skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We use AWS Elastic Beanstalk and couldn't be happier. We compared the performance of quite a few clouds and EB has incredible speeds over the competition even for paid plans. They just lowered our prices too from their old t1.micros to t2.micros about 50% and we have 4 EB applications so that really made a difference and we combine the CloudFront CDN to leverage even more caching where we can and have a scalable solution for very little cost. Data reliability is also a very important concern so we use AWS RDS with MySQL for our primary data store and Elasticache with Redis.

If AWS lowers the pricing of the entry level EC2 instances that Elastic Beanstalk uses a bit more, I plan on moving all my side projects as it just doesn't make any sense to manage any servers or pay $20/app when I get more flexibility with AWS (ssh to find logs, tight integration between AWS services, etc). The other thing I wish they had was the ability to use a EC2 instance for more than 1 application as we don't really need 4 separate apps, but it's just mostly for cost reasons as a bootstrapped startup.

One thing we don't use, but want to down the road is using AWS CloudSearch unfortunately and currently just use a file based search, but if they lower the entry level pricing (currently more than our entire AWS spend) or we can afford it we plan on using them to manage search.
When I read the first paragraph, I was immediately reminded of my feelings when watching the Star Trek:TNG episode, made in the late 80's where Picard considered quitting Star Fleet to head the Atlantis Project. When I watched that episode recently, I found the idea that future people would allow large alterations to the earth to be discordant.

It is interesting that, according to the article, Roddenberry also incorporated the idea of a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar into one of his works.

Today, I expect that terraforming Mars and mining the moon will face significant opposition. Would massive land reclamation projects like those in the Netherlands ever happen today, if a particular hyper-conservation Western mindset were in place when they commenced? We can't even let go of outdated urban streetscapes, and buildings past their useful lifespans[1], so it isn't far-fetched to think of moon miners having to recreate impact craters on the moon's surface after mining them, if mining happened in the first place.

Large segments of humanity are becoming sclerotic. Even if [2] the positive effects of damming the Mediterranean (or terraforming central Australia or Antarctica) were found to outweigh the losses, and the impacts could be mitigated, it would still be extremely unlikely to happen, for sentimental reasons.

[1] See recent news about Lloyds of London building, which has became an expensive burden, but can't be touched because of its "iconic" status

[2] yes, obviously there are risks, and they would need to be weighed carefully.
Everyone writes unreadable code sometimes. Bad languages make it easier.
I’m always interested when mac app developers either don’t ever support, or support and then abandon the Mac App Store.

I can understand wanting to minimise overheads as much as possible - I just wonder what the total cost difference is for a 3rd party payment system, hosting the files, handling refunds etc (plus potentially lost sales), vs the 30% cut Apple take..?

Also, I find myself much more likely to purchase an app if I can do so via the Mac App Store. It’s so ridiculously easy to purchase/install and re-install when required; I already trust Apple with my credit card; and I don’t have to worry about whether the store front in question is secure.

The last part in particular is a big issue to me - your site is not available over https, so I have no way to know if the link from your site to FastSpring is the one you intended or if I’m being MITM’d and getting a link to send $60 to some russian hacker, as the destination page is on a completely different domain, bares very little resemblance to your site, and is also not hosted via https. When I tried to access the initial order page over HTTPS I was given a ridiculous message telling me "Secure Connection Not Allowed”.

The “technical infrastructure” page for FastSpring touts “hardware accelerated SSL” - so I can rest assured that the message telling me I can’t use their store front over SSL was encrypted with great efficiency.

The only part of FastSpring that seems to be accessible over SSL is the final order page - but I’ve already followed multiple links and form submissions from non-secure pages, so I could be looking at anything by this stage.

That FastSpring put a big “Norton Secured” badge on the top of their http only initial order page is both ridiculous and dangerous.

All of this makes me wonder how much extra value that 30% cut can give back to the developer...
An implant under the skin in your arm is likely to be easier to remove than an IUD.
We already have. At one time pro sports were segregated or whites-only. MLB was effectively segregated until 1947, the NBA was integrated in 1950; football was never formally segregated as far as I am aware. Some argue that hockey is still effectively segregated, though you could equally argue that ice skating is simply more prominent in certain Euro-American demographics.

I presume you're referring to the prevalence of black athletes in some sports, particularly basketball where thy are way over-represented. But that is in fact the result of meritocracy. This is so dreadful to some people that last year there was an attempt to form a whites-only basketball league, although the chances of this going anywhere are negligible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_color_line

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_players_in_American_profe...

http://africanamericanhistorysp2014.voices.wooster.edu/racis...

http://www.thenation.com/article/all-white-basketball-league...

I don't have a firm opinion about diversity in tech companies, but your comment suggests you're unaware of the historical context.
Might seem pedantic but its the 'Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation', not the Bill Gates
High Performance Web Development: Start with Good Infrastructure
Those apps are abandoned because its increasingly hard to reach any visibility (and thus success) in the App Store, even if you sell for a ridiculously low price. The risk on not even making back what you invested in time to create a really good and polished app is immense when looking at the stats.
So yeah, there is room for new guys to find out its not a sustainable business these days, unless you have a superb app and get really lucky.
35% of Americans Facing Debt Collectors
Would you go to a hospital where the doctors are hired based on ethnic diversity and quotas instead of skills?
They only had to obscure the target zone, which was a very small area (a single factory complex, the Kokura Arsenal), and by chance it happened to be obscured during the 30 minutes or so that the plane was overhead.

This wasn't a normal bombing run. It had elements of an experiment - they wanted to understand how the bomb worked, so they wanted to control the drop precisely and be able to observe the effects.

The aiming points were very precise (a bridge in the case of Hiroshima), and they were chosen well in advance, and the mission orders were quite rigid. If the crew couldn't see the target clearly after several attempts, they didn't have the authority to randomly drop the bomb somewhere else - they had to go on to the next city.

Ironically, after all that, I think they eventually missed the aiming point in Nagasaki by 2 km or so, because it was also obscured. By then, the plane was low on fuel though, so I guess they were forced to do the best they could. I've read that they weren't supposed to do that, according to the mission rules. The plane came very close to running out of fuel, which I guess might have made them drop the bomb to reduce weight.

edit: This is Field Order 13 - for the attack on Hiroshima. It includes Kokura and Nagasaki as secondary targets, so you can see how precise they were about the aiming points. I'm pretty sure the target details would be exactly the same for the Nagasaki attack (Field Order 17, which I can't find online).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kafaikan/6693719785/sizes/l

edit2: Bomber crew member's diary which explains what happened over Kokura - http://www.mphpa.org/classic/COLLECTIONS/CG-ASPI/01/Pages/CG...
Most of the "reasons" being money. Android phones are mostly sold to the "unwashed masses" who just want a cheap phone and get some low/medium spec Android phone with their contract.

You cannot really compare something sold in 200 models and 50 price points to something sold in 5 models and 5 price points. It will be like saying people buy more Toyotas than Mercedes. Well, of course they do.

Here's another data point: this 80% of marketshare is reversed when considering profits.
I use my iPad at least an hour a day before falling asleep, and I am pretty happy with the apps.

The YouTube app seems to be under heavy development, and while they often break little things, they also fix and add stuff quickly. I really enjoy YouTube on the iPad and I spend a lot of time there.

Likewise, the Google Maps app is great on the iPad. Most of what I said for YouTube applies to Google Maps.

Twitter and Tweetdeck work great. They don't change much, but they don't need to.

Twitch seems to be under active development. It works fairly well, and I use it a fair amount.

Kindle and Amazon Instant Video don't change much, but they just work.
That's news. At Universities here they make up a disproportionate amount of students (ie. a larger percentage of the student body is Asian than would be expected given their percentage of the overall population)...
Schwarzschild.
Why aren't developers choosing to build PC apps instead? Stardock said that their worst-performing PC game earned more revenue than most iOS or Android apps for which they could obtain revenue numbers.

On PCs, it is still possible for developers to sell from their own website, without paying a 30% fee to a platform app store.

PCs may be a numerically smaller (hundreds of millions vs. billions of devices) market, but customer perceptions of software value are reflected in an order of magnitude difference in price expectations.
Perl5 and Perl6 are separate languages. Best thing is just to pretend that Perl6 doesn't exist. God knows everybody else does.
So why do you believe that achievements of Blacks in basketball is a result of their higher ability, but not the same for Whites in tech?
OnAir Player
Tech is brimming with diversity so he can't make a good statistical argument without lumping whites and Asians together as one race. His goal isn't racial diversity, it is the advancement of his race only. Even at the expense of other minorities like Asians.
> But that is in fact the result of meritocracy.

Unlike employment at tech companies?
[But that is in fact the result of meritocracy]

And Tech hiring is not based on meritocracy?
Housetaurant vs. Airbnb Eat with Locals in SF
The tax is paid to the national government.
I prefer a HTML minifier that parses and builds in internal AST (like Google closures compiler for JS) over a regex-based minifier.

HTML-minifier seems like a good solution, thanks, will try it out.
Design Philosophy from a 15 Year Old
Yep, that was always the main problem for me with Tablets. Be it 7" or 10", super thin and light, powerful like a gaming console i always feel crippled when using them. I own an older 2011 11" MBA which is still so much better for "around the house" usage while my main workhorse (13"rMBP) remains on my desk. My girlfriend, who isn't a pro user by any means, also finds the iPad to be very limiting and even uncomfortable to hold in most situations.
Differences between Perl and PHP
While improving diversity in tech is certainly very important, I think there are still a great many needs to be resolved before we can consider it the next step in civil rights. Even if you consider same-sex marriage a done deal as the final pieces start to fall in the place, trans* people often can't even use the bathroom of their gender, for fucks sake. And then also there's voter-restriction laws, trying to revert progress the civil rights movement has made. So yeah, diversity in tech is important, but to call it "the next step in civil rights" seems pretty disingenuous to me.
One really cool tool that web programmers should know if they work with JSON data a lot is jq: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/. It's a line-oriented tool like sed, awk, and grep, but it's for manipulating JSON data. It can be really useful for quickly making sense of JSON-formatted log files. For example, you can do something like

jq -c .'select(.server_name == "slow_server") | .end_time - .start_time' < my_log_file

where your log file might look like

'{"server": "slow_server", "timings": {"end_time": 1406611619.90, "start_time": 1406611619.10}}'

to get your web request timings.

Because it's line-oriented, it also works seamlessly with other tools, so you can pipe the output to, say, sort, to find the slowest requests.
There are wonderful alternatives to pharmaceutical contraception, barrier methods and surgical sterilization, not to mention chemical and surgical abortion.

I would invite readers here to learn about modern NFP and to help spread the word:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/n...

EDIT: expanded my "alternatives to" list per the observation of another reader. Thanks, jjoonathan!
Has that worked for any largeish webapps at all?

I'm especially curious as I would like to do something like this for searchcode. The costs aren't too high but since it has no revenue stream it would help keep things going even if my personal costs suddenly went up and something had to go.
Great stuff. Could you share some data on the server and the traffic? Ram/cores/uplink? This looks like the kind of stuff I've been thinking about for a long time - will have look at the code and test it on a server. Is everything in place to run a clone of your demo server easily?
Victoria judicial importante para los Electrosensibles
This is interesting. I find the idea that people want a grade or rating on their skills intensely fascinating. Actually I find people and data science intensely fascinating, so that probably contributed as well.

However my knee-jerk reaction was more of revulsion. "Who are you to apply any sort of label to my abilities based on a presence!" is probably close to my first thought. That and I totally don't contribute to any of the listed hangouts so I knew I'd "suck" immediately.

Perhaps include more "hangouts"? Project Euler for example.
ProdPad – Product Management Software
I use vpscheap.net for my side projects. They are very good. They have unmetered bandwidth plans that start as low as a couple bucks a month. I use the 10 dollar/month plan, and it's 1gig ram, unmetered on a 50mbit/s link, quad core, 100 GB ssd. You can do quite a lot with that.

Only thing I don't like is that I can't get a clean install. They seem to have one Ubuntu image, and it's not really minimal, so I have to do some cleaning when I start a new instance. Other than that, it's pretty great.

You could run a cluster of 30 of those for your Heroku budget, and I have no doubt that would be an insane amount of overkill. If you were absolutely sure you were going to get killed with traffic, I would spin up a small one of these as a load balancer and put it in front of two web/app servers and do one more for database. That's still just around 35 bucks a month. And you should be able to get that from donations.
> "The government has a role to play" in ensuring that women and minorities are fairly represented in the tech workforce, Jackson told a USA TODAY editorial board meeting. He said the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission needs to examine Silicon Valley's employment contracts.

Looks like Jackson is trying to rebrand 'affirmative action'. Doesn't matter, though: it's still a violation of the rights of almost all concerned.
They would be an even bigger percentage if not for discrimination.

The US used to have quotas for Jews in many universities, as did the Soviet Union. The unofficial quota system for Asians is no different.
Totally agree, the Rooney Rule needs to be applied to other sports as well, and with teeth.
Texas Shooting Hoax Devil Worshiping Exposed
Well, it certainly meets those goals, but it does so by putting view logic into the model layer.

You might take a look at the Presenter pattern; Draper is an excellent implementation of it, which permits for this kind of "model-attached" view behavior, while maintaining proper MVC separations.
it is still down!
Oh come on, IT isn't a perfect site but...despair? Really?

I disagree with you about the About page, the large picture format is so much more immersive and engaging than the tiny text on the About page, but I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

Usability is not always the only thing a website should optimize for. Sometimes beauty and a mood can be just as important, depending on the goals of the page.
Because those are the only two options right?
Sure, but a self-driving car by itself is of fairly limited utility in a taxi operation; the advantage that they provide comes with the data gathering and analysis system that provides centralized control of the fleet. Automation, as it matures, should drive down the per-car cost and drive up the competitive advantage of the player that can expend the most on central resources.

When you reduce the relative importance of the per-unit cost and drive up the relative importance of centralized costs, you make a market that has stronger natural tendency to form a monopoly, because there is more of a positive feedback loop reinforcing the position of the leading player.
Specifically considering race in hiring decisions, however well-intentioned, is racism. We won't get to where we want to be by skillfully and fairly applying racism -- we'll get there by not caring about race.

I grew up in a rural area in the southern US where racism was common and overt. I can very honestly and sincerely say that I find this more insidious form of racism, which is so widely accepted, to be much more disturbing and frightening.
A MongoDB back-end for FullCalendar in 10 minutes
hrm? Amazon does do print-on-demand.

It seems fairly obvious that they don't allow custom designs. If you want to print your own stuff, go to a maker space. Quality control is important for a company like Amazon, and custom designs make that impossible. A small batch of items is the logical place to start a service like this. I'm sure over time they'll steadily incorporate proven designs onto the platform; probably they'll also let people submit designs and get a cut of the design, just like books. But, there will need to be a rigorous quality control process in place before the platform can be that open.
My last three doctors have been minorities, two of them were WoC, and they are all much better than the two white male goofuses I went to before.
Well, the problem is too many people think an App is a Business. A really great app can create a business, but most apps are not sustainable businesses, and should not be confused as such.

That said, if you redesign each time Apple updates iOS you will probably have a good chance of getting featured in their store. Like I said, anecdotally, most of my purchase come from features and recommendations from friends and blogs, not top lists.
Many students in US are from abroad, in that case Asians are 60% of world population.

Some data about %subj%:

http://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-d...
As a user I like the pay-once model, but for apps that provide continuous upgrades, a subscription model would make much more sense and I think Apple & co would do well to start actively supporting that model for apps. The ultimate guitar tablature iPad application does it via an in-app payment and I'm more than happy to pay the yearly fee. I could imagine doing the same for many other apps. The counterpoint here is that, as a user, I would then feel entitled to frequent and substantive updates which would increase the load on an indie even more.
That's what I'm looking forward to. Being able to have more control over contraception without using condoms is great (I'm in a long term relationship with my very loving girlfriend, but we still worry at times) IMO.

What I'm interested in is whether this implantable chip will take off, considering that IIRC oral contraceptives are still used far more than other types (like the injections or the implant) despite being less effective?
For starters, "Whites in tech" generally start out with the advantage of being white. In America, at least, that's an incredible advantage, even in today's "enlightened" age. It's like getting a head start in a foot race.

Secondly, the tech industry is filled with just as much of a "network effect" as any other industry. That is, like any other industry, who one knows is at least as important as what one knows, and is often far and away the most important thing.

For all its anti-intellectual accoutrement, sport is generally far more merit based than other industries, even if it's not perfect. That's because results tend to be black-and-white (har) and easily measured in a way that doesn't exist in our industry.
White House attacks plans to curb NSA data collection (2013)
I prefer pcregrep, it's more feature rich and syntax is much neater. Using \d instead of [0-9] and etc. makes regexes more readable.
I scrolled, it yanked my screen position down like it had lagged. Scrolled up to try and compensate. Bounced between the first two sections in annoyance and then clicked off. Yeesh.
A curated list of 19 most important recommendation systems
This would be great for us. Various parts of our stack are spread around so many different platforms, and this could really take the grunt work out of that. Not to mention removing the need of dealing with fifteen various shoddy interfaces. Heck, AWS isn't even consistent with itself (just check out OpsWorks vs Route53).
Cool game 2048
Alternative? Yes. Wonderful? Only if you stigmatize the sexual behaviors incompatible with NFP, conveniently making it impossible to complain about.

EDIT: You also forgot to mention condoms which don't alter the natural functioning of your body, allow for a wider range of sexual expression, and serve as a stronger barrier against STD transmission than NFP. What was your complaint against condoms again?

> Marriage is a gift from God

Oh, right.
> I presume you're referring to the prevalence of black athletes in some sports, particularly basketball where thy are way over-represented. But that is in fact the result of meritocracy.

Its largely a result the economic disadvantage of blacks in the broader society. Without strong educational opportunities and other economic opportunities, the expected opportunity cost of a focussing efforts on chasing a professional sports career from a young age is a lot lower, on average, for blacks than whites compared to the other alternatives available to them
Five hours is plenty of time on the front page, and the second page has good stuff too.

Neither the article nor the thread sheds much light on the story, so it doesn't seem surprising that this post didn't reach the top tier.
You should probably state what time period you are referring to when you recall hearing about Stripe..

I do not recall Stripe being positioned as a PayPal alternative really ever, but certainly not when it launched.

I also believe that Sam was first made aware of Stripe much earlier than most people and it probably did seem like quite a black swan at the time.

I know the very first time that I heard the idea for Stripe it was definitely considered a "crazy" idea. I would easily categorize it as a black swan investment.
> $300 per month? You can finance and colocate big server for that price

In the immortal words of Han Solo, "Yeah, but who's going to sysadmin it, kid? You?"

(I agree with you, however.)