skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our point in the COST paper was neither that distributed computation systems are bad per se, nor that a laptop is a fine substitute for many of the real-world deployments of distributed systems.

What these posts rail against is a tendency (post-MapReduce/Hadoop) to motivate and evaluate distributed systems solely in terms of their batch performance. This is a particularly common problem in graph processing research, where 2008-era general-purpose systems (i.e. Hadoop) have terrible performance, and so provide a straw-man baseline that a reasonably competent grad student should have had no difficulty in outperforming.

"Does my new system outperform a single thread?" seems like a proper hypothesis to test for a distributed system that claims only a performance motivation. Instead our grad student finds that there is a long list of peer-reviewed systems to compare against, and doing that should be enough, right? It would be fine if those systems had been tested against the first hypothesis, but in most cases they have not, so the new system can be much worse than a single thread (for a small set of benchmarks) and this will go undetected. The COST work is a remedy for this issue.

To return to your original question, I do think that distributed systems are good for some things. First, the OP concerns running graph algorithms on genuinely big data: 128 billion edges, and 3.5 billion vertices. A distributed system should be able to outperform Frank's laptop on that graph, and hopefully this post will encourage developers of new systems to aim higher and evaluate their systems on this scale of data.

The second is that distributed systems offer far more than pure batch performance. For example, geo-distribution is critical to providing a good user experience in web properties; and serving interactive queries with low latency and high availability is a particular interest of mine. We touched on the first part in the Naiad paper [1], and I expect this will become especially important for inference in online learning systems [2]. Hopefully the COST work will force the authors of these systems to try harder in their implementation, and we will all benefit as a result.

[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2522738

[2] http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/Papers/CIDR15_Paper19u.pdf
They're finally innovating here in Canada.

Most branches are open until 7pm on one weeknight, and my local CIBC is now open 9am-midday every Saturday.
For anyone looking to learn more about Elixir/Erlang, here's a dump of links that I posted recently to the local Atlanta Elixir Meetup group.

Roughly in the order I'd recommend consuming them.

Dave Thomas - Power of Erlang, Joy of Ruby - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lww1aZ-ldz0

Dave Thomas Elixirconf Keynote - Think Different- http://www.confreaks.com/videos/4119-elixirconf2014-opening-...

elixir-lang.org tutorial - http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/1.html

Programming Elixir - https://pragprog.com/book/elixir/programming-elixir

Awesome Elixir - Curated list of great libraries - https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Elixir In Action - http://www.manning.com/juric/

Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good - http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

Erlang and OTP In Action - http://www.manning.com/logan/

I haven't had a chance to read McCords new book, but having read his code and interacted with him a fair bit in #elixir-lang the last few months I can only assume I'll be adding it to the bottom of this list as an important intermediary step to becoming proficient in Elixir along with learning OTP.
I personally find Peopleware outdated. Maybe the general ideas still hold but there is little useful details that are still relevant after 25 years.
The Race to Replace Bitcoin
Completely agree. The closer we get to navigating the net like Johnny Mnemonic, the better!

Amusingly, you can see other people navigating beside you, which is pretty novel, fwiw.
>> I'm familiar with the philosophical differences between Free Software and Open Source.

But in this context you seem to imply that there are practical differences i.e: Not all Open Source licences are considered Free Software in the practical sense.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was certifying all sorts of licenses as "open source" under their definition. Basically if you allowed people to see your source code it was considered open source. That's not really practical and most open source licenses had an agenda of the company retaining control, which means people can't really do what they want. To most developers there are basically the BSD/MIT licenses that allow you to do whatever you want, and the GPL/LGPL licenses that allow you to do what ever you want - so long as you pass that freedom on to your users. These are both forms of Free Software, though the distinction causes much argument. Every other "open source" license is generally more restrictive and meant for someone to retain ultimate control, including the old Microsoft licenses.

In my opinion the OSI did more harm to the movement than good by "certifying" a huge number of irrelevant licenses so companies could claim be doing the cool new thing. None of that code can be integrated into anything else under different terms - at least not without consulting a lawyer.
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

I highly recommend patio11's newsletter :)
Let's say I want to use Scala.js to build, not an application, but a JavaScript library. The library exposes a JavaScript API that JavaScript code can call. The library's objects can be used in full from JavaScript.

Can I do this with Scala.js? If so, how?

Very few, if no, *-to-JavaScript cross-compilers can do this. For example, Dart might seem to be that language, but on closer inspection, it's not. Your library is locked inside a JavaScript VM-like data structure.

Although you can get a JavaScript object out of Dart-to-JavaScript compiled library, you need to manually hook up every function in its API yourself. In other words, it's not practical to use Dart to build a JavaScript library that exposes a sophisticated JavaScript API.

Is this possible in Scala.js?
Feelings and learnings from getting our free trial hacked
I see this more as how phones are currently. You must divert your attention away from life to fiddle around with a device. That is diminished reality. Something like a mature Google Glass that integrates seamlessly with reality, having commands that can flow with day to day tasks--that is augmented reality.
Man Documents His Last Moments with His Dog Oden
That's a good point. One 2d screen doesn't seem to benefit from the 3 dimensions.

Having it all around, visible and linked might change everything. Very much like whiteboards or other 3 dimensional physical representations (think like in Cop TV shows) help us to see the big picture.
Interesting question, although I'm not sure it applies much in the real world. Aren't the welds themselves typically the weakest link in a build? Seems like the engineering tricks used to keep welds under stress from ripping apart would also benefit the affected metal in the HAZ.
Hey Matt, I'm one of the founders. All existing APIs require using a secret key, which you obviously wouldn't want to share in your front-end code. We overcome this by allowing sending only predefined templates, so for a "Share with a friend" feature you'd create a template called "share", and your call would look like -

EmailJS.send("share",{"to": "friend@gmail.com","message":"You have to check this out!"})

This should prevent using our service for spamming, and we'll also offer some tools like CAPTCHA image, or rate limiting, to deal with spam/abuse.

Let me know if you have any further questions!
Drawing a line around one kind of metaprogramming and calling it "proper" is pretty silly.
Nobody is expecting you to change anything. He agrees: your story highlights a problem with GG.

But mac filtering is a pet peeve for many of us. It is worth mentioning, as often as necessary: it's bollocks. Don't do it. Let everyone know that it's useless.

Read that post as if prefaced with: "On a tangent: ..."
I agree. I can't turn left or right. Feels very restricting - opposite of what you'd expect.
The trouble is that it's not a lot of space, and it's not as simple as stiffness/weight of the material. Think about something simple like a structural tube. The diameter of the tube has significantly more impact on it's stiffness than it's material. So if you use a 30% lighter, but strong enough material, you can add 30% to the cross sectional area of the tube- which means you can make it a bit bigger in diameter, which will have potentially huge impacts on overall structural stiffness. Note that adding 30% more material will add at least 30% more strength to the part (huge oversimplification here, but just for arguments sake, we'll use that simple tensile case).

Titanium was useful when we needed very high strength on a very large part - a good example is the trunnions that attach payloads to the space shuttle cargo bay. These are large metal bars a little over 3 inches in diameter and maybe a couple feet in length. Aluminum is not strong enough. Steel would be punishingly heavy. (do the math - these things are beasts). So titanium can be a good fit for stuff like that.

But most steel parts were small - things like bolts, rod ends an the like. They tend to be specialized with very specific detailed requirements for things like fatigue, frictional characteristics, and that sort of thing. Because they are small, the weight just isn't that big an issue. Bigger stuff was almost always aluminum, which is actually a lot stronger than most folks realize. At least, the good stuff is.

Titanium also has some other odd properties that make it troublesome in space. I wasn't a materials guy, but they were always bitching about "hydrogen embrittlement" and the fact that large titanium parts do not burn up on re-entry like aluminum does, which presents a debris hazard to people on the ground. (I don't know how big a problem that really is, but people didn't want to be dumping space junk on top of people's heads. Honestly, I just took this on faith - people were concerned about it, but it always struck me as odd.)
Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application.

All the Watson services are still in beta but will start going GA very soon (first one next month). If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.
Show HN: ABTestCalculator.com, an open source A/B test significance calculator
They could be worth it. If 1 in 10 of those voters directly becomes a customer (or mentions it to someone else who does), and the LTV of a customer is > $1k (which is very possible for a b2b relationship), then it is. And that doesn't factor in any customers (or investors) bought in by having greater visibility on the post (more votes = more time on front page = more people see it = probably a few more customers).
Before Uber revolutionizes labor, it'll have to explain these emails
> You want to impose a tax on people when they create something?

Interesting reaction. So you're against taxing the idea guy (or girl), but not against taxing the working people that make the idea become real?

If the copyright has value and is being protected, the copyright owner ought to pay the state for this protection in a proportional way to his work's worth.

I've never heard of the idea posited by the OP before and I must say as someone that doesn't believe in intellectual property laws (because it's not real property and ultimately unenforceable), it is a good idea that makes sense.

The idea reifies the value of the work by putting a bounty on it. If the bounty is paid the work is released. Until the bounty is paid the author of the work will subsidize its protection by paying a fraction of what they make from profits from that work. OP, where did you read this idea? It's very interesting.
Pricing page (which they don't make easy to find): https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing

When this was first announced I remember reading about their pricing model where they would take a percentage of app revenue. I'm glad to see they offer flat pay-as-you-go pricing now. Some of the Watson services are intriguing.
You know what would encourage big content to let go of works?
A tax that increases every year that copyrighted work is kept under copyright.

That way if it's not valuable to them they will let it go instead of hoarding it all forever.
#LTstartups ecosystem 2014 in review – 46M invested in Lithuanian startups
This is absolutely true! However, I'm not aware of anybody doing this for the graph processing systems being discussed in the post. Nor am I sure what that would mean. Admittedly if something takes 100 times longer to run on multiple machines than it does on a single laptop (as in the previous COST post [1]) then you might care about fault tolerance, but this is a contrived problem if you could achieve the same results faster on yor laptop.

[1] http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/...
Surely that's the employee's prerogative? Nobody is forced to work anywhere. It's the job of the company to retain them by providing good working conditions and maintaining a mutually beneficial business relationship.

If they left, that relationship failed. Why would you question if that is OK or not?
The other key fallacy that the telecoms seed the media with is that with common carriage, there is no way to provide quality service.

Net neutrality doesn't mean that you cannot optimize the path to get somewhere, just that you don't discriminate. If you need a lower latency or need to lower utilization on certain links, the ISP can do things like peer with the chatty networks.
I bought the ebook last weekend and I have to say that Chris has done a really great job here. For anyone looking to get deeper into Elixir, this is a great read - can't recommend it enough!
Always. It's always okay.

There might be ramifications, and it's up to you to run through the calculus of whether that means more to you than getting out, but if you want out and you're fine with the results, go for it.
$70,000 ww.com, $50,000 camnow.com
> I am sorry but why does Mickey Mouse deserve perpetual protection under copyright?

Why does your grandfather's farm deserve perpetual protections as he hands it down over generations? Or put another way, why does anyone else deserve any rights over Mickey Mouse when Disney is the one that created him?
I agree it should expire and require active effort (and some $ amount) to renew. That way, Mickey Mouse can still be under copyright but most other artistic works will be available for public use.
Besides, the appropriate answer is not to censor and hide, but to confront and refute. You want bad ideas to be catalogued and paired with their antidote, not let people remain blissfully unexposed, their mental immune system ready to overreact to the slightest provocation.

That is some of the ideas behind Marc Stiegler's "decision duel" idea in his book "David's Sling" [1]. He envisioned a system where two sides would lay out their arguments, and then the two duelists would link in arguments and counter-arguments to each point. This duel would occur with an audience watching, who would also contribute ideas and research to the duelists.

It is actually the right time to be able to implement something like this now, with the advent of WebGL and other browser technology for the presentation. I was just looking at another HN link about the 'wikigalaxy' visualization system which just hints at what is now possible.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3064877-david-s-sling
Fast Non-Standard Data Structures for Python (2013)
Text-to-speech is very impressive. Thanks!
"Google’s product strategy: Make two of everything" http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/10/googles-product-stra...

Not a bad thing to let two or more projects compete to encourage innovation, than granting each team exclusive privilege to represent the whole company in the area.
Credit growth as well.
Just to counter your points, having done many years of Perl, and now a Python.

Perls OOP does feel like a bit of a hack. But it does make it transparent how everything works. I learned Java at University, and everything OOP was a black box and I had no real understanding of how it worked. After learning the Perl way, its really obvious what is going on because it is so transparent. Your current object doesn't have a method? Just look along the @ISA array until you find an object that does have it.

Pythons whitespace is a pain at first, but having used it for a few years, one problem I do not miss is loosing a brace, when reorganizing blocks of code. You cut a few lines of code and paste it somewhere above or below, and your IDE shows you you are missing a brace somewhere. The indentation looks fine, so you can't see where it is.

The whitespace thing is worth it to get rid of that problem alone.
Are you working on any audio (non-speech) analysis services? I have no particular usecase in mind, but it's an area I'm always interested in!
I'm not aware of any cryo process that increases stiffness. Usually, it's more of a machinabily/stability thing they're after. But I've seen many miraculous claims in what I'd call "hobby industries" for cryo treatment. There are guys who freeze gun barrels, for example - with wild benefits that never seem to really bear fruit. I'd be highly skeptical of such claims.
I don't have much experience with cryo treating, but heat treating to gain strength is quite commonly done, especially for metals that are too hard to work in their strongest state, or for metals that lose their heat treat when welded.
Yes, this is possible.

http://www.scala-js.org/doc/export-to-javascript.html
The first rule of Macros is: don't write macros.

However, if you are going to use (and abuse) this powerful feature of Elixir, I can't think of anyone better than Chris McCord to help guide you on your way. Chris' talk on Macros[0] at Erlang Factory last year was not only highly education, but also very entertaining. If that video doesn't convince you, I recommend you take a look at the Phoenix web framework codebase[1]. Chris is an incredibly talented programmer, and an incredibly helpful, and patient guide to those less skilled than he attempting to contribute code to his projects (I know this because he held my hand through getting a pull request merged into Phoenix some months ago when I was still playing with Elixir).

[0] http://vimeo.com/88885763

[1] http://phoenixframework.org
Actually, with 13 bits you could do in-character single bit error correction.
> ...have obtained personal information from our current and former members such as their names, birthdays, medical IDs/social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information

That's medical ID and SSN
I think it was $2000. We were operating in several countries with the same brand and when entering a new country we needed that TLD. It was rightfully owned by a woman who happened to have the name as a nickname (registered years before our brand existed). Her website was static, outdated and of geocities type quality (stars background, animated icons). A friend of hers negotiated and I think we caught him off-guard on the phone. Our budget was multiple times that.

7 characters.
I wouldn't even mind so much if extensions were potentially infinite. My real problem is that everything gets the maximum "protection" by default. Creative Commons was invented to let authors selectively give up overbearing "protections". We should make some of these opt-in instead of opt-out.
Now you can buy back stock algorithmically in the cloud!
Licensing of new modules in Qt 5.5
Assange is there of his own free will as he chose to go there rather than be extradited to Sweden.

He chose to go through the legal process in the UK while it suited him and then when it didn't suit him he decided to seek asylum.

I hope the UK Gov sends him the bill for wasting my tax money
In elementary school in Texas I was home schooled and there were a number of times that Police/Truant Officers showed up to try to take us to school.

The legality of Home Schooling was very much up in the air in the early days. No one ever succeeded in making it into the house since my Mom was very educated about her rights and the rights of her kids and was totally capable of standing up to anyone who came without a warrant.

As a child of 6-10 years of age I thought it was incredibly exciting. Our family was rebelling against the Man!
A post-it note on his monitor of a secure password (they generally require a number or special character, as well as being 8 characters long), is actually better security than an extremely simple password. I can have him lock his office door... I can't prevent someone from brute forcing the password he's re-used on every site on the internet.

I literally tell my parents to have a secure password they write on a post-it note. The odds of someone breaking into their house for their password is about 1/10000th the odds of someone cracking their simple password on a website and getting the keys to the kingdom.
Isn't there a light that goes on when it was recording?
Thanks. I hadn't seen eatthismuch.com before. Very clever.

Eatthismuch (from what I've just now looked at) appears to approach the problem like this: "What are your diet goals? What kinds of foods do you like to eat? Ok. Here's a menu telling you what to eat."

There's a thing (that's starting to die down now) with nutrition called "if it fits your macros" meaning that you can eat anything that you want to eat (pizza, hot-dogs, hamburgers, tacos, etc) as long as your ratios are kept sturdy. Mathfood helps you do that.
Reflection is very much the last option when using Scala, as it breaks the ability to statically reason about code.
That's a really good point. Interestingly, the Nature Letter (paywall) [0] doesn't seem to mention the aerospace industry at all. It's more targeted toward structural and automotive applications. I'm not sure where The Economist picked up the aerospace narrative.

From the conclusions of the Nature letter: "These findings provide a new alloy-design route to lightweight steels, demonstrating that the combination of specific strength and ductility accessible to steels is greater than previously thought, and increasing the density-compensated tensile damage tolerance of structural metal for terrestrial applications."

[0]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7537/full/nature1...
Are the criminal provisions for archivists and DMCA-for-cafes still present?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2014/10/17/latest...

“If the US gets its way, then criminal penalties will apply even against users who were not seeking financial gain from sharing or making available copyrighted works, such as fans and archivists,” write Jeremy Malcolm and Maira Sutton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Such a broad definition is ripe for abuse.”

... while the last leaked draft of the TPP, dated November 2013, showed strong international opposition to this criminalization plan, Canada now seems to be the only serious hold-out. This may, suggests James Love of Knowledge Ecology International, be because this new draft gives some countries extra time to implement the agreement – meaning that current governments won’t necessarily have to carry the can for their decisions."

The European version of TPP is called TTIP: http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/ttip-up...
React beyond the DOM – how Netflix plans to enhance your TV experience