skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's never really a "one size fits all" answer, which is why it's a long-running debate and depends heavily on the product.

Scaling horizontally can let you use smaller, cheaper hardware on average and burst to higher capacity more easily if you need to, at the expense of a lot of complexity. It also (done right, which is rare) tends to gain you a greater degree of fault tolerance, since hardware instances become rapidly-replaceable commodities.

Most web apps have spiky but relatively predictable load. For example, a typical enterprise SaaS startup gets more traffic during work hours than on weekends. For these companies the complexity of developing a horizontally scaled architecture can be offset by the decreased cost of buying really big machines for peak load and then scaling back to a couple small instances for periods of below-average load.

That's (ostensibly) why AWS exists in the first place: Amazon had to buy a lot of peak capacity for Black Friday and Christmas and found it going unused the rest of the year. They never meant to sell their excess capacity, but they realized the tools that they built to dynamically scale their infrastructure were valuable to others.

Plus, a lot of work is offline data analytics, ETL, and so on. It's very cost effective to scale these workloads horizontally on-demand - spin up extra workers to run your reporting each hour/night and keep costs down the rest of the time when you don't need the capacity.

On the flip side, companies like Stack Exchange and Basecamp have high, relatively stable traffic worldwide. For companies like this it makes more sense to scale vertically - if they were in the cloud, they would never scale down or shut down their instances anyway.

Personally, I agree that horizontal scalability is oversold and most people can, indeed, scale up instead of out. However, a lot of plenty smart people disagree with me and have valid reasons to scale horizontally, too.
it confuses me as to why some people are more susceptible to paying for in game items where those are not.

as soon as I see in game purchases, it's immediately uninstalled.

I want to pay for a game and compete based on some dexterity or skill gained over time not on the wallet.
The most luck I had with this was tackling a massive problem with something elegant then offering the idea of regular expressions when a similar problem came up for my colleagues.
I don't know what that is, or anyone who uses it.
Is "Sorry, I forgot my password" an option here?
Note that the App don't know about you but Facebook know about you using that app because they can see all the API calls.
I wonder where that douchebaggery culture among employers comes from.
Cards Against Humanity details - http://s3.amazonaws.com/cah/CAH_MainGame.pdf (full download of game cards).

NSFW!?!
Get your pre invite, Codable: Finding and sharing the best educational resources
The price I get at the link shows $60 only if you're buying 100 at a time, it's $75 for one. Still nice to know about though.
Yep! Also, reinventing what existed before (intentionally or by accident) can give you a better appreciation for what was invented in the oast and might be the best way of finding out about it (if you don't know the name, for example).
Questions like pruning a red-black tree or manipulating a linked list on a whiteboard.
That's hardly an argument. Netflix, consuming 33% of the nation's bandwidth is a great counterexample.

In terms of scale, GoGuardian (the company I co-founded) has passed Stack Exchange. Articles like this make me so happy to be on AWS. Delegating this work to AWS allows us to focus on the product instead of the hardware that it runs on.
The site looks really sharp, and your product also looks cool. Keep up the good work!
We are currently facing legislation (Bill C-51) that, when passed, will do quite a number on our democratic freedoms. :(
This sounds awfully similar to being a highly sensitive person. I.E. covering your ears when a siren goes by, being exhausted after being around too many people, being aware of subtleties in your environment.

I encourage anyone who identifies with the above to take this HSP quiz: http://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/
The Rise of the Nameless Narrator
That sounds a lot like how TrueCrypt worked, before the developers discontinued it's development for unknown reasons.
Looking at the example source code & having experience of AngularJs & TS, I would say this is a huge development in term of enterprise adoption.

Statically typed, annotations, built-in dependency injection, comprehensive test support (easy to write testable code), declarative UIs, 100s of already available libraries & above all support from Google and Microsoft. I can say this with confidence that even with a complete rewrite & not backward compatible, AngularJS 2 with TS is going to be a huge success for everyone.

And sooner or later, all other frameworks will adopt ECMA Script 6 because of standardisation of so many things (modules, classes etc.)

I would also like to add that this is a very exciting time for JavaScript developers because there are so many things happening & companies of all sizes will keep investing good amount of money moderating their JS code bases.
I would say that "tolerating" this is exactly the same flavor as "fighting for democracy": both terms are misleading at best.
> yet measurably identical in all aspects

> behavior is the activity that you measure, and you can measure brain activity.

You've shifted your definition of "behavior" now. I thought we were talking about behaviors that impact survival and are acted on by natural selection, not minute differences in MRI scans. For purposes of the thought experiment, I certainly don't care if the p-zombie has a slightly different brain-wave. Let's say they're permanently sleepwalking, then.

I really feel like you're hand-waving at supposed contradictions here, rather than engaging with why this is a difficult problem. If you firmly reject the idea of a p-zombie, let's leave that aside for now.

Do you believe that it would be possible, in principle, to build a robot that looked and acted extremely similar to a human being? It could carry on conversations, make decisions, defend itself against antagonists, etc. in a similar manner to a human being? In your view, would such a robot be necessarily a conscious entity?
Ask HN: What would you buy school kids to help get them hacking and tinkering
The Brief:

Can we come up with a box of toys/tools, with instructions, that can be given to a class of middle school kids with internet connectivity & smart phone access that, without direct technical supervision, could show them they have the ability to tinker with technology and inspire a few of them to explore it further?

Background:

I'd like to use my Grandpa's inheritance it to help the kids at his old middle school. I'm looking for ideas for the most impactful and high leverage way to use this money. Ideally this would be approach that could be scaled and replicated in other schools.

The school in question is in a rural part of China with internet and 3G connectivity. The kids are from farming families and don't get a great technology/engineering education.

If they had a chance to use technology to build and tinker, it would be tremendously empowering and encourage a few of them to learn more. Hopefully this would open up an alternative to becoming unskilled migrant labourers.

Me:

I don't have kids or any experience in ed tech. I know there are tons of new toys / tools out there. My ask is for advice on what to consider given the constaints listed above. I have design skills, the patience and connections to create the supporting instructions / other materials.

I'm willing to spend $1-5K to make this happen. If the cost can be lowered with a similar impact we can send more packages.

Thanks for your suggestions and discussion!
That's a good point that I overlooked in my post - I'm sure this is a huge consideration for Stack Exchange.

For what it's worth Basecamp also evangelize the "scale up" approach and they're on an open-source stack.
Them being allowed to search my phone is one thing, but how is not unlocking it "obstructing border officials"?

Where I come from (Europe), you aren't required by law to help police (or border officials). If they come with a warrant to search your house and your door is closed, you aren't allowed to obstruct them by barricading your door but you are not required to help them by opening your door either (be prepared to pay for your new door though). Is that different in Canada?
RonyaSoft Poster Designer Crack 2.01.45.02 and Serial Key Free Download
http://imgur.com/yqsYyPY

of the 64 emails I have from them 50 are spam of this nature.
I couldn't do without the knife, I use it nearly every day for something. Opening a package, peeling an orange, etc.

What's weird is when I'm not wearing jeans or pants/shorts with pockets--say a bathing suit. I keep stuff in my hands, then--but I feel really paranoid and I keep checking and rechecking to make sure I still have my wallet/phone.

When I break this habit, I end up doing things like locking my keys in my car.
I ended up in a conversation with a moronic border security twat on my only ever business trip to the states.

"So your company writes software for Americans?"
"So an American company bought your company?"
"So your company is now owned by Americans? Why didn't they write the software here?"
"If it's now American, why can't the training be provided by Americans?"

I was pretty sure he was going to ask why the fuck I wasn't time travelling in order to ensure everything was done by Americans.

All this after enduring repeated announcements for military personnel to come and enjoy the FREEDOM LOUNGE in Denver or Detroit, whatever shithole it was that I was travelling through.

From my view as a non-American? Farcical.
It's really disappointing to see this trend, both as a consumer and as a developer.

On the consumer side, freemium games are designed to be inferior to their pre-paid cousins, or else there wouldn't be an incentive to spend on in-app purchases. And the lucrativeness of the market has turned the heads of most of the game development companies in the world, so it's getting harder and harder to find games that don't use this model.

And as a developer, I want to make things that people enjoy. I want to recreate the same feelings I had as a kid, the delight of mastering a game. Or the bliss of a program that enhances the user's capabilities, without adding new impediments of any kind. But consumers have so gone towards this freemium model that they just don't seem to pay attention to pre-paid programs. How do you compete against a company that can take a game that is as big of a piece of crap as Game of War and turn it into a printing press for money--can afford to spend $40 million to have Kate freaking Upton show up?

I'm sure it's stupid of me, from a business sense, to declare I'll never make a freemium game. But dammit, I went independent specifically because the general lack of ethics I had encountered in industry bothered me so much. If I can't make it on my own terms, I guess that's the fate I'm going to have to take.
Ng-wat
I was working on my own payment startup idea a few years ago - and paying by phone was a surprisingly huge marketing bullet for most people. Paying by phone was a necessary side effect of the real business (crypto based, privacy protective, a few other things)...

...but what really got people interested was the paying by phone part.

Had I had a real brain, I would have pivoted (or at least held my nose) and worked on something "Square" or "Stripe" like, to get customers and money and traction, then added my secret sauce once I was already in the market.

Why was this so compelling? Because most people leave the house with 1) their phone, 2) their keys, 3) everything else.

If they forget 2, they go back for it right away.

They can be in line at Starbucks or the grocery store or wherever before they realize they forgot 3. If they can pay by phone, they're good.

Thems of us here on HN who wallet-pocket, key-pocket, etc., are in the minority. We are in the minority for most things. That's why so many of us have a problem connecting with broader markets, let alone mass markets, at least until we realize how to recognize and understand what the majority are doing.
I remember this as well! There were also some incomprehensible glyphs on the tower climb, leading up to the Winged One's(just prior to the Catacombs in your screenshot) that were only printed in the manual.
In homage to things like this, there are a number of 512 byte, 1k, etc. game development competitions. You can find them allover for a variety of machines. If you're interested these tiny masterpieces, you should enter a competition, or at least check them out.

Years ago I made a 512 byte maze game, I put up the listing here: http://burninghorizon.com/pub/c64/tinyrinth/tinyrinth.htm

I made that page before I ever saw the article (and much later webpage) describing this 1k chess program. The article should enlighten anyone who isn't sure just how small 1k of code actually is: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/
Ask HN: Is technical recruiting broken?
Context ... about to quit my job. Likely for entrepreneurship. On a lark, I emailed a few companies off of the Feb Who's Hiring thread on HN. Since I was interviewing anyways, I also applied to a few large corp jobs to see what is out there.

Pretty much every place I spoke to, I had 1-2 chats with a recruiter before I got to a phone screen. Did 2 phone screens each at 3 companies. Company 1 has gone mum. Company 2 wanted to fly me out (I declined) and Company 3 wants to do a third screening interview.

And those were the good ones. Two companies asked me to do multi-hour "homework assignments" as part of their screen. I declined those right away.

In the old days, I've gotten jobs with 30 minute conversations. Is that pretty much gone now? Do people take a month off of work when they need to find a new gig?
Popular Startup Design Framework
I think it was Zynga, they may have discontiuned it.
Most games I never make in-app purchases. But if the game is fun, and the in-app purchase makes sense, I'll pay.

Hearthstone, Zombie Farm Battles are examples of games I play all the time, so I don't mind spending a few bucks here and there.

I probably spend ten to twenty every few months.
VMware and GPL – it's about api boundaries, not copy-paste
Why do you think it's an analogy?
Can I ask you what is the point in airing this dirty laundry ? Even as a learning experience, it comes off pretty sour. Do you really want to be known forever as "creo ? oh those guys who trash talked yc ?" , because that's what happens.

Lemme air some clean laundry instead that might actually be useful to you guys.

2012 - am driving with a company co-founder who has just been accepted into YC. He points at an elephant logo on a building and says - "those guys! ridiculous! they have a billion dollar valuation! what did they do - put Notepad on the web ? what we are doing is a million times more complex."

He was ofcourse pointing to Evernote.

I gently told him that his company may be solving a problem million times more complex, but how many people wanted such a complicated solution ? 10 ? 1000 ? 1000 ? Maybe 10,000 ? There is a ceiling on any supercomplicated niche product you are building. Its now 2015, his company has about 5000 customers. So in 3 years they got to 5000. But Evernote has upwards of 100 million users, with its supersimple Notepad on the web product. So this yc company has now pivoted to building a specialized social network, and they already have a million+ users on that front. They'll probably keep the 5000-user supercomplicated business running, because its good money, but the focus will be on now growing the supersimple million user social network business.

A long time ago, we had a guest from Microsoft visiting our compiler theory class. He bemoaned that more people were using something called Microsoft Flight Simulator, which was just a stupid toy, compared to what his team was working on - the Microsoft Visual C Suite, which was such a sophisticated state of the art compiler.

Once again, how many people have a need for such a compiler, versus how many people want to just play video games ?

Focus also on customers, not just on the complexity of your technical problem space.
It's about how one strives to improve. Have you read the original paper?

http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/...

Incompetent people think they're doing fine because they can't tell the difference between good and bad work. Highly competent people, readily seeing their own flaws, think they don't do as well as they are doing. (At least until you have them grade a bunch of other work, at which point they are better calibrated.) Competent people are competent because their metacognitive ability, their ability to tell good work from bad, drives them forward.

So basically, if I already can see the problems in my work, then my metacognitive ability is sufficient to drive improvement. When I improve enough that my work looks fine to me, further improvement is prevented because I literally can't tell whether changes I make are better or worse. There, the path to improvement is to improve metacognition.

As to the latter, my approach may be common sense, but it is not in fact common. Last I was interviewing developers, most people had never done a pair programming interview before. The default is talk-talk interviews. I'm sure some people did it the other way, of course: science frequently trails practice. But the Dunning-Kruger paper in specific is what convinced me that self-assessments were at best highly unreliable and at worst thoroughly misleading.
Woman Flew an F-35 Simulator with Her Mind
so you want to be an ass (not walk on eggshells as you put it, be unforgiving like a compiler) because there's homeless people and because nerds get a hard time?

yep i'm convinced those industry ladies should get thicker skins alright, especially when they are in your industry - they should play by your rules - right?
Precision cooking is the same, but this goes way beyond sous vide, because we can go above boiling, which is where all the fun reactions happen.

Caramelization, browning, and similar reactions are what produce the really great, complex, flavors in the best food. It's not just about searing steak -- we can take apples and convert them into apple pie filling with no added sugar. We can make butternut squash sweet and eggplant creamy. We can perfectly brown cheese without burning it, so you can have a grilled cheese where the cheese inside is browned, like the stuff that sticks to the grill.

We have a test chef who is coming up with new ways to use this all the time, and we're going to share them through the app so everyone can play.
The BASIC resided in ROM. Here is a complete listing of the ROM: http://www.wearmouth.demon.co.uk/zx81.htm
I would argue that articles like these indicate, that the people of Europe indeed have more power as citizens than people of other countries. I do not see how Europe would benefit from being a superpower again.
They didn't work like modern interpreters, which basically compile the program into bytecode and then interpret the bytecode. They would do simple very simple parsing of the program, mostly just tokenising it, and then more or less execute each Basic statement directly. (Sinclair Basic's wacky keyword-at-a-time entry system meant they didn't need to ship a tokeniser.)

So:

10 LET I = 10

20 LET I = I + 1

30 GOTO 10

The program counter would point at the start of line 10; the interpreter would see LET (mandatory in Sinclair Basic) and know a variable name was next; it'd read that; it'd read the equals sign; then it would read the expression and evaluate it on the fly. Then the program counter would be pointing at the end of line 10, so it just advances over the line number, and it's ready for line 20. etc, etc.

Line 30 would read the GOTO, then read the line number, then reset the program counter to the beginning of the program and scan through looking at line number headers until it found the right one. Yes, O(n). Yes, you put most used subroutines at the beginning of the program for speed.

So the entire run-time state is a program counter, a couple of fixed-size stacks for FOR...NEXT and GOSUB...RETURN, and your variables. I've no idea how Sinclair Basic stored them, but BBC Basic used a hash table that was immediately after the end of your program. Strings were a problem because they could change size; Commodore Basic had the world's slowest garbage collector. BBC Basic just fragmented and ran out of space. I don't know how Sinclair Basic handled it.

If you're interested, the entire ROM is disassembled here: http://www.wearmouth.demon.co.uk/zx81.htm
Mark Zuckerberg's one rule for hiring at Facebook
What vassal state do you live in?
Yeah that's the consensus, and that's what it was meant to be, that's what it once was. However these days, especially in a community where only certain individuals can downvote, they become the only ones to control the discussion. What was supposed to encourage a higher level of discussion has instead created a community that is the exact opposite.

Who cares about my stupid comments, sure, I'm an idiot- I'll agree to that. Unfortunately, I see it happen all the time. The parent of this, for example, was downvoted immediately.

Everyone in this community is prepared to be corrected- the problem is when there's no correction offered. It's a community of suppression, and it's not hard to see.
I think it's just a case of novelty. The average mobile gamer hasn't been playing video-games for a very long time, so contrary to veterans gamers who will from the very start model the game as a system in their head, they just interact with it in a more primitive fashion. Therefore they won't feel that the game is unfair or dumb because they don't see the ropes long-time players do see and criticize.

And just like mobile UI designers are starting to reintroduce more complexity as the average user becomes more familiar with touch interfaces, I'm sure we'll see a decline in "pay to win" games as the average mobile gamer becomes more experienced and long for more interesting games.
People _used_ to say "Im moving to New Zealand!", but the Mega/Kimdotcom fiasco and some of the most recent Snowden files show they're no better than any of the rest of them.

I'm hoping Elon gets us to Mars and we get to leave the B-Ark behind on this once-nice rock that we're busy destroying for ourselves...
Hmm. I never thought it was so simple. I'll have more of a play and see if I can make it work. I'd _much_ rather use hg than git. Thanks.
I've said "con permiso, abuelita" -- roughly "excuse me, grandma" -- to dudes half my age waddling down the street.

I should do it more.
"Let's implement BM" (with some hints/guidance) doesn't seem absurd. It's not much code; handwritten can fit on a piece of paper or two. "Why is GNU grep fast?" would definitely be an absurd question though.
Whether it's true or not, I get upset with web pages for being shoddily coded and running orders of magnitude slower than they should, not because of absolute loading speed.
No, marco, you're just being "corrected." Iron sharpens iron, duh.
Since the digital storage of a phone cannot contain a firearm, explosive, blade, protected species of plant or animal, or a pork sausage, they have no goddamned business.