skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It is a compiled language .... and has a reference-counted memory management architecture which avoids the overhead of garbage collection ....

Reference counting is optionally available but is not the default approach to memory management.
If you had a personal twitter account, I could have granted you commenting access on Product Hunt. That's why I contacted you.
Re: Quantcast -- "I'm also really struggling to understand how 17,671 unique people could create only 11,005 visits..."

Quantcast's visits metrics is counting the computers that hit the site, whereas the unique people is counting, well, people obviously. As multiple (or even zero) people can be using a computer at the time when it loads the site, you'd naturally expect those numbers to differ, for example, when you have a group of people crowded around the screen to watch the latest episode of Real Kittens of Beverly Hills on Youtube.
A plain text file stored on an encrypted disk image is a pretty decent way to save passwords, as long as you can trust your text editor not to upload your data behind your back (which has generally been a reasonable assumption in the past).
There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML.

Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.
Fantastic, this appears to be changing then, because cloud services have been quite hesitant in the past about this.
My understanding was that it'd be impossible to make a 100% compatible docx parser even of armed with those docs. As an example, when the EU forced the issue I remember seeing stories about XML fields which simply contained undocumented blobs
There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications:

1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.

2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.

3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.

4. Equations!

I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.

I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.
Wasn't mature enough at the time, and JFS allowed larger volume sizes. After the second or third pod revision, BackBlaze switched to ext4.
Wasn't part of the scope of the language. It's a doble edged sword, but I could see that being a good thing too. If you want raw speed, and know what you're doing, it could be OK not to have overflow guards.
Great article!

Love to see more write up on software selection process, tradeoff, failure recovery process/methods and benchmark data.
If you submit an old article even if newer versions of it exist, at least mention the year in parenthesis.
IanniX: a graphical open-source sequencer for digital art
In later blog posts they discuss moving over to ext4 despite the 16TB size limit.
In my experience, there's much more to 'programming' than typing out new code. Where typing speed becomes an issue is in communicating with people, not machines: trying to have an IM conversation with a non-touch-typist is painful, and when you have emails or documentation to write, it's much more reasonable for typing speed to be the limiting factor.

I don't want such things to be a big chunk of my day, and being able to type quickly helps keep the amount of time I spend doing that to a minimum and lets me get back to coding :).
Starting Up, Then and Now: Why Branson Believes Business Life Is Better Today
I wonder how they can guarantee data integrity.

Are they checksumming on a higher level and is that cheaper than using ZFS with necessarily more expensive hardware?
LaTeX: great for those compsci students who don't want to stop programming, even when they come to write up their projects :)
Seriously, you can buy pretty good coffee beans in bulk, and you can buy a passable coffee machine and espresso press for $100. If you're still scraping things together, I think your developers will be ok with that.
Sure, there is a lot of code you could write that results in undefined behaviour. However, none of it is code that you should write, nor is it code that an expert would write.
Truly disgusting. They just don't care about disrupting the livelihoods of developers who have poured hours upon hours of hard work into their apps, only to be whimsically squashed without explanation. Not to mention the 30% revenue share - where does that money go if not to some basic level of support that lets you speak to a human being in these situations?
I don't think I've ever seen a physics paper not typeset in Latex.
well, if your code coverage scope is one line that's true, but it would make more sense to scope on statements.
Isn't this also a feature of ASCII-based markup languages, which the author suggests as the right alternative to LaTeX?
When we started our company, we were loathe to call ourselves CEO or CTO or anything else. It felt too big for where we were, and it felt self-aggrandizing. Instead we decided we'd just skip titles until we had more than three people.

This was a mistake.

It made it hard for external folks to understand who was the best contact for different types of requests, and we wound up with all of us doing every type of work.

It also made it internally, because we had inadvertently hamstrung our ability to specialize, even though we had unofficial definitions of what each of us did.

So we decided to stop giving a shit if somebody thought it was pompous, and we gave ourselves titles. It instantly solved a whole host of communication problems, many of which we hadn't even identified.

Don't be afraid of organization. Don't be afraid of titles. Don't be afraid of somebody who thinks that you can't be a CEO unless your company is of a certain size or maturity.

It turned out that titles exist for a pretty good reason.
Compare with the ol' DataHand [1] and the upcoming King's Assembly [2]. This one looks like it might be a most alien yet effective design, but I dislike the "chorded word" idea, because it has to rely on some sort of dictionary-based predictive text technique. Honestly I find all of these seem less efficient than a standard keyboard, but maybe that's just me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/70308014/kings-assembly...
Our experiences are different then. I spend a fair amount of my time actually editing code.
Is it only for HTML, or will it alert on changes to JavaScript files for instance?
As much as I like LaTeX, I think it has outlived its usefulness. Let me elaborate a bit...

LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good.

It's also interesting as a template language, to produce documents from applications, but here's where it starts to become obsolete: there are a lot of alternatives to do this that don't force the person creating the templates to be technically-inclined and having to learn LaTeX.

Also, LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. The rules say you let LaTeX choose the looks of your document, while you focus on content, but it's impossible not to spend hours fighting it because it's not breaking pages or placing figures where we want it to (and iterating over this endlessly as the document is modified). You just cannot force yourself to let LaTeX do everything by itself.

So, it's useful for novels (which might as well be written in plain text and let the publisher do the typesetting) or documents with a lot of maths (which are nowadays most likely also complex documents that cannot go without human intervention to look good.)

I like LaTeX for the technical aspect of it, but in the end it's just a tool do accomplish some goal and, sorry, but Word doesn't consume that much resources anymore on a modern machine...
I am also a bit suprised they're running Debian 4 + JFS combination instead of something a bit more modern, like FreeBSD and ZFS, for example, my default choice when it comes to filesystem nowdays. I'd love to hear abou their reasoning behind that and possible plans (if any) to move to something more recent, when it comes to software layer.
Thanks I knew that didn't sound righht
A footnote to your 2nd point: LaTeX actually is Turing complete. (You can find a Turing machine implemented in LaTeX at http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28L... .) As far as I know, this feature is more amusing than useful.
Adolescents, as a demographic, have only been around for about 100 years.
asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported.

I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.
Need the Add the Year at the title. This post is old.
Seems like it got deleted. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QkTa-zW... is the cache.
How many hyperbolic, bad faith posts about Yosemite are going to be made and voted to the top at HN? (This is the third I've seen this week, and they all make extremely negative insinuations based on incorrect assumptions and the shallowest possible examination of the functionality being excoriated.)

It appears that the only new functionality in this case is increased visibility via iCloud Drive. Presumably these documents were always saved on iCloud, which has been default behavior when you don't save to the local file system for a while.

As usual, there's an unfounded insinuation that this is intentionally nefarious activity on Apple's part. Documents and Data sync is easily disabled -- what did anyone think it was doing previously?
There are two kinds of users in this scenario. Those who don't care (99%) and those who do.

Correct, and those of us that do should act on behalf of those who don't, because a good many of them are not technically inclined enough to know if they should care.
The author is confusing positive thinking with blind, without-a-plan, plowing ahead. They're not the same.

Optimism and positive thinking are close synonyms. Positive thinking is the a belief that there is a solution to the problem and that you, as a problem solver, should be open to the paths that lead to the solution.
>HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

I agree that HTML should re-flow. Let's try with the OP article.

<http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn>
speaking from some experience in putting together and running a mooc class (as well as non-mooc classes), they are very watered down versions of their original courses. after a lot of soul-searching, I think that the world is better for having these classes, but I can't imagine how they could replace or supplant the previous model. from my perspective, the things that add the most value to a college class, in educational value, inherently do not scale.
That is really a shame that you guys didn't use this new requirement to improve your product and internal process. Your comment comes off as a group that was just obeying the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law and I could only guess that this would easily spill over into all cases of documentation even the cases where it matters. Having a large group of developers believe that it isn't worth the time to make good API's and produce worse than horrible docs is really sad. Taking the time to create good API, even for internal use can uncover design flaws, reduce errors, make it faster to make changes, easier to test, and faster to bring in new developers. Here with a government mandate you could have used it as an excuse to grow as a group to become better at creating software.
I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that.

The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.

Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.
Could this all be related to continuity features? Not all apps support continuity APIs but I suspect we'll be seeing more and more apple stuff working across devices and one way for this work is by using iCloud. iCloud Drive is just an iCloud service.
We should be writing papers in HTML.
I am very tempted to try to write my next publication in HTML. However, I seriously worry about things like footnotes, code examples, floating figures and references. CSS3 seems to have support for many of these, but I wonder how well the convert-to-PDF pipeline really works, and how flexible it really is.

It's bad enough if I have to convert my original source to some other format years down the line, but it is absolutely critical that I can at least create the initial PDF correctly.
Oh sure. It's programmability gets used quite a lot I think e.g.:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/

There are also some really nice graph drawing libraries etc. which I would guess rely on this.
When iPhones Ring, the Economy Listens
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-storage-pod-4/ seems to suggest their boot drive is SATA (google "WD5000LPVX"), where are you getting the idea that they're PATA?
Dear Chefs
Some of those are really old. Ruby 1.8.3??
I don't know why many people, including the author skips (or don't even see?) the important point: we are not just miles and miles far away, we are in the entirely different reality from where automatic typography is any good. So the more it's “declarative” (whatever this means) the worse it will look. This is out ugly reality. And the document in LaTeX made by someone without a clue (≈ how we want it, simple and declarative) is f*cking MSWord-level ugly.
As of 2012, they checksum each file and check it every few weeks, and if a file went bad they have the backup client retransmit it:

https://help.backblaze.com/entries/20926247-Security-Questio...
> LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. Maybe I could agree with a general "it is irritating to make complex documents", though.

After many bitter fights with WYSIWYG software and 300+ page technical documents, I firmly believe that LaTeX is by far the least irritating way of making them.
That old MacOS stuff is hard to find on the Internet. One thing I did find that gets a bit close is http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_16/Radcliffe_f.... Problem is that it likely is a bit hard to follow if you do not know about the stuff. Moreover, it doesn't really show patching itself.

I am fairly sure there is some article about patching in those archives of Develop, but I couldn't find it.

Wikipedia has little, too. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/INIT may provide some starting points.
A Bible dating to 1600 which contains a secret arsenal of poison
This is an old video; the original is from over five years ago:
http://youtu.be/dTHWBSluUjU
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/rc-jets-120/9133201-fast-rc-...

Either it's a rip off or somehow "Jukin Media" got the rights to it... It never ceases to amaze me when old stuff goes viral like this. Maybe it's the keywords stuffed in the title, 'cause UAVs are a pretty hot topic these days, but this thing is not a UAV.
Three myths and eight tips for presentations
These have been around for many years. The FAA already regulates them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-controlled_aircraft#Jets

> In the U.S.A. the FAA heavily regulates flying of such aircraft to only approved AMA Academy of Model Aeronautics sites, in where certified turbine pilots may fly. Also, the AMA requires model aviation enthusiasts who wish to operate miniature gas turbine powered RC model aircraft, to be certified in the operation of the type of gas turbine engine, and all aspects of safety in operating such a turbine-powered model aircraft, that they need to know in flying their model.
To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.
This years C++ Proposals listed by mailing and subgroup
No, not directly. If you're logged into iCloud, Documents and Data sync is enabled, the app uses iCloud documents, and you don't save the file locally, the file is saved in iCloud. As far as I recall this is how iCloud has always worked.
I'm old enough to have collaborated on papers using troff (strictly speaking psroff) and sccs as a revision control system, long before latex became popular and PDF didn't yet exist. So, yes, the primary requirement is, as you say, for an ASCII-based markup system to enable this workflow.

However, latex is extremely good at flowing text while applying good style guidelines. Most of the time you know that extending a paragraph by a line won't make anything bad happen - no titles left at the bottom of a page, acceptable stretch of line spacing, and things like that. Of course you can only push this so far before you have to fiddle about moving figures to the right page, etc. This is probably unavoidable, although it would be better to have a bit more direct control over where floats end up. The key thing is that latex does mostly get the small stuff right, so you're not constantly yelling at your collaborators for breaking anything.
Quite detailed post. Loved reading it.
Fed’s $4 Trillion Holdings to Boost Growth Beyond End of QE
> Could something that small break the sound barrier?

Why not? Missiles and rockets of similar size do.
Healthcare Transparency Tools Lower Overall Claims Costs
I think the article is referencing employee-based cost transparency tools such as Castlight.

These are by nature private, and costly.

My startup is working on providing these tools for anybody, free of cost:

http://comparedcare.com

Let me know what you think.

This is exciting news
Synaptic – Advanced Neural Nets in JavaScript
> A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block

> But the intelligence of where to store data and how to encrypt it, deduplicate it, and index it is all at a higher level (outside the scope of this blog post).

I'm curious about their software that works outside the nodes too. I've been working on storage clusters over this past 9 months using the Ceph ( http://ceph.com/ ) open source storage software. Its pretty amazing -- and I suspect it could be deployed to a set of backblaze pods too.

It seems to be that for production environment where you wanted to maintain availability you would to build at least 3 of those pods for any deployment - enabling replication across pods/storage nodes.
Timeline: Web Widget for Visualizing Temporal Data
Maybe we have read "social status policing" to mean completely different things. To me, that suggests caring a lot about status, and worrying a lot about people laying claim to more status than what they're due. My issue here is with people turning status, either deserved or otherwise, into a bigger thing than it is.

Social status is only very rarely material to any given conversation, so I do care when people feel the need to bring it up, and when they feel the need to give themselves pompous titles, because they're signalling to me that they do care about status, and they're going to make it an issue in our dealings.
I think the article is referencing employee-based cost transparency tools such as Castlight.

These are by nature private, and costly.

My startup is working on providing these tools for anybody, free of cost:

http://comparedcare.com

Let me know what you think.

This is exciting news
All hard (but honest) LaTeX fans may enjoy reading my old post about LaTeX, which is somehow loosely related (I hope I'm not overstretching it :>).

Getting things done in LaTeX (or not)

http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-don...

Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff.

I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility.

EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.
The uses is a very interesting question because the first things that pops to mind : it would be totally useless without the proper tools to take advantage of it. Basically the web is a flatland with many arrows going from one doc to the other - a one to one relational database. Semantic web (or lets call structured web) gives it a z axis to build depth.

A trivial example I gave on another comment :

> The way google exposes the web today is unidimensional : keywords => related website list. It's great for humans to parse. But its extremely limited for machines. Why isn't there yet an API or an UI to ask for "all books of Japanese novelists of the last 2 centuries" (website links included per book).

An other example that comes to mind is : you query a person and instead of a list of related website you get a set of tabs with : bio from different sources, work, news, images & videos.... Bonus, you don't need to be google anymore to do that ! Ok that's far fetched but imagine the potential for webapps.
Show HN: Hashi Link – A visual, sudoku-loving, puzzle game for iOS and Android
Before learning Haskell, try learning lisp through SICP. Haskell is wonderful but it's mostly (not really but bear with me) syntactic sugar over lazy application, which is explained in SICP (as opposed to eager evaluation used almost everywhere else). Syntactic sugar makes the whole thing appear like dark magic but it's not. It's a few minimalistic rules applied over and over (at both language and meta levels).
I'm dubious that you can actually choose your own hours AND make a decent living. With surge pricing and higher demand in the post-work hours, I would assume you have to work those hours to maximize income, no?
http://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive-...
The whole article is exactly about that point. Epub is just a packaged set of html pages, for which tex is horrible, because it's page-centric.