skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> AWS is always going to include a premium because they take care of the DevOps portion of your infrastructure.

This is a surprise to me, given that I work at an AWS shop doing things other people would call "DevOps". AWS doesn't automate provisioning or provide a (worthwhile) deployment pipeline, andAWS doesn't react (except in crude and fairly stupid ways) when something goes wrong or out-of-band.
Inspired by a standard algorithm which is in every better geometry textbook and used in the industry far earlier than 1999? Come on, even I wrote such an adaptive polygon smoother depending in the angles of the neighboring faces at around 1996, during the VM boom.
It is a required method to get rid of the huge number of automatically generated 3D points from scanners or terrain data, esp. in 3D cards. Games etc.

Use this better method from 1996: "Francine Evans, Steven Skiena, and Amitabh Varshney. Optimizing tirangle strips for fast rendering." In Proc. Visualization ’96, pages 319–326. IEEE Comput. Soc. Press, 1996.

It uses the better subdivision-surface wavelets for Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. There should also be libraries out there to do that.
RAPTOR: Routing Attacks on Privacy in Tor
If it really has no plans to use them and has spent money putting them in its cars, HTZ shareholders should be furious.

But, I suspect "has no plans to use them" means "is not prepared to publicly disclose its plans for using them at this time".

EDIT: Actually, the article indicates that they had very firm ideas of how they would be used (for two-way video streaming contact with agents from the device), but that they have "no plans" to use them based on the fact that they currently have insufficient infrastructure -- particularly, in terms of data bandwidth to the car -- to support the intended use.
Take it one battle at a time.
I'd love to hear others' tips on how they are using Slack effectively with remote team members (vs. typical email trails).
Great point. Also, on AWS if you use Amazon Linux you are even more 'locked-in'. Maybe that's the reason many hosting companies give you discounts at the beginning.
I too am not concerned about Skynet.

I'm worried about the descendant of Bonzai Buddy. I'm worried about annoying little algorithms that are simple-minded but have access to vast quantities of data I'd rather they not, and that have means of actuating things in the real world that could prove annoying.

Everybody seems so goddamned thrilled over this stuff that nobody seems to be worried about the mundane but harmful things we can accomplish and enable with current-day technology.
Silicon valley owns your data
Can you give morespecifics about what you were running on and what you purchased for your own gear?

I run an environment that scales to around 1,000 EC2 instances daily. Primarily we run C3.2Xlarge and R3.2xlarge for the core of our application.

We have ~12 nodes in our mongo cluster, and havent had a single issue with these nodes.

I occasionally get a zombie (totally hung VM) but thats very infrequent. I was aggressively using spot instances previously, but have switched to all 12-month reservations (We would lose many machines to a spot outage, new machines - more than those on Richess) and the recovery time for our system is 35 minutes (due to the R3 boxes needing to download their in-memory index from other machines) - so our service is degraded in capacity until the relaunch of these machines completes.

[aside: if youre looking to use spot, do two things - over-provision by a factor of 1.8 and spread across zones, and go look into using ClusterK.com for their balancer product]

Anyway, Just curious what was causing "sometimes daily" outages - I can't imagine that this would be due to AWS and not lacking ability of your application to handle instance losses.
Bye Bye HipChat, Hello Slack
I guess saying "the worst in the history of the city" is less impressive for American cities, since they have not existed for very long... :)

At least we still do better than in the xkcd "Ice Sheets" comic (http://xkcd.com/1225/).
Scientific Expertise and Craft Practice in Molecular Gastronomy (2013) [pdf]
The post ends with: "It actually was a once-in-a-century winter, which is good news for Boston, because it means we probably won't see another winter like this in our lifetime."

This may or may not be true, depending on how much climate change affects our environment during our lifetime.
Yeap: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473786-dictionary-with-a...
I see what you're saying...kind of like an AI or an "automation" tool/framework for backup.

I was focusing on the lower-level building blocks.
I assume the "NeverLost" device is just a rebadged commodity Android tablet that includes a camera.
This is somewhat hidden on the page:

> ReadMe was built almost entirely on Open Source projects, so we want to give back. If you're an open source project, shoot us an email and we'll upgrade you to the Developer Hub tier for free. It's the least we can do to give back.

Very cool.
What about people like me that would never have learned about the "continuum fallacy" if it weren't for Eliezer's willingness to stoop to my level and explain things like I'm 5 (or, more accurately, like I'm a fan of Harry Potter)?

I personally don't care one bit if the good bits aren't original. They are approachable, and nobody else has done that for me. So I applaud Eliezer and his efforts, regardless of whether or not he has broken ground philosophically.
It was given to me by Kenny Zadeck in the form of an an unpublished chapter of a book that they had been working on.

I was asked not to reshare it because of that, so i haven't.

The book, sadly, still has not been published.
As an aside, this started a decade ago as a personal backup script using rsync and hardlinks for a few personal machines. But hardlinks really start falling apart once you get a lot of machines, say more than 10, or large systems with lots of files.

At one point we switched to BackupPC, but ended up switching back to this after around a year. BackupPC implemented its own rsync code, which (maybe this is fixed now) didn't support incremental file-data transfers in the rsync version 3 protocol, so large systems could take hours to build the file index and then hours to re-walk the file-system to send the data. Larger systems were taking longer than 24 hours and tons of IOPS to backup.

It also wasn't very efficient, when we switched back to ZFS, we consolidated 4 Backup PC servers down to one with ZFS holding the same data. The biggest issue there was log and database files, big files that had small changes resulted in the whole file getting stored multiple times. Particularly Zope ZODB files killed us, they are append-only and we had users with 2+GB files that had small changes every day.
Well, supposedly, cache-oblivious algorithms exist to deal with this kind of thing - by grouping related data together regardless of exactly what cache-scale you are at.
Yes, I think they originally used Flash then switched to Silverlight. Not sure if they still support the flash player though. That said I'd bet they will be moving to HTML5 soon.
Oregon man spends 900 days in jail without charges
EV certificates will not be free.
Why not have a separate configuration just for test? It's easy and solves all the issues
user created an account to make these comments, then promptly made more comments on other anti-drug threads only.

user has made no other comments thus far.
My 5cent:

If you have lots and lots of money and a high margin business, do yourself a favor and go with Amazon (much less hassle with contract management and low level challenges).

If you need to scale month to month and are growing 50% per month, go with Amazon.

If you are very small and can live with 10 instances, go with Amazon.

If CAPEX doesn't help you and for whatever reasons you need to spend OPEX, go with Amazon.

If you need many (types of) machines for failover but which otherwise mostly idle, go with Amazon.

Otherwise it's always cheaper to buy or rent hardware. Amazon is very expensive (TCO).

If you base your decision on hype, you're screwed.

* Amazon stands for Cloud Provider, personally I'm choosing Digital Ocean with Mesos/Docker.

* Except S3 which is a no brainer to use.
But doesn't Netflix successfully use AWS now?

Its possible they get special treatment if they are big enough (nobody else's jobs on their physical machines ... or something like that).
And I'm sure there's a git-hub project for "making bitcoins appear out of shoes". Without an explanation or review I'm calling BS, trolls, or dumb thieves.
Show HN: Launched onpremise version of our bootstrapped startup, packagecloud.io
Is money making us racist?
I think so too. There's no reason we have to subsidize agriculture in CA. The one question is do the farmers have some legal claim or right to access the water at non-market rates?
In my previous job, I was a web editor at a metro daily, and I actually developed a program that does basically the same thing as ChartBeat. It showed real-time page view stats, overlayed on our homepage. (Headlines were all highlighted according to how popular they were at the moment.)

The problem with making money off of digital journalism, however, is not finding the "God metric." Even if you could pinpoint exactly how engaged each user is at any moment, and even if you could predict each user's likelihood of future engagement, and even if you could supply that information and more to advertisers, it still wouldn't save journalism, because ...

DISPLAY ADVERTISING ON NEWS SITES IS NOT NEARLY AS LUCRATIVE AS PRINT ADVERTISING USED TO BE.

Seriously, go back 20 or 30 years, and metro newspapers were raking in extremely healthy profits off of ad sales. Because, particularly for local businesses, there was no better place to reach a lot of eyeballs.

Nowadays, advertisers (both local and national) have gotten wise. They are much better able to pinpoint how a particular display ad translates into sales, and for many of them, it just isn't worth it. And even when they DO see a decent return on investment ... they just aren't willing to commit ad dollars to nearly the same degree that they used to.

I love journalism, and I recognize its importance to our society, but it absolutely is not going to survive on the back of online advertising alone.
Done and done!

https://github.com/hadouken/hadouken/wiki/Getting-started-on...
Of course, wide streets predate cars. Both Chicago's and NYC's street grids, with their wide avenues, predate the era in which everyone had a personal automobile. But take a look at older cities with narrower streets. You can get around Center City Philly, but the streets are so narrow in parts you barely notice crossing them.
Got a link for the claims in those first two paragraphs for us? Because if that is true, it changes a whole bunch of things, including the argument about entrapment I made in a sibling thread.

It's a rather different thing if they entrap him with a tough moral dilemma than entrapping him with simply ordering a hit on people when it's not the only alternative to a whole bunch of other people having their lives destroyed, including targeting 3 people that just happen to live there.
I think a lot of his books consist of finding something people are anxious about (Japanese Takeover of America - Rising Sun; Sexual Harassment of Men - Disclosure; Prey - Nanotechnology; Westworld - Robots) and then write a book about it.

Plus, he also did ER as well which was pretty entertaining.
One of the most touted advantages of Scheme (and other Lisps) as a teaching language is precisely the (lack of) syntax which allows the student to focus on logic.
Rent control causes all kinds of bad effects.

As noted by others here, it discourages maintenance and property improvements to rent control units. The landlord has an incentive to create a terrible living situation to get the tenant to move out.

It also reduces tenant mobility. If you're a long time renter and have a great, but maybe just affordable to you, rate, and then have any life change where you'd normally want to move, you face a tough decision. Get a new job, want to move in with someone, have a baby, need to take care of a parent, sell or buy a car, etc... and when you would like to move, instead you're stuck.

Rent control also directly causes Ellis Act evictions, IMO. If your building has occupants who've been there for a while then you're getting much lower income than market rate. One way to retrieve the true value out of the property is to sell it someone who will convert to private residence, thus valuing the property much more than a landlord.

Rent control is a subsidy to renters paid by landlords. They bear almost all of the financial responsibility for this attempt to make housing affordable. Home owners don't, and employers and employees don't. And the subsidy is incredibly unevenly applied: You get more a subsidy the longer you've been in a rental, it's not dependent on how much you need the subsidy.

As long as the city deems it beneficial to have a rental subsidy, they should just go ahead and have a real subsidy paid by taxes, and get rid of rent control. There's a good argument that a diverse population is good for the the city, so a subsidy funded by income, sales, corporate, property, and hotel tax makes a lot of sense.
Really you'd want to compare EC2 and real hardware, not AWS and real hardware. AWS as a total package comes with a great many services, and if you're using more than a few of them then it can require a great deal of engineering time to set up replacements.

A lot of AWS services can be used by real hardware though, so it's not all or nothing.

For example, where I work we use S3 to store an archive of files but keep the working set of data cached on our web servers which are at codero.

We have video rendering servers which turned out to be much cheaper to do with a cluster of desktop-class hardware in a server closet at our office as opposed to the server grade GPU instances on EC2. The monthly cost of a single GPU instance at EC2 is more than the total cost of the hardware off of newegg.

However, for outages we have a script that spins up GPU instances on EC2 which is much more economical than having a separate set of servers somewhere just in case.
Portugal comes to mind for me, but I am not sure what he means by a majority of developed countries.
One Year of DynamoDB at Timehop – Building Timehop
Did you seriously consider a traditional colo or other vendors like SoftLayer (e.g., Rackspace)? It seems like at some point your reasoning here will apply to a colo if you grow bigger.
Roughly, the intuition is that in OCaml, objects are to records as polymorphic variants are to regular variants
> e.g. PHP: it has a higher chance to be remotely crackable

No language war/php sucks discussion, but this isn't even remotely true :/
We need to make that more apparent :) But yeah, email support@readme.io and we'll upgrade you for free!
patio11 wrote an amazing post of work culture in Japan.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/

Basically if you are a salaryman in some respected company (to which you are prepared to sell your soul for the rest of your life) getting an apartment, a bank account or really any service is trivial, since it is assumed that the company guarantees for you.

If you are NOT backed up by a major company you have more or less the status of a bum, and people will refuse altogheter of renting to you, at any condition, or ask for crazy guarantees.
>However, I find that those that are more practiced are usually far better than simply those that are passionate.

Passion is the starting point to becoming exceptional.
For PyPI it is rather straightforward to get downloads information: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21419009/json-api-for-pyp... (along with some other data, e.g. categorization). See example: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/seaborn/json
You explanation is not understanding the fact that when a cop stops a white and a black with marijuana it is the black who goes jail. When a black and a white go before a judge with a charge of marijuana possession it is the black who is convicted and given a long prison sentence.

What do you call a justice system that catches two people in the same 'illegal' act but only one of has their life ruined? Certainly not just.

Depending on the state, it costs over 20,000/yr and sometimes over 40,000 to house each inmate, state's tried to solve this problem by contracting out to private prison complexes, and often they would give the private companies large tax deals and even free or heavily subsidized land. Of course these private companies do what every private company does, took the generous offers from the state and plowed more money into politics to get even more generous offers, better deals, more pay, and more business.
Interesting, thanks for the insight. We are doing something similar to the nonce that you mention, but your argument that at-least-once semantics is more appropriate is very convincing to me, as is your RPC argument. I'm old enough to have had to endure both ONC and DCE rpcs :)
The fact in itself isn't sexist; but I don't see how bringing it up here is relevant except to say "Hey people, remember that almost everyone here is a guy!"
One option that wasn't originally intended for this use, but works really well, is Artificer (http://artificer.jboss.org). It's an open source project that started out as a metadata and software artifact repository. However, it's expanded to include any type of logical information. It supports hierarchical classifiers, custom/ad-hoc properties, relationships between nodes, etc. I'm in the middle of working it into a demo that implements the "Getting Things Done" structure.

It's self-hosted on Wildfly or JBoss EAP, but we're almost finished supporting Docker (ie, you'd be able to run it on OpenShift).

Disclaimer: I'm the technical lead for the project.
> I suspect that the current google car is already safer than the overall average driver.

Based on what? Even Google admits that the car is essentially blind (~30 feet visibility) in light rain. They've done little to no road testing in poor weather conditions. The vast majority of their "total miles driven" are highway miles in good weather, with the tricky city-driving bits at either end taken over by humans.

Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can “drive anywhere a car can legally drive.” However, that’s true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car’s exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It’s vastly more effort than what’s needed for Google Maps.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles...
That's not true. AWS is known to be more expensive in the long run. AWS was never about being cheaper for a mature company. It's popular because it's cheap/easy to get started, it's elastic, and it allows CTOs the freedom to balance capex vs. opex.
Prices go down until to a certain amount, then then start to increase. Analogy: you want to buy shares of company X. If you buy 1, brokerage costs are high compared to your investment. If you buy 100, you still get the shares from the top of the order book, and fees become negligible. Buy 10M, and you will pay much-much more per share because supply is not going to be there.

Just think of the simple supply-demand curve. As demand increases, price increases as well. The bulk discount pricing is only valid for amounts that provide better utilization of the supply chain. If Intel can produce 1M chips a month, then if somebody orders the last 50k, he might get a discount. If someone wants 2M, then he needs to pay a huge markup because the supply chain is not ready.

And Amazon is definitely big enough to move the equilibrium price up.
I've lived in multiple cities over the years. Currently it's Seattle. If anything, I'd say Seattle is one of the less paved-over places I've been.
I can't find the original anywhere. Must have deleted it before Google Cached.
Valid point. My perception (Based on SF and NYC) is that many of the laws that go along with rent control make it difficult to build low income housing. The time to get permits, and the difficulty in rehabbing, make anything except luxury apartments unaffordable.
Well, we understand hash functions a lot better now than we did back then. It would be foolish to confidently state that SHA2 or SHA3 will _never_ be broken, but it's not foolish to state that, given what we know, they are unlikely to be broken.
Generally I'd say the extra cost savings come from the lack of software needed to support the amazon style apis. They may have also made a multi year commitment, which would also further drive the cost down.
MoonGen, a scriptable high-speed packet generator
Video Membership Script Written in Laravel 5
I received mine a couple of weeks ago and have been pretty happy so far. Everything worked out of the box in ubuntu (camera, multimedia keys, trackpad, touchscreen, bluetooth, wifi, etc).

My only complaints are:

- The Glossy monitor is incredibly reflective. I wish there was a matte option.

- I got the UHD screen option but there are still too many scaling issues in linux. Ubuntu looks fine with some minor tweaks but a lot of programs look horrible (ie. chrome). I ended up just lowering the resolution for now.

- The power cable sticks out really far when it is plugged in. It also makes me worried I'll break it if I forget I'm attached because the input seems a little wobbly.

- I like the keyboard for the most part but a few of the keys squeak occasionally.

- The trackpad also is pretty good, but it feels overly sensitive and jumpy compared to my macbook air.

- WIFI seems a little spotty. It might be that my wireless router isn't very good but my signal is much weaker than it is on my macbook. I need to play around with setting a little more before coming to a conclusion.

- If you open it up on your lap you might pinch your legs!
Netflix uses thousands of instances, they don't share servers.
> What if the AI mind/intelligence is of such a high level that it regards us like we do bacteria?

We don't regard bacteria like that, because they are not sufficiently intelligent, but because we believe they can't feel or suffer. So it's not a question of "level" of intelligence.
I think that in any debate, you have a responsibility to respond to the strongest version of the opposing argument. Even if your "third option" is correct and the specific aforementioned people just "want to get in on the AI buzz", that still doesn't justify ignoring the argument itself.
We use DNS-based load balancing along with an HA pair of load balancers in each datacenter. If the DNS health check fails, we stop sending traffic to a failing frontend LB. If failing LB is dead, we move its IP to the other one.

DNS TTL is not as big of an issue today as it was 5-10 years ago, when idiotic ISPs were trying to save on DNS resolving by ignoring TTLs. Nowadays you see an almost perfect drop in traffic when switching off a load balancer. Only bots and some weird exotic ISPs may keep sending traffic to a disabled box for up to an hour or two, but since DNS LB is only used to handle real emergency outages and for planned maintenance we could move LB IPs around, I really do not see it as a big enough issue to stop using the DNS LB magic :-)
Show HN: Online journal that encrypts entries with a cipher
> gotcha titles are the norm these days

Not on HN they aren't. From the guidelines: "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". This, obviously, was both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sort of reminds me of what we've done at my first work: http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2013/measurable-happiness/ ;)
Did you use any libraries for the dashboard? I'd be interested in setting something like this up at my company, too.