies that manage their own fleet.

There are a lot of ways things can pan out, but being the most tech focused of these companies with the best engineers of any of these types of companies, puts it in the best position to own the self-driving car future. The only company better positioned is probably google.
This sounds shady to me i mean if you're a customer paying for a top tire internet connection that uses all the data capacity you line can give you how is it not affecting you when this starts serving other people?

The line must be able to handle more bandwidth but somehow i doubt ISP's had the foresight to leave some extra for just this occasion.

Is the router even capable of handling the extra load this would introduce? Most consumer routers are known for being under powered.
Show HN: inBoundio – Basecamp of Marketing (Single Founder and Bootstrapped)
Scribd is a Ycombinator company. All pdf links are converted to Scribd links.
Lang.NEXT 2014: Leverage by Andrei Alexandrescu
How is "winning at soccer" a better proxy for sentience than "able to hold up its end of a conversation"?

One of the ironies of AI is that trivial tasks for humans like recognizing a soccer ball, moving around without falling over, or, yes, holding a conversation are very, very difficult while difficult tasks, like playing chess or finding the best route on a map, are relatively trivial.
Why are countries still using fake bomb detectors?
Most of the data is collected from the MBTA's real time data feeds that list the current positions of all of the trains. The capacity data (who's entering and exiting the stations) is collected at the turnstiles and is not part of the MBTA's public API, we were able to get this from the MBTA through their developer relations program http://www.mbta.com/rider_tools/developers/.
You seem to assume that the companies are completely unaffected by their investors and share price. Companies issue securities for their own reasons, not as a way to distribute their earnings to a wide group of people.
Net Neutrality Podcast
That's a nice theory, but the impression I get from the (extra biased against last mile ISPs) DSLReports is that Comcast is continually spreading usage caps and plans to make them nationwide in 5 years, e.g. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/128987

Lots more with this search: http://www.dslreports.com/nsearch?cat=news&q=comcast%20caps
Got the same 404 and after refresh it works. Maybe its overloaded or buggy
> Zero-cost abstractions come at a pretty hefty price if you pick C++. The cost is in programmer productivity & quality of resulting software.

I agree with you. But as with most prices, sometimes they are worth it. There are a lot of practical cases where you really want the performance (even outside scientific computing, which in itself is a pretty widely applied field).

> I'm sure there are some fields of academia where this is a reasonable tradeoff

I'm not sure where you got "academia" from; scientific computing is in no way restricted to research. Weather predictions, genome processing, and oil reserves exploration are just three of many examples for the commercial application of scientific computing.

> (if you're programming DSP algorithms running on a embedded battery powered device strapped to a dolphin, say...)

DSP applications are ubiquitous today; you'll find them, e.g., in your phone, or in your car.

> but your generic number crunching job rarely calls for it.

You're very wrong. Number crunching is the example for which you want lots of performance.

> As an aside, zero-overhead abstractions being unique to C++ doesn't sound right to me.

I didn't say they are. I said that no other language offers them to the degree that C++ does.

> so maybe it's just a name for C++'s tradeoffs?

No. It means abstractions which do not cause runtime overheads because the compiler can optimize them away.
Last.fm is down
Status: http://status.last.fm/
Is this just a USA problem?

Why for example has SKY or TalkTalk in the UK not tried this? What is stopping them?
> tunneling is monstrously expensive

it is even more expensive in parts of Boston known for having the worst problems. The Green Line (which isn't even analyzed) runs through Back Bay, which is largely landfill[1] without very good engineering properties. Combine this with running under many buildings that are National Historic Landmarks[2][3][4] and have shown shifting with bits of construction such as adding an elevator[5], these tunnels are pretty much impossible to expand.

[1] http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/fnart/fa267/boston/bos1820....
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Public_Library,_McKim_Bu...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_South_Church_in_Boston
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church,_Boston
[5] http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008...
Some bridges, such as the Seattle Lake Washington bridge, require a toll to cross even though they're on a toll-free highway.
Live profiling wouldn't work for social reasons. When a frontend engineer demos to his executive, or a startup CEO displays a MVP to a prospective customer, they usually get a link on a cold browser, and if the transition is janky, they're like "Nope, don't want." So every frontend engineer worth his salt will continue to use the null transform hack to keep things smooth even on the initial transition.

I was one of the Blink team's initial "reference customers" within Google for this, and we were pretty adamant that if there's any jank at all between when the user taps on a link and when the transition starts firing, it was a no-go for us. We've had launches canceled because they added to user-perceived latency instead of subtracting from it.
You said POSIX, which makes no such guarantee.. soft updates are cool, though as far as I know they still don't provide durability. Still, that's far better than the default Linux behaviour
Salesforce.com Launches Software Program for Wearable Devices
We have habits, unconscious things we do, learned on our own or from others. We eat when we get stressed, but it's not deliberate. (Or whatever it is for you.) We have to change the way we've wired our minds to break these behaviors. So if you find yourself constantly knocking yourself down (in self-effacing jokes, internal monologue, whatever), you need to become aware of your action, and deliberately alter your behavior until it sticks. If you eat too much, you have to be aware of yourself at the dinner table, and learn to push things away or ask for a to-go box. Eventually these deliberate changes will (hopefully) stick and become the new, desired, habits and behaviors.

So it's not two yous. It's one you, but one part is conscious and one part is unconscious (or non-deliberate, habit-based, instinct-based, etc.). The objective is to bring yourself to awareness of your actions, recognize that you are doing something, perhaps actually understand why, and then change it.
http://status.last.fm/
I'm just concerned about the time-value of money thing and the utility of cheap labor when it's available. It really does get more expensive (relatively) to do this stuff decades later.
How Much **** it Cost to Get Your Mobile App to the Top 10
I like something more along the lines of "Trust the judgement and expertise of medical professionals, especially in emergency situations."
Works now, but you might want to block pointer events too, for example I can drag with the mouse from the captcha into the text area below to get a URL.
Asymetric for files? Wouldn't that be slow? Or does GPG automatically do a combo?

I had used OpenSSL's enc tool before and seems to work too. The sucky thing is that I liked having a tool where I at least had access on my iOS devices. With encrypted disk images (ironically) that wouldn't be the case whereas I at least had read access to TC volumes.
Come on guys, think about this critically for just a few minutes.

First of all, what kind of insane person pays $5k for parking and insurance? I have a new car with fairly high rates and pay about $1,100 in insurance. My parking expenditure (yes, I live in SF) is maybe $10 a week -- we'd need to imagine a parking expenditure of about $80 a week to get my total parking plus insurance to come out to $5,000 a year. I'm sure some people pay $5k for parking and insurance -- but those people are self-evidently not cost-sensitive.

As to gas and maintenance, you obviously pay those for an Uber car just like you pay for it for your own car -- in fact, you pay more for these mileage-related costs, since the car has to drive over to you as well as drive you wherever you go. Unless the driver is operating at a loss, your fare obviously more than covers the gas and maintenance fees, ergo you're paying it. Just because you don't personally stand at the pump does not mean you aren't paying for it.

You also, just as obviously, pay the insurance costs for a ride-for-hire vehicle that you're in. Indeed, the insurance costs are probably inherently higher than the ones for your personal vehicle.
This has been in place in San Francisco for quite some time (at least a year, I believe, if not longer).

It seems like a great idea...for opening a giant MITM attack vector to anyone who chooses to use it.
I read your blog entry. Your experience was with tru64 and you also mention zfs. These and other file systems may indeed use data structures to make filename lookup performant.

But traditionally, ufs and ext2/3/4 (without dir_index) have to perform a linear scan through a linked list for lookup, and so they do indeed grow slower with number of files. This is likely where the fanout strategy originated from.

So as usual, YMMV and you should test on your file system of choice.

Personally, I don't really consider that fanout adds much complexity and I'd be surprised if it hurt performance.

edit: HN runs on FreeBSD. Not sure if they are using zfs or ufs, but I'm going to guess ufs. UFS apparently has a dirhash which improves directory lookups, but it's an in-memory structure so it won't help in the cold-cache case after reboot and it can be purged in low memory situations too.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/DirhashDynamicMemory

edit2: I wonder whether the HN admins ever tried tuning the dirhash settings? http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-Augus...
Regarding that last sentence, yes. It's a pretty stark contrast, even, to look at the design of Lyric's website in comparison to the rest of Honeywell's site. I guess there is no harm in trying to disrupt the disrupter, but I don't think that this is going to work for them.

Maybe they could have some success against Nest by playing off of some people's privacy concerns around Google.
So I guess minor updates are how we do things now.
I'd say it's like blaming Toyota for the traffic jams when you close lanes on the bay bridge.

Or alternatively like planing the SF Giants or AT&T Park for the traffic jams when you close lanes on the bay bridge.
Uber is 30% less than taxi's in SF. I think in NY it is also cheaper than taxi's. Your data might be a year behind, when it used to be more expensive.
Comcast is turning your [Houston] Xfinity router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot
> happens to be to temporarily replace the patient's blood with a saline fluid

Which, according to the article, has the effect of stopping the heart as well as brain activity. This seems pretty close to "death." If someone decided to stop the operation halfway through without replacing the saline solution or reviving the patient, it would make sense to me to claim that the "time of death" was the time at which brain activity ceased.
Actually I don't think the fiscal loss is so clear-cut. Each deployment of cache nodes removes load/bandwidth from the rest of the CDN, and also reduces support time spent with customers.

In fact, 100% of Netflix traffic outside the US and 90% inside the US is served from Open Connect[0]. It is actually a shift of the location of the serving hardware that allows both parties (the ISP and Netflix) to save on bandwidth. This is a net win for everyone.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/netfli...
I've been watching rust from the sidelines for a few months now, cheering it on. I'm really excited for the language to stabilize a bit.

Has anyone here who uses it run into any downsides in comparison to other languages (aside from it being new and changing)?
Drones Approved: FAA Gives OK To First Commercial Use Over Land
Not to dismiss the importance of language stability, but forward porting in Rust should be significantly easier than Ruby for a few reasons:

* Rust's strong type system means the pieces fit together only in specific ways - roughly, if you can get it to compile again it will work; in more dynamic languages you have little confidence that the code works until runtime.

* Co-evolving the language with the downstream community is such a critical issue that Rust is developing several tools and processes to help, and this should set it apart from other open source languages that have gone down this path:

The Rust process already attempts to tag all breaking changes in the commit log with `[breaking-change]` and we've heard anecdotally that this has made forward-porting Servo much easier. This log isn't published anywhere besides the commit log yet, but it will be.

Secondly, Rust has a [stability](http://doc.rust-lang.org/rust.html#stability) system that tracks API stability at a fine level. This is influenced by node.js, but in Rust stability is detected and use of unstable API's can be enforced by the tooling. This is still in development but you can see it in the [docs](http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/intrinsics/).
Your experiment fails, I think, because it's not making an apples-to-apples comparison. No one has spent $18 billion on Uber; total investment to date has been ~$1.5 billion. To do what you're describing, someone with $17 billion in liquidity would have to want to spend it on creating an Uber clone, and would have to have the organizational resources and wherewithal to use that cash productively. It's one thing to make an over-valued investment; it's another to spend 17x that amount on a green-field project.
This is going very tangential, but no, not all bridges are directly paid for only by people driving on them.

To make public bridges into an ISP analogy, imagine: municipal and state taxes as well as tax revenue from other states (via Federal highway dollars) pay for a municipal broadband network. You may or may not actually use the service, and you pay for it either way. You likely don't have any other choice of ISP. And it's not-for-profit, and the general public and lawmakers constantly clamor and legislate for better service at lower prices.
I feel like it should be outlawed to post untested code that must run as root. :/
Someone on Reddit pointed out that it would be a huge PR win for Netflix if Verizon did sue and they got the right documents in discovery. Depending on the scope maybe they could possibly get things as wide ranging as actual customer speeds as well as the peering points/capacity etc.
How to make an oscilloscope at home
I wonder if the language can support similarly fast access to user-defined data structures. Though maybe it's not a very interesting question, if arrays are built in. Most user-defined data structures are already their own iterators in some sense. For example, iterating over an ML-style linked list obviously requires only one check per iteration.
In such cases -- where it is JavaScript's responsibility to mutate the CSS at runtime -- it seems like the 'will-change' property should also be added/activated using JS.

However, most of the CSS transforms I write are pre-defined in the CSS and activated by simply adding/removing classes using JS. This seems like something the browser should be perfectly capable of predicting without my help, since the JS isn't actually mutating the CSS.
Google's driverless car will need more testing, watchdog group warns
I agree 100% with what you said. I would never advocate C++ for business logic. In fact, I wouldn't use it for anything which doesn't really need the most performance available (and even there I would try to restrict its usage to the actual performance bottleneck).
Does it strike anyone else as odd that they don't highlight security updates as Chrome does? Example, http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2014/05/stable-chan... Maybe it's psychological, but I like the reassurance security is a focus for Chrome.
Easy to use extension to Selenium WebDriver that doesn't choke on JavaScript
I hate Comcast as much as the next guy, but at least here in Chicago, they're very expensive and very good. I hate dealing with them, but paying $90/mo for 105/20 that works well is better than paying $60/mo for something that doesn't (RCN).
Firebug 2.0 Video: What's New
In my experience, UberX is way cheaper than a cab. From my place in the Mission District to 2nd/Mission is usually like $12-13 via UberX. Cab used to cost me like $17.

In LA we took an UberX from Venice to Downtown, it was ~$35, cab was ~$55.
What British Pound Sterling’s Current Strength Means For Businesses
I thought sleep apnea mostly occurred in people who are overweight?
nothing is banned from exploration

Nothing is banned, per se... but there's just too much search space to sift through to not be smart about where you look.
It does seem to be showing the times in Pacific time for me, too. Very confusing since the text says "5AM" and the timeline says 2AM.
An Introduction to ARM NEON
Ah, I forgot about deviated septums. Wonder what evolutionary advantage came with those.
Honestly using MacPorts is a terrible idea. If you need non-standard packages uses homebrew -- which goes out of its way not to break system components, unlike MacPorts.
I missed the AI Winter. Norvig survived it. I would imagine that colors his thoughts on work towards general intelligence. Also the fact that all AI research that has actually done anything interesting has been of the "weak" (as I learned to call it) variety.

But look at me, ascribing thoughts and intentions on a black box that I cannot be sure really exists.