skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it's so inherently dangerous to ride a Harley that their loudness is required in order to achieve an acceptable level of safety, then no one should be riding them, period.

If non-Harley motorcycles with reasonable noise levels are insufficiently safe because they're so quiet, then no one should be riding motorcycles at all.

I don't agree with either of these perspectives, but whenever anyone makes the "loud pipes save lives" argument, this is what they are saying. It might look good on a bumper sticker but it doesn't make sense. It's no different than suggesting that all pedestrians walk around screaming gibberish as loudly as possible at all times, to reduce their chances of getting hit by bicycles.

If I really believed that I needed to ride a Harley in order to ride safely, I would stop riding altogether. It's not worth annoying hundreds of people every single day just to indulge myself in this one thing. I would find a different hobby.
Ask HN: how to develop a status page for a Rails app?
Hi everyone,

I have a huge Rails app with many usage points: web interface, 2 APIs, etc. and I want to show a status page for this app, decoupled from the app itself, of course, like GitHub, Bitbucket, Basecamp and so many others have.

How do you make this service know that the main services are running? How do they communicate? If the main service is on Rails, what do you use to develop the monitoring/status website?
For anyone that's interested - http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1124&contex...

The above is a terrible write-up of my undergrad research project / dissertation.
I think Google translate can help the students. What about any help with just getting it done in case I needed english students? Would mechanical turk be enough?
I have suffered tinnitus on and off since my late teens. It became permanent around 4 years ago. I don't think this phenomena is related - if you have tinnitus you know you have it.
Does anybody have a running total of how many people this person has abused or even gotten fired?
> It always could do them, it just wasn't told to.

"A board, spring and wires could always trap a mouse, they just weren't configured to do so."

How is programming a computer different from assembling existing components in a new arrangement to make a new machine?

> otherwise changing and programming the state of your brain to know and do things it could not before.

Not a neuroscientist, and this risks derailing the thread, but isn't that exactly how brains and learning work? This has also been observed at the macro level, e.g. that study where London cabbies' brains were found to have enlarged portions that dealt with spatial processing.
Account deleted, but this says enough.
"openshift-arachni 0 Deploy arachni on openshift"

Apparently hacker used Arachni on openshift to scan for vulnerabilities
I've thought about doing this as a general productivity tactic to force myself to do less shit I don't want to be doing.
Here's a start, just to see if that 2-10% figure looks reasonable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7918694
Ask HN: BandMule.com – my side project
Hi there. I created bandmule.com as a weekend project. It needs a lot of work but would be great to get a little initial feedback.

Thanks!
Erik Buell (who did the innovating at Buell) continues his work at EBR: http://www.erikbuellracing.com
Back in my high school days, I worked at a restaurant as a waiter (cough "server", being more polite/correct), and always hoped people would leave the tip in cash.

You had the option at the end of the shift to punch in a total for your claimed tips. There are pro's and cons to claiming cash tips -- Pro's being it keeps your actual income on the books, making you more attractive for loans/financing. Con's are you get taxed more.

You get the money either way at the end of the night, but the tax man was not kind to you at year's end with all those claimed tips.
You Can Kill Anyone with Your Car, as Long as You Don't Really Mean It
How to Choose a New Programming Language
I think it's both good and bad in theory and both good and bad in practice. Certainly most of the things you list are major downsides, but none of them keep the upside from being (IMO more) major.

I'm you're right that the experience is "almost always" sub-par. I would say "often", but not even "usually". I guess YMMV.
It sounded from the article as though it had more to do with retention than simplification. Poetic expression optional, summarizing what you've read in your own words is a broadly-accepted method of internalizing the information.
It's a linkbaity title, but I can't think of a better one. If someone else can, we're always happy to change things.

(That offer holds for any story, btw. The best way to criticize a bad title is to suggest a better one.)

The article itself seems fine for HN.
We did prototype for a while with fluentd as well as Cassandra and a few other technologies which we decided not to use in the end. The answer to why we chose a lot of what we did was to satisfy our requirements. The "Minimal Hardware with Redundancy And Scale" and "Minimal Software Layers" requirements came into play in regards to your question. We found that most off the shelf technologies are great at scaling, but they have a cost that would have required us to employ a lot of hardware. We were able to reach the speed we needed by writing our own Go client to ship off the logs to our cluster, and that also gave us the customizability and control to be able to make sure we weren't consuming all of the resources our servers needed during peak times to deliver content.

As for why we chose the database we did, while TokuMX is basically a drop in replacement for MongoDB, it has features that make it much more usable for our situation. Specifically, a compression rate of over 80% without negatively impacting our insert speed and document level locking. And because TokuMX works as a drop in replacement for MongoDB, we were able to use the MongoDB driver (mgo http://labix.org/v2/mgo) for Go which is just a really great tool. Additionally, we are now able to leverage the MongoDB aggregation framework which allows us to use the data in a way that builds very helpful aggregations of the data very quickly.
I don't understand what you mean?

10 things to store, 1000 buckets to store in, less than 0.1 probability of a collision? That seams both not very impressive or even correct?
I was able to halve size of GIFs with lossy LZW compression:

https://pornel.net/lossygif

With a good palette (which most software is terrible at) and proper delta frames (without artificial differences created by blindly applied diffusion) GIFs can be 1/4th of the size you get from an average GIF maker.

Still, it's a terrible video codec.

I think trauma caused by awful plugins like RealPlayer and QuickTime made people stuck thinking that "animated images" and "proper video" are completely different things. But with native video support in browsers IMHO there should be no divide between <video> and GIF at all. It's the same thing, except the latter wastes more bandwidth, needs more memory or CPU (to enable seeking, used when you switch tabs) and can't be hardware-accelerated.
NANCY MOVING FORWARD
Google Threatening to Pull Indie Artists From YouTube
Browser idea: each tab should have it's own volume control. I should be able to hit some hotkey or button, and then scroll-wheel to the desired volume. It's annoying when I have a browser-based music player, and then I open up a noisy page like this one. I want a standardized way to mute or turn down this page's volume without having to hunt for a custom button.
Don't buy into the bullshit. People often don't appear to hear fire trucks, let alone the fruity tone of an uncorked Harley exhaust that is pointing away from the car. If you're getting cut off and frequently have near collisions, ask yourself if there's something you could be doing differently. Take an MSF course, you'll be surprised how lane position and other techniques can make a difference without pissing off your entire neighborhood.
Weird title. If someone built a quantum computer that performed remotely as well as a 2014-era classical machine, that would be huge news. Quantum computers are really hard to build.
What's the distinction? It also runs in Firefox yet the audio is out of sync (as of now). IE doesn't support the necessary tech needed.. Not yet at least.

Also the majority of mobile web users use safari and chrome anyway. Those two browsers to me are the mobile web.
No worries! But please do a Show HN when the product reaches that stage.
Those are neat, but from what I can tell a cartogram is something different from what I'm describing. From wikipedia: "A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time, population, or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area or distance." So they're basically distorted maps, where the distortions are proportional to a variable.

(It might help to include some explanation in your comment.)
I feel exactly the opposite. To hell with graphics and story-telling - I want to play a GAME with good GAMEPLAY
Yes, but they're Article I courts where everything is reviewable by a generalist District Judge.
OOhhh a fun name to throw out and speculate about! I'll try to hold back, but thanks for this. :)
Totally agree. Reputation is the most important factor in response rates. Not to say this isn't a good approach to cold emails, but expecting anyone but the CEO of Stripe to get a 90% response rate using this template is kidding themselves. It's frustrating for recruiters because this is obviously something they have little control over, but pretty much the most important factor in their job success.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the title is kind of off-putting. These really are valuable skills, but anyone who got into arguments or did debate in high school, etc., etc. developed at least the rudiments of making arguments and discerning when a point was/wasn't valid just as verbal 'self-defense'.
That's a fair question but the industry's answer, in the form of products like the Can Am Spyder is "Yeah, we want people who can't even balance on two wheels."

I also think the whole transportation industry is going to have to get over crashworthyness and move on to autonomous automatic crash avoidance. High speed trains are not crashworthy compared to traditional passenger trains. Efficient personal vehicles should not need to be crashworthy.
> I strongly believe that if everyone were to take an introductory philosophy course such as this, the world would be a much better place.

France has mandatory philosophy classes in the 12th grade. The average French citizen is far from being a model of critical reasoning and a paragon of logical thought.

(this week the "bac" takes place, a final exam French students have to take to graduate high school. A text from Victor Hugo was in the French language exam; shortly after the exam, "Victor Hugo" started trending on Twitter, insulted by high schoolers all over the country [0]).

[0] http://www.france24.com/en/20140619-france-victor-hugo-twitt...
Ruling on Argentina Gives Investors an Upper Hand
> I can't tell if you are heavily drinking the kool-aid, or trolling, but ...

No, just armchair-lawyering :-) My experience in this field, while more extensive than most non-attorneys, has been as a hobbyist. What I lack in hands-on experience, however, I try to make up by reading empirical studies.

I would agree that the standards of 101, 102, etc. have not been evenly applied, to say the least. In fact, that's why the Federal Circuit was formed. There are studies evaluating to what extent they have been successful in harmonizing patent law. To your point, there is even a study on how consistent (or not) the CAFC is. (Will try to dig them up when I get a chance.)

However, what I'm trying to say is, regardless of how the statutes have been implemented, the theory is sound and rational: a patent has multiple, largely orthogonal, dimensions and it should be judged along those lines. To my engineering mind, anything that conflates those dimensions is an inelegant and problematic ruling.
Phillips' on github:

https://github.com/mrrrgn
I don't care much for pong, but this game is worth playing for the shear beauty of it. Lots of wonderful detail and happy surprises!
What's the definition of "ordinary PC" being used? Not finding an answer to that in the article, which makes it difficult to get an idea of what the researchers are comparing this thing to.
Hey, this looks pretty slick. I like the targeted coupons and progressive discounting, I'm hoping to extend the latter over multiple product lines. I agree this could use a wizard or more explanation for us non technical types, but otherwise it looks very start up friendly. Thanks.
East Asian Immigrant Techie needed for a Documentary
I'm making a documentary for Al Jazeera's 101 East program on Asian entrepreneurs in the valley (see the development of the story at storylab101.com) I'm looking at success stories, how that's spurring immigration from Asia and the value of outsourcing between the US and Asia.

Most critically I'm looking for an EAST ASIAN TECHIE who is facing troubles with immigration to the US.

Know anyone who we reach out to?

Please tweet @u_hani_taha with #EastMeetsTech
Going by their iOS apps, it's damned hard to argue that NYT has world-class dev talent. (I could be blaming the talent for the sins of management, of course.)
This is amazing. The bear's reactions are simply brilliant. Nice implementation of pong. It must have taken quite a bit of time to put together and polish off.
> > A free-space wipe on an SSD can't guarantee that reserved or remapped blocks get erased.
>
> I think most controllers implement a secure erase feature that guarantees the data have been erased from NAND.

yes, ata secure erase, which guarantees erasure of the entire drive (excluding vendor specific areas)
Well, for starters, web applications without internet connectivity are, at best, an inferior experience. Secondly, web applications are inferior in terms of both user experience and performance in all but the most trivial applications. Thirdly, developing for the web is actually at least as much of a pain, if not more so, than supporting native code bases for multiple platforms. The difference is that webdevs have shifted that fragmentation from the native SDKs and APIs into the webdev versions of the same thing (JS frameworks, browser support, etc.).
Interesting little look at how people will take a vague suggestion and run with it. I liked her summary:

"Human cognition is multifaceted: it covers many domains and gives rise to many skills. Educational systems should embrace this richness and diversity. I think that’s a better argument for arts instruction than any promised benefit in particular domains like mathematics."
12 reasons clickbaity headlines must die. You'll be shocked by this one trick that Obama hates!
As Iraq censors Internet, Tor usage jumps tenfold
I would start off with a single wiki page, that is dead-simple with nothing but instructions that are commands

To submit: type this
To fetch: type this
To resolve: type this

etc.

The internal workings of Git are way too messy to introduce all in one go
I really doubt this is just a weekend project. I am sorry but titles like this has been getting on my nerves.
Why would a person have to zoom around at 120+ mph on an electric bike just because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to shift on a normal bike?

There's no actual logical connection between the two things.

I've always wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I would enjoy not having to shift. Accordingly I may choose an electric motorcycle over a traditional one. And none of that has anything to do with whether I'll be a safe driver or not.

Logically it's absolutely no different than a driver preferring an automatic car vs a manual transmission car. It doesn't mean the person is going to drive faster.
Hello,

As part of a school project in Software Engineering, I had to help my team understand and use Git.

Making them commit their work is fairly simple, that they can do with little guidance. The problems occour when they have merge conflicts.

We all worked in the same branch (stupid, I know, I didn't know better then) which created a lot of merge conflicts. The team had some issues fixing that in the beginning, but tools like SmartGit / SourceTree made their experience better.

Based on my limited experiences, I would recommend the following:

1 - Start with the simple parts, checking out code and committing.

2 - Then, introduce the concept of feature branches. Do not go all the way that Git flow does in the beginning, keep it simple for now, and then, when more of the organisation understands Git, you can go over to the full Git flow model. Ensure that people focus their branches, and let them only live for a short amount of time. This so that work can be synced up regularily.

3 - What can go wrong? Show them a somewhat advanced merge conflict and how you solved it.

4 - Try to introduce it to them using a GUI client (SourceTree / SmartGit) if they're not into the Command line. It can make adoption easier and less painful.

Good luck!
Thanks for the insight. Given his broader influence and role at Google it made sense he was involved in some way.
A board, spring, and wires is a bit different from a programmable computer, because the computer was designed to be programmable. Putting a program in changes the computer's state, true, but it's changing it to a state that it was designed to be able to achieve.

That difference ruins your mousetrap analogy.
What about searching an unsorted database? Quantum can do it in O(N^0.5). Hasn't it been proven that classical computers need O(N)?
This is pretty interesting because I've been hearing a low-frequency hum for the last few years -- since moving into my current home. I only notice it at night, lying in bed when it is quiet. To me, it sounds like an idling car sitting within a few hundred feet of my house. At first, I suspected cops were sitting near my house (on a corner, near a stop sign) waiting for people to run the stop sign, but I never found any idling cars when I went to investigate. Fortunately I'm not bothered by it.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changes_(TV_series)

Soon people will start destroying all the machines!
I hear this. I just assumed it was some internal thing that I could only hear when it's sufficiently quiet.
>Google would be better off throwing efforts into a new layout engine leveraging raw JS and WebGL, but with a sane API, than these continuous attempts to push HTML into places where it doesn't work.

WebGL is great when what you're trying to do simply can't be done in a high-performance manner using standardized markup.

However, a generalist WebGL-powered UI framework would suffer the same drawbacks that Flash/Flex/Silverlight did: your content ceases being semantic. Of course, some sort of convoluted metadata system to preserve this could be devised, or simply run parallel to real markup that's not rendered, but those types of solutions are ugly at best.

In my opinion, if you're going so far as WebGL to achieve UI performance in a mobile context, you should probably just make a native mobile app instead. At the moment, WebGL support on mobile tends to be incomplete and suffers from poor performance on most devices anyways.

Mobile will always lag behind desktop in terms of browser performance and features, but browser optimization and mobile hardware is improving every day. Keep in mind that both desktop and mobile browsers already utilize GPU acceleration in some aspects of rendering normal content.
I can't help but notice that the display of <ul> items is broken (current Firefix, 14pt min font size)...
Freezer, airco or refrigerator. Probably contact sound from a pump or compressor in one of those. Don't be surprised if it ends up being very far away from where you're located, sound waves travel very well through solids.
It really shouldn't have anything to do with your tech stack being Rails. You can just have some status page site or your own status site (see below) check a certain page/port/endpoint for each of your "usage points".

- Twilio open sourced theirs though it's Python: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2010/07/twilio-open-sources-stas...

- https://www.statuspage.io/ is a hosted version as are the following

- http://www.uptime.ly/

- https://statushub.io/

- https://status.io/
Supreme Court Rejects Software Patents On Performing Generic Functions
Well, I could convert it to a SQL statement too, but then we're no longer using a general-purpose language. Filter, map, and so on are additions to the basic for loop that everyone already needs to know how to use.

"you might even extract some or all of those three details into named one-liner functions"

No. Replacing familiar operations with unfamiliar ones (adding a level of indirection) doesn't add readability or make it "more self-documenting" than pure boilerplate code that everyone's seen many times before and will see again.

But these sort of arguments never reach a conclusion. The way to test it would be to teach beginners and see which one is easier to teach. That's a bit beyond a casual internet discussion, though. :-)
The Science of Problem Solving
It helps her to understand and remember it. You wouldn't use poetry for your own learning. I wouldn't either, but I don't expect others to only use what works for me. Some people would take notes, others might make visual diagrams, on paper or just in their head. Some people make narrative stories to help them learn and remember new concepts.
Recruiting a Designer? Here's What You Should Know
What do you mean? Are you saying it because Riak with sibling preservation is actually one of the few (if not the only) database that didn't drop writes.
When I started Scala, mature jvm and wide libraries were the main reason. But out of many other jvm languages Scala became winner because of its mixture of oop and functional. And those Actors. The best thing about Scala, it still surprises me with kind of stuffs we can do (scalaz). Most other language I find very limited or less encouraging.
A visual analysis of the Texas death row data recently posted on HN