skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who could fix it? What organization or individual could possibly create an architecture that all of the web could be ported to, that's better than our existing web? Especially considering we usually get pretty upset at companies for trying that.
What will happen next?

They will make the "IKEA Hackers" logo look less like the official IKEA logo, and they'll put a big "not an official IKEA site" banner on each page. My guess.
No evidence for quantum speedup found in Google's D-Wave 2
I see Google Code being in the same spot as Google Reader on Google's roadmap.
Rogers in Canada used to do this. I'm not sure if they still do, though, because that incident alone caused me to switch over to another DNS server.
"Based on distributed Solr" might be an over simplification. It uses Solr as its indexing engine, but really, that engine could be any single-node indexer... including single ES nodes. Basically, Yokozuna adds real grownup distributed systems computer science to the OSS distributed search space. http://docs.basho.com/riak/2.0.0beta1/dev/advanced/search/
You can if you want:

var jp = function(last) {
return formatNames2('John', 'Paul', last);
};
var je = function(last) {
return formatNames2('James', 'Earl', last);
};
var lh = function(last) {
return formatNames2('Lee', 'Harvey', last);
};
var c = function(middle, last) {
return formatNames('Clarabelle', middle, last);
};

But I find this cleaner:

var jp = formatNames2('John', 'Paul'};
var je = formatNames2('James', 'Earl'};
var lh = formatNames2('Lee', 'Harvey'};
var c = formatNames('Clarabelle'};
Yeah, this. If I were to do a dumb dick move like this, I'd much rather have the candidate call me out on it than blow me off. I'd be really excited to meet a candidate whose first real interaction with me is to tell me I'm being an asshole and be right about it.
Wouldn't the FSA approach require more memory than the table, since it has to maintain all the intermediate nodes?

What do you mean by 'a table'? If you want a set without false positives/negatives or a perfect hash function, you have to represent the possible elements in some way. FSAs are compact when you store a set of sequences where there is a certain amount of redundancy in the form of subsequences that occur in multiple strings. In such cases, FSAs are far more compact that a flat table of strings.

Of course, in an actual compact implementation, you would not implement states and transitions using classes. E.g. Dictomaton stores states as an array of transitions (which are unboxed), which is far more compact (see the numbers on the Github page for some comparisons with comparable data structures).
Great time. Really enjoyed a few things:

- Zach Sims quoting his classmates' saying something like "you should be embarrassed by your first version, but you shouldn't be THIS embarrassed."

- The Instacart story was very inspiring. I've heard it before (the pictures, the late app, etc.), but always a lot of fun. The part about him refusing to food shop until he could do it from his own app is exactly the sort of dogfooding I do and recommend.

- The repeated invocations to build for yourself.

I especially appreciated Shana Fisher's contrarian advice:

- don't be afraid to perfect & build a minimum "desirable" product

- get each hire right before moving on to the next

- sometimes it is best to be a single founder if you have a certain personality
I suspect that they're using the CEO to get your attention. I'd be very surprised if the original email came from him. As can be seen here it's kind of nuts to do all this work only to pass off ot someone else when there is a bite.
> I call the new version "service architecture" because "service oriented architecture" has such stifling connotations.

That's why the term 'microservices' is being pushed. It would be better to just agree on 1 new term instead of several new terms.
T-Mobile's no data-cap music streaming with Simple Choice plans
In video industry FPGA based devices are used relatively wide. Multiplexers, encoders, satellite and cable devices etc. And they don't do "everything", usually there is a regular purpose cpu - power, x86, arm etc. as a controller, which also hosts OS and all software and lots of specialized FPGAs. In one device there can be one low power dual core cpu (celeron, old ppc) and tens of top level monster FPGAs like Stratix V.

Reconfiguration is also very much needed - customers often experience network and different specific problems that are only fixable in hardware. So we need configurable packet processors (basically top level router in a chip), configurable processing fpga, lots of small fpga etc.
And bug fix for one customer is then gradually distributed to everyone. And devices lifespan is long - many customers use 5 or even 10 year old hardware. Performance is enough for them and new functionality is provided for them, partially in way of new fpga firmware.

PS: some devices, especially cable or satellite, are sold in thousands by several companies, so its not like unique hand-made hardware.

PPS: of course any costs to buy toolchain or windows pc in such companies doesn't matter really. Finding talented fpga designers is way harder as far as I understand.
Didn't know it was the logic behind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scwm
> Last time I ran the back-of-the-envelope numbers (admittedly 2-3 years ago) they weren't competitive with GPUs on price/flops and price/iops.

To me, that sounds more like the problem was not a good fit for FPGA hardware.

I'm just speculating, though.
Show HN: Bithub – Social community rewards
More info about the Bithub can be found at http://bitovi.com/blog/2014/06/bithub-social-community-rewar...
I mean with Xib, you can e.g. specify how the window should behave when you are resizing it since you are specifying layout constraints as opposed to having to hardcode the layout. With CSS, your only recourse is media queries but those are a lot less fine-grained. Look into http://gridstylesheets.org (and more specifically http://gridstylesheets.org/guides/ccss/) which is kinda the love child of CSS and Xib (or the technology that inspired the layout technology).
As we talk about here: http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/how-we-run-ironic-and-yo..., each instance is provisioned with redundant 10Gbit network links with minimal network over-provisioning in each cab.
Yokozuna and CS (or plain Riak) use different backend configurations[0,1]. So beyond having physically distinct clusters, you'd get to have purpose optimized storage, but with a common management regime.

[0] http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/ops/building/planning/back...

[1] http://docs.basho.com/riakcs/latest/cookbooks/configuration/...
Thanks! It's a django app that uses Mandrill for sending email, and Twilio for sending sms alerts.
Yes, obviously.

If the reply is fallacious, then show that it's fallacious. If it is fallacious then it shouldn't be used as an argument irrespective of whom it's aimed it. If the reply doesn't contain some logical flaw, then it simply doesn't matter whether its opponent is black or white or anything else: neither truth nor logic are subject to whether people like them.
Horrific is an exaggeration. You may not like it, but that doesn't mean it's overly difficult to build native mobile UIs with standard HTML and CSS.

Also, Flexbox makes this even easier, and is a great step forward.
A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane – Nobody Knows What's Causing It
I'm not sure what controversy you think you're wading into here, or why you think I was sneering. I was being completely serious.
aphyr is homosexual and isn't afraid to let the world know[1]. I think it is just his own humor. I actually find it pretty hilarious how often he changes his twitter picture and the strange things he switches them to.

It is just a quirk of an incredibly brilliant person, which I personally find hilarious. That being said, he has a great point of view on non-tech things and is a super humble guy. As quoted from the movie Van Wilder, "You shouldn't take life so seriously, you'll never get out alive!"

http://aphyr.com/diversity
Are there any other providers out there that have anything like this? For example, SoftLayer has "Bare Metal" servers, but I'm not sure if there's a virtualization layer.
Just me or is it down... again?
Ah, cool I think you have hit an intended design feature. We use min-device-width to know that you started on a smaller screen (or a wide screen). If you are on a wide screen responsive elements are changed slightly to fit the screen. If you start on a small screen you get the hamburger menu.

Can you file an issue on the github project so that we can work on it to see if it is an issue.
Time-lapse video of Bethany's maniac week of coding
So true! I still have the game box sitting on the shelf for this! It's been ages since I played it through, but it is still the game I look back at the most fondly!

Never realized there was a push to mod the game so extensively. Gonna have to give these mods a try and replay this one!
Pretty Printing the full dependency tree is a feature that could be easily added to npm itself, and in a way easier way to understand than trying to read through a directory tree
https://docs.billforward.net/ was unavailable for me (Chrome on OS X)
When I saw the headline I wished it was Alice Corp v. Bob Bank
Or alternatively browsers could use non-terrible chroma upsampling algorithms.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/79805
Is there a flash blocker solution that removes all traces of the page element rather than leave an ugly placeholder? It's going to be annoying to see this on Twitter from now on.
After 47 years, tech publishing's elder statesman, Computerworld, exits print.
oh awesome; did I miss that in the article? Reading is hard...
It is harder to debug points-free code. I find myself doing more debugging with `log` statements in a long pipeline than I do with other styles of code.

On the other side, I tend to work with a few well-tested functions over and over and end up with fewer problems to debug when I work in a functional paradigm, points-free or not.

On rare occasions, when I need to debug something that is difficult because it's points-free I simply add some explicit parameters, either temporarily to enable debugging or permanently.

Points-free is nice, but should never be an overriding goal.
This is really clever!

I'd love to extend this to a state-level tool. Specifically for Massachusetts.

It looks like the sunlight foundation only works at the federal level.

Could I generate a JSON representation of the state data and embed it into getLegislators()?

drop me a line at sanj [cinnamon_pastry_roll] alum.mit.edu
> any function important enough to require an FPGA can more economically get absorbed into the nearest silicon. For example, consider the serial/deserial coding of audio/video codecs. That used to be done in FGPAs, but got moved into a standard bus (SPI) and moved into codecs and CPUs.

But isn't that because, back then, CPUs simply weren't fast enough for decent video coding? And they still aren't blazing fast for that purpose - compared to GPUs (see GPU-enabled video encoders).

I think the main argument against FPGAs is that it's still a chore to re-purpose them. Sure, it's not as painful as making a new chip from sand, but it's harder than applying code changes to software running in production on CPUs.

If it's a relatively simple algorithm, that changes rarely, where speed is the main bottleneck, that's a very promising scenario for an FPGA.
A more folksy version: http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/19/5824336/google-s-quantum-c...

Unfortunately, there is no clear answer as to possible cost advantages - even though there may be no clear speedup, its still a single chip vs. a whole supercomputer.
Sounds like a bit of a gimmick.

FPGAs are typically used in ASIC development to emulate the ASIC being developed. I've seen boards with 20 FPGAs emulate an ASIC design at <~1/10th of the speed at >>x10 power. While FPGAs are programmable hardware they are far less efficient than custom hardware for various reasons. Naturally ASIC emluation is an application where FPGAs have a very large advantage over software... At volume they're also a lot more expensive and good tools are also very expensive (virtually no mass produced commercial product uses FPGAs). Now obviously if the FPGA is inside the Xeon you're not really paying much more for it (except you lose whatever other function could be crammed in there).

Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google have enough servers to make a custom block inside Intel's CPU more attractive than an FPGA in terms of price/power/performance (and they can get that from ARM vendors which is probably scaring Intel).

CPU vendors have spent the last several decades moving more and more applications that used to be in the realm of custom hardware to the realm of software. There are certainly niches of highly parallelizable operations but a lot of general purpose compute is very well served by CPUs (and a lot of it is often memory bandwidth bound, not compute bound). Some of these niches have already been semi-filled through GPUs, special instructions etc.

The FPGA on the Xeon is almost certainly not going to have access to all the same interfaces that either a GPU or the CPU has and is only going to be useful for a relatively narrow range of applications.

I think what's going on here is that as the process size goes down simply cramming more and more cores into the chip makes less and less sense, i.e. things don't scale linearly in general. So the first thing we see is cramming a GPU in there which eventually also doesn't scale (and also isn't really a server thing). Now they basically have extra space and don't really know what to put in it. Also each of the current blocks (GPU, CPU) are so complicated that trying to evolve them is very expensive.

EDIT: Just to explain a little where I'm coming from here. I worked for a startup designing an ASIC where FPGAs were used to validate the ASIC design. I also worked on commercial products that included FPGAs for custom functions where the volume was not high enough to justify an ASIC and the problem couldn't be solved by software. I worked with DSPs, CPUs, various forms of programmable logic, SoCs with lots of different HW blocks etc. over a long long time so I'm trying to share some of my observations... If you think they're absolutely wrong I'd be happy to debate them.

EDIT2: Re-reading what I wrote it may sound like I am saying I am an ASIC designer. I'm not. I'm a software developer who has dabbled in hardware design and has worked in hardware design environments (i.e. the startup I worked for was designing ASICs but I was mostly working on related software).
Thanks, gdb. I'm totally gonna plagiarize you when I need to send cold emails. :)
This was a ton of fun and I'd love to do it, or a modified shorter version of it again. It's hard to shut down the rest of my life for an entire week, but maybe a long weekend. Or I could do a week where the computer is taking screenshots 9-5 and I pre-commit to post the video as soon as it is over.
I say this everytime I get in my car
Did you take into account filesystem block size?
Wow, that's extremely low pricing you're looking for. I think the current pricing isn't only fair, but the top end is somewhat low.
You should probably qualify that somehow, because MP4 works for me on Firefox (on OSX 10.9).
I disagree, HTML/CSS have come a long ways in the past few years, in terms of browser compatibility and features. I don't see how introducing a new layout engine would help. That's just another standard that every platform has to support. Using WebGL would be great, but so far WebGL support on mobile is not great.

If you haven't worked with web tools recently you should see how far they've come. With JS frameworks like Angular or Ember, and crazy fast build tools like Gulp, it's pretty nice developing for the web these days
I had the luck to have Fabiano Botelho — the person behind the Minimal Perfect Hash thesis — as an Algorithms and Data Structures professor back when I was studying Computer Engineering at CEFET-MG. He is absolutely brilliant, and has some incredible knowledge on both the theoretical and practical aspects of using hash tables.

IIRC, he had just finished publishing his thesis, and had each of us write our own implementations of minimal perfect hashing for extra credit. The data structure is really useful for indexing large, immutable data sets.
This article makes it sound like Twitter invented a whole new optimization, when they really just recycled a concept already in use by gfycat (http://www.gfycat.com/) and MediaCrush (https://mediacru.sh/).
This video of Polish government raid may lead to early elections
In particular, the broken implementation of CSS position:fixed on all mobile platforms is probably the major stumbling block preventing app-like interfaces for the mobile web. I have been frequently tempted to try to build a canvas-based interface from scratch, but I suspect even that would run into the same problems.
How do you want to live professionally? Having the soft-skills to manage-up and explain things to non-technical senior management is a necessary part of your job. They deserve your best recommendations. If they don't get it or give inappropriate push-back, that's a sign your talents are best employed somewhere else.
My mistake, I must have been going off what's common versus what's allowed. Thanks for pointing it out.
Age of Subscriptions: how product design is changing with new business models
New push to get girls into computer sciences
This is the same complaining I always hear from people who don't want to learn how to use HTML and CSS. Yes, it is different than what you are used to. Yes, it will take some time to learn and some of that will be uncomfortable. But that does not mean that that HTML and CSS are bad. I know this because I successfully build mobile sites that look and function fine and I assure you it works.

You say "hackery is required to attempt to imitate native mobile apps" and I agree with you. Can I ask why it is so important to copy the styling of native? That seems like a lot of effort for no good reason. Mobile web can be better than native if you let it, but forcing it to be something else purely for reasons of fashion is foolish.

HTML/CSS produces a flexible layout that is usable by many different sizes and types of devices (even audio interfaces) and that is a good thing. It takes effort to get it working for all of the possible ways it could be used, but it is possible. After a little practice, it can even get easy. The hard parts of HTML/CSS would still exist in any flexible layout solution. Making a rigid screen-painted layout solution avoids problem inherent in flexible layouts those, but it gives up so much.
I completely agree - I have seen multiple start ups go from bootstrap to raising money and then filling desks just because they think that is what they need to do - the first place they off load is usually customer support. On a side note, I usually avoid working with / for companies that do this just because I have always thought it was bad signal.
At a closer look (I missed the pdf link, the first time) it seems the abstract is tremendously misleading. Under the conditions of the experiment dynamic typing was faster. Of course, the conditions of the experiment involved a small project in an unfamiliar language with an unfamiliar type system over the course of 27 hours with an unchanging set of requirements, so draw your own conclusions as to how well this generalizes.
This kind of stories are common in the affiliate world or atleast it used to be...In 2003 i wrote a simple perl script which made me over $1 Million!
> From a business engagement point of view, making hard to use tools and then "giving away" thousands of dollars of free consulting to the customer to gain their support seems to work well.

To me, the entire recent history of computer industry (well, all of it is recent BTW) shows that, if you want your technology to become mass-adopted, you need to make it easier for the little guy to get in the game. The high school kid tinkering with stuff in the parents' basement; the proverbial starving student. That's how x86 crushed RISC; that's how Linux became prominent; that's how Arduino became the most popular micro-con platform (despite more clever things being available).

You make the learning curve nice and gentle, and you draw into your ranks all the unwashed masses out there. In time, out of those ranks the next tech leaders will emerge.
I've gotta hand it to https://deadmanssnitch.com. Free referrals! :)
Because they're hilarious, that's why. How about having a sense of humor?
One way I've solved this in the past which is a bit hacky but novel and fun was to set the MAILTO to some e-mail address like cron-error@ and use the local postfix process to map that e-mail to a command via transports. This allows us to inject cron errors into our exception tracking system and alert minimizing the amount of cron storming to our inboxes.
I have a similar game. I have a text based online football game, and can relate a great deal to many things he said, like the albatross.

I will start trying to reframe it in my mind as a garden. That sounds much nicer :)

I think 500 people right now play my game, and if anything that makes the weight of it all larger.
I think this a great approach to creating customer evangelists! I am an early employee (not founder), and spending time in our ticketing system helping users has given me good insight into where we can improve our tutorials/FAQ/etc type materials.

Users also do not expect to get a detailed response directly from the engineer who developed the feature they are asking about. They are usually pleasantly surprised. A few weeks ago, I spent about 30 minutes answering a technical question for a user and he was so happy with my response that he tweeted about it. It made me feel pretty incredible, we have an excited user, AND we now have the start of a good article for our FAQ section relating to that feature. Definitely time well spent.
And the monitoring and alerting is done with a python daemon.
Funny, I get an error when I try to buy anything on Svpply.

http://www.saturdaysnyc.com/item/salt-1
SoftLayer bare metal is bare metal; it's pretty similar to what Rackspace announced.
As I mentioned elsewhere, the abstract seems to disagree with the paper. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from that fact...
Quinn's analysis appears pretty shallow - his discussion of the Watson patentability boils down to "it should be patentable because it's like the star trek computer" and "doing something faster is always patentable".

He also asserts that increased difficulty of getting software patents "means we won’t get disclosures, information will be held as trade secrets, and those who follow will not be able to stand on the shoulders of those who come before them." As I have yet to hear of anyone ever getting a single useful idea from a software patent disclosure, I view this as a completely acceptable consequence.
If we're throwing out HTML/CSS why on earth would you keep Javascript? (or also contentiously - HTTP)

If we're throwing away the cruft (which I fully support!), lets do things right. That means planning a (light) abstraction layer for a world where you can use the right tool for the job.
How to read music – Tim Hansen