skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Check out this post on viral metrics: http://blog.yesgraph.com/top-3-metrics/

In short, look at # sending, # invites, and % accept. We know we can do a lot better than the status quo.

Invite all: very small # sending, large # invites, very small % accept. By the way, getting marked as spam hurts all your invites, lowering your overall acceptance rates even for direct invites that weren't spamming the whole list.

YesGraph: larger # sending, more # invites, larger % accept.

This by the way is how to tell the difference between buzzword bullshit "viral" and real products: Math.
There are some very basic things that could be done to reduce tax fraud. Requiring employers to e-file W-2s to IRS at the same time they send them to their employees would cut this problem down significantly.
Timestamps – there's a standard extension for this (see IRCv3 above). ZNC has been using it for maybe a year.

Senders – there's absolutely no reason to fake senders, since it was always valid for messages to come from people not in the channel.
can you elaborate what you mean by bar is higher?
Olia Lialina's work on the terabyte of Geocities that was salvaged [you might want to turn down your speakers]:

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
Looks like want to cover big parts of mountain view with a see-thru tent, and turn north-of-101 into a new downtown. Life under the dome. I absolutely hate it.
These really curved, artsy spaces remind me of Xanadu House and similar poorly received architectural experiments of the 70s. It often seems to me that designs of this type tip too far away from function and too much into form. (Plus what's the long-term maintenance requirements?)

But if anyone could pull it off, it's probably Google!
IP ranges of the Internet
Great post. Quick question: Is there a way to artificially bound virality in an experiment so that you don't need to partition the network without destroying the signal?
Good Morning! I'm the author of the post and tried to highlight the salient points. Please feel free to ask questions for a more indepth explanation of application, derivation, etc!

I will be actively checking and answering questions today.
I'm still in many casual chat channels. The general topic ones are the best for this, not ones with a strict "Support/Devel for $PROJECT" mentality that shut down offtopic conversation immediately. It's also a matter of finding like minded individuals to chat with, which does seem harder than it was when I was in highschool a decade ago. Of course, I don't spend much time off of Freenode, for all I know, other networks are the equivalent of crossroads chat or an IRC version of /b/!
Show HN: Postvox, an open, distributed, newsfeed/chat thingy
My productivity has clearly increased from using Boomerang for gmail
I'm full time job in consulting/biz dev and getting my start-up off the ground. I've been using (boomerang for gamil) boomeranggmail.com and seriously, I don't have to remember about sending emails or following-up (key in both biz dev and start-ups). I'm surprised most people I've met don't know it/use it.
The Play Store page could just start with "This software is currently in private beta, and only installable by our testers." How is anybody who arrives at that page supposed to figure it out?

As for poorly edited, here is the press release: http://www.videolan.org/press/vlc-2.2.0.html

It says the Android version is released today. Note no mention that Android is in beta, limited to testers only or anything similar.

I have no issue with VLC and like it well. They have done a great new release, which is welcome. They even went to the trouble of writing a long press release, getting quotes, and apparently talking to people at venture beat.

But then prevent installation of the android version without any clue as to why, undermining that previous effort.
The comparison to reddit is terrible and confusing. I would remove this ASAP, because all this really is is a What'sapp group conversation, with the twist that you can group things by topic.
I grew up in India, and TV was very new to where we lived. But they used to put on Star Trek (TOS) on Saturday mornings, and I religiously watched the show. I soon gravitated to Spock, and consciously modeled my thinking after him: trying to be extremely rational, not showing emotion, etc. My friends even started calling me Spock. :-)

He touched so many lives...
This is the first time Google is developing an office complex from scratch and it's somehow "Edifice Complex"?

Mind you this is a $400 billion company.
This is true about infrequent updates - it may be more for providing the appearance of total control.

I would love to see a user-friendly universal app for managing static sites (Jeckyl, Docpad) that is something someone of my Mom's tech capability could use. (and let's be honest, WP itself is sometimes "way too much")
It's the IE of blog platforms.

WP causes endless security problems for hosting companies. Even when it's locked down it's (often) still wide open, and most users don't know how to lock it down.

But it's never going to die, because ecosystem. Static alternatives are never going to take over, because they don't have gargantuan theme factories supporting them. And most users like pretty.

So I guess we're stuck with it for a while yet.
Bit of a tangent, but I just finished reading Spark which shines some light on how exercise can improve neuroplasticity.
https://books.google.com/books?id=zM_9Ft1j40UC&lpg=PT36&dq=p...
LLVM/Clang 3.6 released
It's crazy, theres 10 minutes of inspiring (read: empty) talk and all of the renderings show completely empty buildings with just a bunch of floors that you can walk down one side and fall to your certain death.

Also, America, no wonder your commute is long, theres a 10 lane highway surrounded by a bunch of single-family homes. If you want to put more people into the same space, what you usually do is go up in height.
"I believe that Lisp was, in a sense, too advanced for its own good. Because it is, as it were, pre-optimized for AI applications, and most commercial software just doesn't need that kind of sophistication. Maybe, as the industry and our clients mature, this mismatch will go away and Gabriel's NextLisp will come to the fore. I'm very interested to see if the Scandinavians can do for FP with the ErlangLanguage what they've done for Objects." -- KeithBraithwaite

"Smalltalk's lack of popularity, on the other hand, can simply be explained, historically, by price, and currently by bad marketing. Most newbies simply know of Smalltalk as the ideological predecessor to Java language - they think of it the same way they think of Cobol. Neither of these languages failed for being "too expressive" or "too obfuscated". Perl, C Macros, and scripted Excel Spreadsheets are used more frequently and produce maintenance horrors that completely outdo clever Lisp macros... but they're all conceptually familiar concepts to the users who learn to use them." -- MartinZarate
I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. And I too think the last mile problem is at least as interesting—I feel it's even more important.

My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services.

Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable.

Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better.

Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better.

That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future.

But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.
How I Accessed Employee Settings on Uber
"Web Design is 95% typography" is depressing.
I agree that the database is the bottleneck. I wrote a DB caching drop-in for WordPress and got pretty deep into the various queries that are running. There really aren't any nasty joins, but the problem is that the stock WordPress install with the default theme and no plugins runs nearly 30 DB queries per page. If you install once of the really slick commercial themes then WordPress will run upwards of 100 queries on every single page view.

Even a small site with a low level of traffic can bring a modest DB server to it's knees without caching of some type. It's really ridiculous but just due to the modular nature of WordPress.
Thanks Bruce/Brendan. Interesting info to know.

Another general perf question: How do you generally explore perf problems? I find that I can narrow down performance differences to the point of "we spent more time in function foo" fairly easily. Understanding why can be difficult (was it an intentional change? Should we have been in there at all? Did some data structure change this time around?).

All in all, I feel like a detective, and don't have a rigorous method to apply when looking at problems. Just wondering if anybody feels similarly or if with more knowledge and understanding will come clarity.
No.

Most of the large, healthy PHP-based sites I’ve worked on spend 5-20% of their average request time in the database. Which means PHP is chewing 80-95%. Which makes PHP the slow bit.

Not because PHP is bad: That’s a pretty reasonable figure for platforms based on Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. (Less so for Java and .NET.)

It's a really good rule of thumb: If you’re spending more time during each request doing database work rather than PHP work, then you’ve got a problem that needs to be fixed.

You’ve probably hit a database scalability limit, or tried to get the database to do something silly. (And hey, that’s easy to do with MySQL, which is fast primarily because it’s dumb.)

(By the way: WordPress, out of the box, doesn't spend much time in the database at all.)
FreeBSD from the Trenches: ZFS, and How to Make a Foot Cannon
I don't think that makes sense; in most other aspects, there's the concept of a successor state. Russia took hold of international assets, commitments and liabilities of Soviet Union. This included things like membership in the UN Security Council, commitments to SALT, or NNPT (with the related commitments to respecting Ukrainian sovereignty now quite clearly breached), the place in the Ice Hockey World Cup A Series, ownership of embassy properties all over the world, and whatever you can imagine.

I don't see why copyright to Venus pictures would be much different, if any copyright was reserved in the first place.
You can object to it if you want, but it's a well known phenomena - starting to build buildings is often a bad sign for the company's long-term future prospects. And since we're talking about companies peaking, the size of the company isn't particularly relevant.

It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.
For those without 10 minutes to spend watching the video, the architects are BIG and Thomas Heatherwick. <strike>I really wish they'd give them written credit -- they're the ones who did all the work!</strike> (It's actually there, I just missed it. :-/)
Full disclosure: I am one of the developers on the aforementioned IRC server.

In a future release InspIRCd will adopt support for the server-time extension which will allow us to get rid of the timestamp duplication if a user's client supports it.
Hehe, I loved Enterprise. And I thought the same thing about its intro music. I think people just got caught up in their hero worship, again, and it prevented them from wanting to like the show. Then the ratings machinery took over and it really hurt the ending of the series.

I've similarly felt a lack of aspirationalism in modern sci-fi. That's one of the aspects that I like about Interstellar. It almost feels like a pre-warp, Star Trek universe Earth. It's gritty and bleak in a lot of places, but the overall message is one of hope. People also complained about the plot, but I thought it was pretty typical Christopher Nolan fair, so if you don't like that flavor of ice cream, you probably shouldn't have ordered it in a sunday, if you catch my metaphor.
Yep. I double-checked that I hadn't borked the PHP install because I was surprised at the result. I'm not sure what it was doing to make the big difference since the inconsistencies with real PHP behavior were enough to write it off as a drop-in replacement, so I didn't continue experimenting much more, but it seemed promising.
I understand why architects are attracted to transparency - it's beautiful and let's you see the internal structure of what the architects spend all their time designing. But letting that much light into an enclosed space is basically a giant greenhouse. Either you're uncomfortable, or you're spending all sorts of energy keeping it cool - if it's even feasible to keep such a large space comfortably ventilated...
Back in the bad old days of "traditional journalism", you could either let this kind of crap hit your perception filter or, failing that, find a real person responsible to go bash over the head.

Now that we can't keep this stuff out of sight anymore, we at least need the virtual equivalent of going and bashing someone over the head back.
VLC is awesome, but it's sorely lacking one feature on OS X -- which is the ability to open multiple movies at once. I surely hope this is something they'll ad at some point!
Exactly. There is a reason for the plasticity decay
> It's the first time we'll design and build offices from scratch and we hope these plans by Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio will lead to a better way of working.

They did.
In this context, I meant it mostly about the WordPress admin back-end, but I wouldn't be awfully uncomfortable making the claim more broadly. :-)
I'm pretty sure the certificate companies when doing their verification stop obvious attempts at scams.

So, all this is to get an encrypted connection?
I've had the following ASCII art in the source of my personal site (driverdan.com) for a few years. There are a lot of tools to convert images to ASCII so it's pretty easy to do.

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Good to know. Besides, I should wait to see what specifically shows up in the package before worrying too unnecessarily.
Visa Announces Acquisition of TrialPay to Expand Its Offers Platform
Check out superagent for all your $.ajax-replacing needs. :-)

https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent
When we talk about driverless cars replacing taxis we really mean programmers replacing taxi drivers in aggregate. The cars are a constant, if you're responsible for a fleet of them you are just a better taxi driver.
I'm in favor of automating taxes completely. Its an entropic waste of human talent to spend 3 months every year, smart people thrashing over numbers. Imagine what they could accomplish!
Isn't anyone else upset by licensure encroaching on a vibrant profession that hasn't needed it? Licensure generally only serves to drive up wages, reduce innovation, suppress new entrants, and does little to improve quality.

Also, isn't the whole point of engineering to screw around looking for something new where we don't know a lot. The "work only in an area of competence" sounds a lot like let's bring back apprenticeship and try and create a static craft instead of endorsing dynamic exploration in field where we assume most things aren't yet discovered.
There is no accounting for the amount of time I spent trying to pick the perfect background music for the websites I built in the late 90s. It never occurred to me that you'd even want a silent site.

But, I guess that's the nature of youth. We're supposed to be a bit embarrassed of ourselves, or else we never grew.
Computer learns to play games, using only the pixels and the game score as input
https://web.archive.org/reporter/magazine is ironically a 404.
One of the downsides of being a convicted monopolist. They abused their power to exert pressure on vendors to bundle or not bundle certain applications, so now they're not allowed to do it at all.
> it's a well known phenomena

Do you have any data to back it up or did you just made it up?
I don't know why he's complaining.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1340?vs=1316

AMD's newest processor compares quite well to the nearest Intel octo-core that costs 3x as much.
They're not just hurting journalism, they're hurting readers. (Which is probably the same thing, of course). Crank every knob to 10. Compress music so it's louder. Everything is all sugar, all caffeine, all fizz. Blood, guts, and gore get regular new ways to crank the volume. Adult entertainment in 2015 is so extreme, a guy from 1970 might wonder if it was a psychology experiment. Media is consumed en masse, in parallel. Google loses revenue if it loads 0.2 seconds slower than the competition. We had to invent runes like TL;DR this past decade as a beacon of faith to the impatient. The word "this" has turned into a scam - "Insane new medical treatment for aging uses _this_", "New sorting algorithm magnitude increase with _this_ insane tweak" "If you don't know _this_ then you will fail in 2015". _this_, the magic box you have to stick your face into before you can see what everyone's looking at.

Factor that TL;DR in as fact and you will literally compress your article's body into the title your news feed lists - how do you sell advertisements when your idea is so easily understood it can be represented by a descriptive sentence?
I think the reputation on that end has been a bit overblown for a few year now. It was most definitely true circa 2009 or 2010, but I watch a fair amount of anime and have had a pretty solid subtitle experience for the last few years. Solid enough that I rarely use other players anymore.
> I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.

Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
If people wanted to be in the same space, they would be.
Actually that's what I said.

I wasn't blaming the coder or the language.

I was saying that it would help everyone if there was top quality online help explaining how to code around language deficiencies - the kind of deficiencies that everyone has to deal with it, because no language is perfect, and most languages are quite a lot less than perfect in at least some respects.

Be realistic. js isn't suddenly going to be rewritten with a proper semicolon patch. It's too established, and it would break too much code.

So complaining about it is a waste of everyone's time. It's like complaining about the fact that sometimes it gets cold in the winter.

It's more productive to do something practical about producing quality code that minimise possible problems, surely?
What gpg key does vlc use to sign builds.
It's a great question but things have a price. You might hack and win that raised plasticity but you might compromise your memory.

Natural Selection put there a decay in brain's plasticity for a really good and time proven reason.

This is just an hypothesis: the decay in brain plasticity diminishes neophilia and raises neophobia to preserve culture's identity. The new generation attacks the current one with tides of its own new cool and the old resists with conservative trenches of realism. Over and over.
VLC is fine for anime. Sure, there are sometimes issues with subtitles, but they usually work, and support is improving.
Why is it a good idea to have a software engineering test?

How does a test make you ethical? Norms keep folks ethical.

I see these tests as mostly a protection against new people entering a field.

It's also standard to lock folks into working under "qualified engineers" for a number of years, which seems unnecessarily burdensum and counterproductive for an expanding field.

That said, I put the term "Software Engineering" right up there with "Computer Science" in terms of descriptive value.

I prefer "Software Developer" myself.
Tim Cook Says Apple Watch Could Replace Your Car Keys, and That’s Just the Start