skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you a disgruntled employee? You sure sound like one. That, plus that you worked there over ten years ago - and that Rackspace didn't even offer a DNS api until a few years ago[1] - makes it very hard to take seriously any of your claims about the nature of their dns infrastructure.

All we know is that Rackspace has dns servers in three out of its six datacenters[2], and that they appear not to have always-on DDoS protection in place.

Market cap and technical sophistication, esp at large scale, tend to become divergent.

You say this, but go on to compare Rackspace unfavorably to Amazon who, at 141.93B (of which AWS is just a part), has over 20x Rackspace's market cap and probably 10x the infrastructure[2][3]. Big companies do things poorly, but then it's hard to have highly-available dns without having lots of infrastructure.

Namecheap, Route53, Dyn, DNSimple, and now Rackspace have suffered DDoS attacks with outages of varying severity. Don't act like DDoS prevention is a solved problem and claim technical incompetence.

1: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/web-host-rackspace-o...

2: http://www.rackspace.com/about/datacenters

3: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/
The fact that large groups of people are grossly under-represented in SV categorically proves that it's not a meritocracy in the presumably positive sense that guy means it, and is very much a meritocracy in the true meaning of the word.
Meteor is monolithic in that it forces your app to be structured in a particular way - It dictates how you should handle your data and how your scripts get loaded/bundled into your app. That said, I think it's much more flexible (and scalable - In a business sense) than a closed solutions like Firebase. I think Meteor is suitable for most projects and monolithic isn't always a bad thing - There is some negative stigma around the term but it's not entirely fair. People don't go around calling Linux 'monolithic' even though it is!
Consider that if you're so willing to compromise your principles on human rights for the benefit of your family then you're basically practicing tribalism. You might as well enslave a race, or subjugate a class, or annex a sovereign nation for the lebenstraum.
Time to switch to guile.
Homo Economicus might be fictional, but Corpo Economicus and Beaureau Econonomicus are not. Whenever individuals must make decisions on behalf of organizations (public or private), they must be able to justify their actions in the rational, sometimes psychopathic, terms of their institution (to make legible decisions, to use Venkatesh Rao's terminology).

Though economics is value-neutral when it comes to what individuals define as their best interests, institutions have their best interests defined quite explicitly, and are often indifferent to any other outcome. Applying the rational actor model to such institutions provides a great deal of cover, if not active encouragement, for maximizing the acquisition of power and resources with little regard for the irrational human processes of morality, responsibility and decency.
Indonesia’s capital builds giant sea wall to stop it from sinking
Ask HN: Automating large Enterprise business operations
Hi HN.
I'd like some advice about automating business operations - what to consider, what technologies or framework to look out for etc. For background, I'm working for an ICT service provider, and just got promoted to look into enterprise-wide automation and system. My team is small, but I report directly to the C-level. Frankly, I'm a hobbyist programmer, and was only promoted to this post due to my enthusiasm and small track records i.e. handling CSV files for analysis etc.

The ultimate goals are to improve lead time in service delivery, reduce aging tickets, and reduce cost. I currently see gap in performance management, where the bosses do not have clear visibility or simply do not trust the performance metrics.

Simultaneously, there are lean internal consultants doing studies and making recommendations. Also, middle managers are being trained in Six Sigma, acquiring "belts".

To reiterate, how do I start assessing the situation and what kind of technologies or methodologies associated with this scenario? Is it SOA, workflow engine, ERP etc? How feasible is using standard web framework i.e. Django or Flask for business automation?

Thanks.
Coding, Crowd(sourcing/funding), Card Games, and Completely Controversial
...and all of the media.
That's just an availability problem. One of the likely effects of self driving cars is that taxi density will increase by quite a lot, which should decrease pickup latency.
It's pretty "funny" the article took 20+ seconds to load. (Flamebait; Off-Topic; Insightful)
Companies could if they wanted. But up-front capitol costs are high like that, it's easier to "crowd source" the investment and take your 30% off of other people's effort. All you have to do is provide a coordinated system they can sign into/outof.
And passing laws about "kitty litter" just because today's ranting blog post is about kitty litter is a _spectacularly_ bad idea.

The law shouldn't be about specific individual products, but about consumer rights and vendor obligations.

I'd be happy to discuss a law requiring vendors to disclose at point-of-sale any measure taken in a product's design that artificially limits replacing consumables with 3rd party alternatives. Cat litter machines, ink jet printers, coffee makers, razors, cell phones, soda streams - if there's a reasonable assumption that you could buy kitty litter, ink, coffee beans, blades, airtime, or carbon dioxide gas - and _not_ have to buy those from one specific company who sell it at significantly above market rates, vendors should be required to clearly disclose that before the sale takes place.

Laws should solve _classes_ of problems, not instances.
FastMail continue to impress me. Good work folks.
I wonder if you have considered updating your about page.
Who cares about voting anyway?
It's a lot easier to work on a greenfield project than to change an existing, extremely heavily used project.

And, different group.

I see their modified self-driving Lexus SUVs driving around Mountain View all the time.
+1 to @pbreit.

I had the same remark; "why on earth another Chat Widget company?". I guess you could communicate better on the service by adding some sort of graphic (user comes to your site, we do this, we do that, ...).

Best of luck!
"And before you know it, the protocol is bloated as hell and you've basically reinvented HTTP."

I don't think this assertion makes sense. If it's JSON over HTTP (as you've said above), why would they need to reinvent HTTP to achieve any of the stuff they're trying to achieve? They already have all of HTTP to choose from, no need to reinvent it. And, you've made a lot of claims based on some kind of slippery slope argument (which is a fallacy).

I think it would be educational for everyone talking on this subject to spend some time learning a bit about the existing protocols in the space. SMTP is messy, and shows its age in a lot of regards (character encoding complexity, transfer of large data, authentication of sending servers, etc.). IMAP is somewhat less messy and slightly more modern, but still quite old.

Neither protocol is well-tuned for modern email usage. I don't know that JMAP will solve it, but given how much effort is going into web tools, both on the server and client side, and how many more people have experience developing with HTTP, I don't see any reason to not leverage that for email, too.
I too benefited greatly from the negotiation piece (got the signing bonus from the offer I didn't want from the company with the offer where I did want to work) and it's become part of my standard package of advice and resources for friends looking for software jobs. Thank you!!
It's important to remember just how recent slavery was in the US and how much closer to equality we are now than even just 40 years ago.

Some people that fought in the civil war where alive in 1950, and your grandparents where likely to have met someone that fought in that war and or a former US slave.
The Superfans Using Stats to Get to the Bottom of 'Serial'
AACs, actually. (MPEG's superior successor to the obsolete MP3 format.) It fixes some artifacting issues and produces higher quality audio at lower bitrates.
Anaglyph 3D, SBS 3D and Top/Bottom 3D
Did any one read the book that is very similar to this, but used Java as an example?
Most isn't all tho! At any time I can come up with a dozen really small fixes. Changing the timing of a task, updating a string, or any other small things that are always hanging around.
Life is not fair. And that's a fact.

But (glass half full) life is more fair than it was 100 years ago. And it was more fair 100 years ago that it was 1000 years ago. And probably, it was more fair 1000 years ago that it was 8000 years ago.

We should all do our part to do the right thing. We should support systems that make sense. We should recognize that sometimes ability lies in surprising areas. But we are never going to see life be completely fair. Not in our time. Expecting differently I think will lead to despair, cynicism and disgust. I believe we should do what we can in our time, and recognize how far we have come since we first came down out of the trees....
This is a LOT to read up on, but seriously consider mesos + aurora. It is really incredible stuff and Twitter uses it for huge production environment. The Mesosphere guys have better documentation with Marathon, but it has a lot of catching up to get to the feature set of Aurora.

I happen to be the tech lead of a team that builds internal tools for an "enterprise" company primarily using Django and Flask. Build it and then show the business how it is useful. Sadly, that means you might need to write a lot of high quality docs or high quality clients (if you write an api). I tend to favor "api first" development.
Plastic bags actually. A plastic bag looks pretty solid to most sensors and cars have been known stop suddenly when one flies in front of the car.
Quadcopter drone packs first all-Linux autopilot
> Housing prices going up while the rest of the country suffers.

Aren't rising house prices also a problem?
Why? Not having a vote is not a major pain point for most people.
Thanks @jamesbrownuhh where did you get that detail about the phone home proxies?
FWIW the CERT ('US Computer Emergency Readiness Team') report on the 19th [1] delves a bit deeper into the exploit methods.

If you search for the MD5 hashes of the code you can find code snippets and incidents where such code was used in the past (hacking attempts at DHS, etc). Even though none of these were '0-days' or written by those with ties to NK, the attribution seems to be based on such code reuse.

[1] https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-353A
Elements of Distributed by Computing by Vijay Garg is great: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Distributed-Computing-Vijay-G...
EFF's Must-Reads and Must-Sees: Books and Movies of 2014
What's the value of never having another farcical performance review?

What's the value of being able to devote tomorrow to reading a Phyiscs (or whatever) book if you don't feel like going in to work? Or going out to a movie?

What's the value of being able to pick your kid up from daycare no-hassle when they run a fever?

What's the value of never ever having to dress some way you don't want to, to travel at times that annoy you, etc.?

When you're an employee, or a tightly-scheduled professional, or in a high-velocity startup, you give up all of these things. Sometimes it's worth it, but often it's not.
We didn't pivot. ;)
Actually theres been a lot of research that increasing speed limits have more benefits than not. Most accidents that happen on high ways resulting in fatalities are due to driving under the influence. A higher speed limit has been shown to decrease accidents, decrease ticket fines, and decrease fuel consumption.

Making it illegal to buy SUVs is moronic even if buying them is moronic in itself. Lots of things in life are dangerous, and we're going too damn far with needing to make anything with a potential of danger illegal. I'd much rather own a Range Rover which is far more comfortable, enjoyable to drive, accommodating, while reserving the capacity to take me to Yosemite a few times a year.
It's definitely monolithic, but depending on what you're doing it can be a real time saver to have a lot of decisions made for you up-front.
> There are many things that happen when you and your kids are comfortably sleeping or having hot cocoa.

Torture isn't even effective in getting any information. So you can't justify it on pragmatic grounds.
As one comedian said, the three probably put it to a vote as to which two would get to walk on the moon, and Armstrong and Aldrin said "Let's do it alphabetically!"...
When trying to reach out to the Perl community, don't use hackernews. Use irc.perl.org, blogs.perl.org, perlmonks.org or perl-community.de

(Also a website that loads would be useful. ;) )
Those LIDARs are a spinning array of lasers measuring time of flight for each laser as it spins. Each of ~64 lasers forms one scan line all around itself, and by taking all the scan lines together, they form a rough picture of the 3D structure of the surroundings. You can filter out aberrant inputs in software.
I don't necessarily agree that prosecutions would be a bad idea, but I do agree that for reasons given by plenty of other people in this discussion, they're not going to happen.

So you're right: we should turn our efforts to fixing the system.
Show HN: rb-brain - An easy-to-use neural network library written in ruby
But when have the gods actually spoken?

Seems likely what we really have in the words of the gods is simply a collection of more uberman psychopathy. Which leads us right back to the inevitability of lack of absolutes.

Maybe we would be better off dealing with this as is?
There is a real problem of monotony with such an over concerned need for safety and practicality. I mean, I really don't want to live in a society where everyone has chosen to drive cars like this to the markets. Yes it looks cute in a picture, but boring as hell to live in.
No mandated format for message-ID. If you are proxying an existing store with a stable message-ID, you can just use that. My partially written gmail proxy uses the MSGID from Gmail, for example.

SHA1 was a good balance between speed and unforgability at the time. There's still no known collision, and I'm working on putting a piece of randomness into the LMTP headers that are added to every message on delivery into Cyrus to make it even safer.
Maze generators are a lot of fun to play with, but don't always come up with the most compelling gameplay environments.

One of the techniques I've heard works well is to step up the abstraction level one click, and create interesting environments and set pieces, then combine those to create a compelling environment for your players. One approach to do this uses herringbone Wang tiles to place various precreated environment tiles in a random, pathable way.

http://nothings.org/gamedev/herringbone/

The results are similar, but allow the developer to inject a little bit of human direction along the way.
Anybody who feels the need to bolster their argument with "trust me" is trying to fuck you over. It's an ironclad rule that people will only say that when they know they shouldn't be trusted.
In 1995 C++ it wasn't a good choice. In 2000 it was a poor decision in most cases. In 2005 it was a bad decision in almost every case. In 2010 it was completely indefensible. It is almost 2015, why are we even talking about it? C++ was a mistake. A bad detour on the highway of computing.
>why would any senator give up 2% of their power to add 2 more senators?

I think the issue is more why would any republican senator vote for it, since DC is extremely liberal and would be confirmed Democratic bastions
It's boring. This car says you have no imagination, no spontaneity, you're extremely practical, possibly OCD, with a German sense of humor.
Suddenly, Google is surrounded by pessimism
Your political opinions are not universal, and those who disagree with you are not evil, and frankly your way is stupid and the reason the mess perpetuates.
>key distribution
GPG key servers?
That's a pretty big, open question. There's a ton of literature out there that you could (and probably should) read, and no simple HN post can do justice to the scope of process automation / BPM / workflow, etc.

For some background on business process / workflow automation, a few good books to review would include:

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Business-Process-Modeling-Mi...

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Business-Process-Manageme...

http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Enough-Systems-Competitive-Autom...

http://www.amazon.com/Social-BPM-Bpm-Workflow-Handbook/dp/14...

http://www.amazon.com/iBPMS-Intelligent-Systems-Workflow-Han...

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Life-BPMN-Analyze-Automate-Proces...

That said... for starters, I'd back up to the issue of truly understanding the business need you're trying to address, and figure out a methodology for mapping the technological capabilities you will implement, to the business strategy. To that end, I'm a fan of a technique called "capability cases", and actually wrote a series of blog posts on that topic a while back. I'll refer you there for more on that topic:

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-capability-cases-are...

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-what-is-capability-ca...

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/capability-cases-part-th...

The other positive thing about the Capability Cases methodology is that it helps IT people learn to "speak the language" of LOB executives (and, to some extent, vice versa, if everybody buys in), and helps bridge that gap between "the business side of things" and "the IT side of things".

Anyway, if you get through all that and decide that some sort of BPM system is for you, there are a handful of high quality, popular, Open Source BPM engines out there that you could consider. If nothing else, they could enable you to get to a good POC quickly and without spending a bazillion dollars. One popular option is Activiti:

http://www.activiti.org

It uses the industry standing BPMN2 notation. Stay away from anything that mentions BPEL, and stay away from Oracle products. Especially Oracle products that involve BPEL.

Depending on how complex your needs are, you might not actually need a dedicated BPM / workflow engine. In that case, you could certainly code up automation code in any general purpose language of choice. But be careful of going down the path where you wind up rebuilding the wheel.

I'd also advocate taking a careful look at the idea of "Social BPM", which focuses on making BPM systems more flexible and less rigid, and introducing aspects involving social connections between humans.

I'm not trying to be overly self-promotional here, but I will refer you again to a couple of posts I have previously written on this subject, which may be of use to you:

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/social-events-bpm-oh-my-...

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-solving-social-aspect...

Like I said, this is a big topic. I could talk about this stuff for days on end, or until you died from boredom. :-)

Seriously though, if I can be of any further assistance, feel free to drop me an email.
No, it originated in 2002, but the equivalent was VB, COM, and ASP. That said, I was speaking in the present tense.
I disagree. Most people driving around are not racing drivers so they're not "one with the car" so they don't treat it like there bodies. They're more likely to treat it as an accessory.

More over, I quite enjoy driving so I'm not interesting in relinquishing control of the vehicle.
NetHack 1.3d on the x68000
Looks like good reading, thanks! I'm always interested in new techniques for use in my project http://socketcluster.io/
Don't underestimate the influence of US culture; SUVs are the new "estate Mercedes" over here.

Sports car are really quite gauche, the realm of sheiks, footballers and crass salesmen. Old Money, industrialists, politicians and affluent professionals will buy SUVs for the day-to-day.
Aren't most tanks driven by teenagers already? Of course, they get very specialized training, but it still shows that teens can handle that responsibility under the right circumstances.

Actually, I don't really know: how old are the soldiers in a typical tank crew? I guess they might have a couple of years in the service before they get into a tank, so maybe they're early 20's rather than teens.
And how do you trust those? And if I'm a brand new user, how do I get my key in there?

All the moving parts probably exist, but so far no one has pulled it together into something that a random person off the street can use.

Its not the problem JMAP is trying to solve.
I am truly frightened by the fact that you probably aren't alone in thinking that, for instance, shoving something into someone's rectum with 'excessive force' causing anal prolapse isn't torture. I would ask if you feel the same way if it's someone other than the American government doing it to Americans as you do when it's the American government doing it to Muslim people, but I don't really want to continue the conversation, it's sickening.
I can't imagine how painful it has to be to be known for an achievement the rest of the country has effectively abandoned for decades. Every single time someone runs up to ask him "what was it like on the moon?" must be like a knife to the gut, a painful reminder of what we've willingly given up.
For what it's worth, neither do I. I did get my first "real" job in 2000, in the midst of the madness, but since then, my lack of education credentials has been an issue maybe once or twice. But +1 on self-employment, I think that's a more fulfilling path.
Now I'm not aware of how modern military training is built, but I have to imagine that the top priority for the military is making sure that their own soldiers don't die. Apart from the ethical aspects, training somebody takes a long time, and having people with experience on the field seems valuable.

Much like how lifeguards are taught that the first priority is making sure that they are safe rather than saving the person drowning.
My presentation to the Thunderbird folks led with that, and we would have used it at Inbox Love too if we'd had time, but a 5 minute presentation had to get straight to the point.

It's a good comic. Good point.

We didn't take this decision lightly. There are significant reasons why all the existing standards don't do what's needed, and we made sure we built a technology preview and used it in the real world first - check the video or try out FastMail yourself.
I think you're better off learning through courses. Trying to reverse engineer other site's JS by looking at their source is usually a pain because of how JS source is served (heavily minified) and it requires you to dig through the entire naming structure of the site's HTML, etc. Just stick with some courses that teach you sound principles.
You really think this will survive a crash with an SUV? It looks very flimsy.
I think your problem is that you assume that because Uber might be, in some cases, be ignoring regulations that that means that Uber's behavior is wrong. The law usually not a guideline for ethical behavior. Specially in a country as bureaucratic as ours. The law quickly becomes something that protects incumbents and stifles innovation.
I just wrote the Haskell DDP client last week :)
> you would do whatever it took to save your family

Including something illegal, yes?

This is a stupid argument and has no bearing on whether ot not torture should be legal.
The Fordham Road BID Selects APPrise Mobile's App Development Platform
And how do you solve the problem of reliably delivering messages over XMPP?

For ex, if I switch from 3G to Wifi on my mobile (or just loose connectivity) the server still thinks I'm online and will send messages over the TCP socket (that hasn't timeouted yet).