skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for bringing a larger perspective to the issue.
Okay -- "what it takes" is a pretty broad question, but I'll do my best to put some thoughts together. I run a few web applications, but the most popular one is http://sleepyti.me -- with about ~50-60k views per day.

- A reliable hosting environment. I currently have a Linode VPS (basic $20 package, with $5 monthly backups) that runs http://sleepyti.me, my personal web site, an IRC server, a Mumble server, and a bunch of other stuff -- it's not even close to being maxed out resource wise, even with all the constant traffic the site is getting. It's important to remember that consistent network connectivity is a really important aspect here: a 30-minute downtime during peak hours can easily lose a lot of users. I'd say Linode is great, and I'm very happy with their service, but I also host several Sinatra web applications on a Digital Ocean VPS that only costs $5 per month (although I do my own backups, rather than using their service). I've noticed zero load-related performance impacts. Clearly, though, there is a limit to how far that can scale.

- A production web server. This probably goes without saying, but a lot of webapp developers are used to just working on their own dev environment. For my apps, I use nginx (and thin, when necessary).

- Security. Make sure that you have the basics of application security covered in your app itself. OWASP produces some pretty great "cheat sheets" that can help out in this area. Furthermore, make sure that your server is updated frequently, using SSL correctly, etc. I work in information security -- please believe me when I say that getting hacked is not something you want to deal with when you're trying to grow.

Hope this helps, and good luck with launched your apps!
I liked this visual explanation

http://setosa.io/blog/2014/07/26/markov-chains/
It's important to remember that the hacker mentality is not limited to the field of computer science, or even science at all; the concept of creative ingenuity transcends fields and industries.
At the $13/share pricing, Box will be paying its previous investors back penalty shares. Apparently they promised a share price of $20. [1]

1. http://pando.com/2014/07/08/boxs-updated-s-1-contains-onerou...
To bypass the paywall:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
By extension, language builtins should also never be the place for the best facilities to do $WHATEVER_PARTICULAR_TASK. The line between builtins and standard libraries is extremely variable between languages.
Come on! Maths is about passing on messages, and this is a human endeavor.
I don't understand the problem with having it on the same label as the serial number. Can you elaborate?
Absolutely true, and that's why it's important to make a conscious effort to fight these types of unconscious biases.
Guy Kawasaki's most favorite business apps
Javascript to 192.168.1.1, eg see here http://blog.kapravelos.com/post/68334450790/attacking-home-r...
Hey, North Korea gets a point for women's rights!
May I ask what altitude, roughly, you live at?
The useful thing about a standard library is that it provides a common vocabulary for code, which is a great help for interoperability. For example: c++ doesn't have a 3D vector class in its standard library, so pretty much every 3D-related library invents its own & you end up having to write lots of useless glue code to convert from one to the other.
Where are you located? If you're in one of the "hubs", i.e. Bay Area, San Diego, Boston, Cambridge (UK), etc, identify the local networking organizations and get exposure to what others are doing, both in industry and academia.

If you're not in a hub, get to one....
>Seems like a great trope for a science fiction 'super max' prison to be right in the middle between them.

Oh my god YES! This!
Huh, surprising green checkbox there on the iPad.
You probably mean 5C=D years but the logic is the same... :-)
While I'll readily agree that some parts of the standard library are rotten, that's not sufficient justification to say that there shouldn't be one.

I should also clarify my expectations about a standard library; to me, a standard library should have all of the basics covered (interaction with the underlying system, I/O, networking, etc.) and anything that benefits from better integration with the runtime (think data types such as those found in python's collections module).

If anything, I'd argue that the main problem with Python's standard library is not the library itself, but the lack of more focused curation.

Note that I never said that I expect all functionality to be available in a language's standard library; for me personally, Go's standard library has roughly the right balance.
We've taken to pressure canning dried beans in pint jars. All that, plus the end product is shelf-stable so you can build up a variety of pre-cooked beans in the pantry for convenience.
2015: The Year We Get Loading Screen Mini-Games Back
I suppose they need someone with a clean name to run the company. And he's probably also serving as an abstraction layer between them and online gambling issues.
There will probably be a lot of resistance towards self-driving cars from insurance companies as the issue of responsibility becomes much more complicated, so It's probably a good idea for Google to get some influence in this business.
So basically, they are better on every possible front, and the technology has existed for a while?

Yet, LWR is still the dominant design. So, what's the catch? There's clearly something preferable about Uranium LWR that causes their dominance, no?
Visual and interactive - this is pretty great!
It should be remembered that feeling empathy is not the same as being controlled by empathy. Just because I feel empathy for a newbie's struggles does not mean I am going to push sub-standard code live so they can get that feeling of success.

As the article notes, a ruthlessly critical attitude towards your own work is very important. I'd argue that it's one of the most important traits that helps an engineer develop. If we don't teach that, we will collectively become a community of warm, emotionally supportive, technically worthless people.
Well, you are correct. I stand corrected. Thanks for providing some insight into both of their personality.
Yeah, that statement only applies to scientists IMO, and to a huge degree. You'd be surprised to see what kind of research simply can't get funding.
This and many comments seem to miss the facts, at least as presented on the ABC conjecture's wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture:

- An error was found in 2012 and was just recently (Nov 2014) corrected
- He's re-released his notes & lectures on the subject
- A workshop will be held on the topic in March

That doesn't seem to be unusual / isolationist behavior, though it's obviously a complicated topic and since Fermat's Last Theorem has been deemed 'solved' already, the fact that it makes a FLT proof easier isn't much appreciated by the press / community.
fwiw I was in the same situation and found taking a stab at the challenges in http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer helpful.
Yes, this is very true, and one of the reasons that we have a pretty big set of things like collections. Common traits are an excellent thing to put into a standard library.
They should spare a drop for Gaza
Since the article you point to is about programming then I'd assume your asking about the technical side of things rather that actually acquiring 5-10k users (which is very difficult). It's an interesting question, but as you have it phrased it's similar to "how long is a piece of string."

Firstly, the load of a web app is going to be dictated by what the app actually does.

Also 5k-10k users should be clarified as to whether you mean total users or concurrent users. Testing capacity can be actually tricky figuring out how the number of users equates to actual hits to your servers.

As an example, we have nearly 50k accounts but on average only a few hundred are using the service at the exact same time. I would guess that our app is fairly complex compared to the average app. We run 3 app servers, 1 DB master, 1 DB slave, and 2 cache servers. Our monthly hosting bill is around $1,200.
TACHYUS Hiring Senior Front-End Engineer (JavaScript)
I run a free product without a revenue model as well. (DuckieTV, a chrome extension / node-webkit app, http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTV )

I have zero costs though, since it's serverless and all hosted on Google and Github's infrastructure.

For privacy reasons I have made the deliberate choice to not include any log reporting tools or use any tracking services that could possibly make development a whole lot easier.

Thankfully I get some support from a couple of other people that mostly help with small dev tweaks and supporting users, finding out what goes wrong and providing excellent feedback.

I can really recommend setting up a subreddit so that people can help themselves and others, and you can provide some feedback where needed.

All in all the load of user support has been quite easily manageable, though now with Trakt.TV's debacle with the new API there is definite pressure to fix things.
First off, there are some fields where scientists can write their own ticket. Certain medical areas where an MD as well as a microbiological PhD is required, those guys just don't hardly exist... I've heard of relatively insane levels of pay for them.

Then if you do get a good research position somewhere, you get your base pay and all but a lot of scientists reach out for grants and they can pay themselves from them, padding their base. If you can get one of those cherry positions, it's potentially way nicer than what most engineers make. If you work on things with industrial applications you can get royalties and such, all while working at a university. Seems a number of these places have like real pension type retirement programs as well.

The haves in science are doing great, the vast majority are have-nots though and they live near poverty in a lot of positions. It's my opinion looking in (my wife is a scientist) is that there are 2 main problems: 1) Little understanding and appreciation for real science, it's thankless, there are tons of failures to usually make incremental progress, the level of meticulousness is something else.. and 2) They've got their own culture running it now and there is a history of paying dues and lot's of unwritten traditions about how you can grow and evolve a career. Post-docs don't get paid much, that's how it is, even if a lab can afford it, post-docs don't often get jobs where they post-doc, even if they're experts on the lab's area of work because that's just not how its done. It's kind of like how MDs are stereotypically just ground up by working insane shifts at the at their residency because that's what the doctors before them had to do, almost like hazing..
TCP buffers, and caching eliminate any argument about Jitter that one could pose on this issue. Timing of file transfer and playback rate on the DAC are not linked, so this study is absurdly flawed.
Why Heady Topper Probably Won’t Be Coming to a Store Near You
The pricing feels really high. $9 per 60 minutes of content is a similar price as watching to a $200 million dollar hollywood production, I know you can't compare the two but it gives some perspective.

I mean if you pay $100 an hour to two people to code for 2h, with the basic editing and setup these videos cost maybe $750. That means you can break even (read: get paid $100 per hour per person to have fun coding) after 40 people watch a particular video, and that just seems like such a small number. Realistically you'd probably get a few thousand sales per video.

So in terms of costs, it seems quite overpriced. And in terms of value? Well comparing it to university it's sort of cheap, but not by much. A typical resident tuition fee is about $10k per year, that's 24 semester credit hours at $420, which is typically about 15 hours of tuition which is a rate of $27 or so per hour, while here it's $9, about a third. But college tuition involves a lot of other extras outside of those contact hours, tends to be subsidized, has the added value of awarding the status of a degree beyond its educational value, and is generally regarded as really expensive to the extent that we can't speak of universal access to higher education.

Anyway all of these are just for apples/oranges comparisons for some perspective. The better comparison would be say Team Treehouse which has 2 weeks free, then $25 monthly for access to over 1.000 videos, a development environment, support etc... it just seems ridiculous to charge $18 PER video. It'd be cheap as hell if it was a masterclass by experts for PhDs doing niche Machine Learning. But I'm seeing basic projects like 'parse a calculator' or 'rank a poker hand'.

I'm sure there's a market for it. Plenty of not-so-poor people around looking to learn how to code. But the pricing at least to me feels really high. Undoubtedly Growing up in a free youtube / streaming / torrenting culture definitely has shaped this perception. But more realistically, alternative tech educational services like Treehouse that offer 100x more similarly professional content for the same price make this seem like a poor purchase.

Beyond the pricing, love the idea.
This blog reminds me of something I heard in an interview with Dr. Roy Baumeister. He pointed out that when he works with grad students he has to actively criticize and knock down most of the ideas that his male students have because they are full of testosterone and hubris and he has to actively draw out his female students to build their confidence. He told some of his grad students this years ago and they thought he was being sexist, but years later when they (both male and female) got their own grad students they noticed the same thing.

Baumeister is a psychologist who has done research in evolutionary psychology, culture, and gender. His point is that, as taboo as the subject is today, there are differences (statistically) between men and women: how they learn and how they interact socially, and what they like. Right now, we are doing a lot of work to make STEM a better environment for women, but we probably also need to understand that the style of interaction that the poster is criticizing is not bad per se, it’s just a male style, and it does work - it’s what young men use to push themselves further. Women, on average, seem to need/want a different style. It’s going to be hard to figure out how to accommodate both needs without systematically favoring one.

We may not be at the right stage culturally to have a serious conversation about this. I think this is one of Paul Graham’s “Things You Can’t Say” http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I've found my project source code. Can share it with you. It uses some non-trivial scaling algorythm (can't remember the link to the original publication about this resampling), which produces good quality.
I've tried to port all math to worker but haven't it done yet.
If it can help, I could easily join your project and share codebase.
I've got some marketing ideas and I know where to grab some traffic and how to set up monetization.
If it's interested, touch me via e-mail or in Skype: vladimir.ignatyev
Proof That College Football Refs Are Riddled with Bias
> Two black holes orbiting each other in a binary configuration ... what the space-time around such a thing must be like

If I recall, there is a book about this. Samuel Delany, Empire Star. Absolutely phenomenal. From an amazon review: "The best way to describe the book is to say that it is the literary equivalent of an M.C. Escher print."

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Star-Samuel-R-Delany/dp/0553234...
The article also mentions that two supermassive black holes could orbit less than a parsec apart. The Earth is a long way from the Sun, but it's not too far away. So it kind of blows my mind to think that such a small space could pack two of the largest phenomena ever observed. I wonder what happens when they collide?

Also, this seems like a great place to ask any physicists that may be reading: Is there consensus about whether you could live inside a supermassive black hole? Theoretically, you should be able to cross the event horizon and be quite comfortable (apart from the existential horror of never being able to leave, running out of fuel, and ultimately succumbing to spaghettification). However, some models predict that you'd be instantly ripped apart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_%28physics%29

Which scenario do you personally believe?

EDIT: I confused parsec and AU, because I'm dumb. That's like confusing a bread crumb with a skyscraper. But I wonder whether it's possible to live in a blackhole for a little while?
While significant risk to internal organs seems unlikely, there have been studies for decades suggesting RF exposure may increase risk of cataracts in the eye.
e.g. http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc28/sc4/Ocular.pdf (see also the references)
I wonder if Patreon.com should add a "science" section?
Per the guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

It doesn't say anything about it having to be computer-specific, or technology-specific, or even maker-specific. Just that it has to be something hackers would find interesting.

And considering that it made it to the front page, QED.
I think it's important to consider that maybe scientists aren't worth paying that much. The average scientist is probably moving society forward, but I'm not so sure the median scientist is. Having been to a 'top 10' PhD program in a 'hard science' (chemistry), I am not sure 75% of the professors there were worth a dime. I am not sure 50% of the thesis defenses were, either (mine included).

This is in contrast to the doorman example, or in my case, being a Lyft driver (which pays more than being a postdoc). Every night, I help society out by providing a service that someone wants, and if you want to be more abstract, by keeping drunk people off the road.

I was able to raise $56,000 for an experiment in anticancer research. That doesn't seem like much (it isn't) but in retrospect it's about right. I asked for money for one experiment, and that's what I got. It doesn't pay my salary, but I probably don't deserve it (yet) until I've proven myself at least at one stage. Drug development is risky, why should society pay much more than the bare minimum to get it done?
Global responses to An Era Of Conscience movement
Part of it still feels exploitative to me. It vaguely reminds me of back in the early days of web sites where people thought they were doing a web developer a "favor" by letting them make their web site for them. "You can put your name on my site! What great press!"

Oh yeah, sure, while I'm young and learning maybe it's okay but at some point you realize you're just being scammed out of money
awesome awesome idea. any willingness to disclose a few numbers?
I have little more than a layman's understanding of the nuclear power landscape (I've read a decent bit and watched several talks, but that's about where it ends), but it seems to me that there are at least two reasons: 1) LWR reactors have been built for a long time, so they're very well understood (known risks are better than unknown risks) and the processes are already in place to bring them up. 2) Even though they're dominant, very few LWRs are built. There simply aren't many reactors being built of any kind, so it's unsurprising that the most common type (traditionally) is what we keep building.
I've contracted for several government agencies and research firms, and I've noticed only PhD's get to run laboratories. Without one, you hit a glass ceiling rather quickly (by which I mean you don't make the leap from 100Kish to 200Kish salaries)
How to Launch Your Website Tests Successfully with KISSmetrics
I'm really looking forward to CSS selectors level 4. That spec will include a new parameter to nth-child: nth-child(3 [of S]), where S can be any further selector.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/selectors-4/#child-index
> These days RAM is cheap

Ironicially it's a completly different story on the consumer market. I bought my two 4GB sticks about 2 years ago and now they cost twice as much. 4GB can cost you $40 which is not cheap at all.
Wallis WA-116 Agile AKA 'Little Nellie'
The dismissive criticism was not only present, but in a large proportion of messages; and those criticisms were supported by upvotes. These facts make a very clear statement about HN. I'm not sure what you are trying to prove with your ratios, do you think that the only issue is whether the ratio is better or worse than 1:1?
> Oh, and usually that's without working any of the summer months.

Hah! This must be one of the strangest and most pervasive myths about academia. Typically you only get the summer off ... from teaching. It's the prime time to do that research that motivated you to get into the business in the first place...

And conveniently, the University doesn't pay you a salary for this time. You can elect to pay yourself... out of your research budget. At the opportunity cost of students, postdocs, staff, equipment, travel, etc.
This is a depressingly perceptive comment. Is there anyway to counter or discourage these tendencies in other coders, do you think?

Normally, that would be management's job, or that of senior devs. But the former seem to encourage, or at least tolerate hypercritical responses, and the latter often actively engage in them.
I agree about urllib and unittest. However over the last decade I still find Python to be a one of the best "batteries included" language/platform.

That is not small thing either. It allows getting started easier, which in turns gets more people to use it.

Here is a list of modules I used and was happy there were in stdlib:

socket, shelve, cPickle, tarfile, urllib[2], Tkinter, time, ctypes, subprocess, asyncore, json, SimpleXMLRPCServer, wave (sorry, I did use it many time ;-) ), timeit, syslog and many others.

Most of the time I was happy to find them there.
This makes me think I do not understand what "walkaway safe" means.
I totally want to do this, but I'm kinda disturbed by the fact that they don't explicitly mention how the anonymization is done. Given that they want to study dynamics, I'm guessing they are going to be collecting timestamped location data, which is one of those data sets that is intensely personal and really hard to properly anonymize.
Some of my favorite sci-fi authors like Asimov (Foundation) and Harry Harrison (Stainless Steel Rat) might disagree with your last sentence. ;)

Personally, I think both sentences at the end of your comment are correct: it is inevitable that bureaucracy grows, and it is driven by the bureaucrats.

It's almost like a "law" of economics, which, of course, describes human behavior. So they can at once be the cause of something that is inevitable.
I've been incredibly impressed by the willingness of the Rust team to take a step back and re-evaluate old decisions. I think this 1.0 release will be much better for all the iterations put into e.g. dynamically sized types and other things that never quite fit in their first half-dozen iterations of the design. Congrats all!
So you moved out of the service area and complained that they could not continue to provide you service? And that you had signed a contract stating you would be provided service for 36 months?
Last chance to cash in before investors realize that cloud storage is essentially commoditized.
LWR is what the Navy used, and the civilian designs were just based on that.
Drones are getting better faster than anyone expected
Perhaps germinating the beans also triggers a process similar to malting of barley for beer making. It breaks down some complex sugars, making them easier to ferment, and perhaps easier to digest as well.