News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

chewbranca

Re:Node.js to pass Ruby on Rails in search popularity on Thursday March 01, 2012 @12:44PM (#3653108)
The only problem with that comparison is the first six example results have nothing to do with "Ruby on Rails".
Re:Node.js to pass Ruby on Rails in search popularity on Thursday March 01, 2012 @10:26AM (#3652426)
This graph is biased by the fact that you're searching 3 words versus one. I personally qualify searches with "rails" throughout the day, but hardly ever actually search "ruby on rails". I imagine most other rails devs do as well, so this graph is missing a substantial amount of rails traffic.
Re:Heavier people should pay more to fly on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @12:07PM (#3562607)
As someone who is 6'8", 310lbs and spent 12 hours flying last week, I would have to strongly disagree. Until airlines provide a means of adjusting available room to compensate for height, its not appropriate to charge taller people more at all.
Re:Big Data: principles and best practices (new book) on Monday January 09, 2012 @08:41PM (#3445251)
Try: http://beta.manning.com/

Lists all of your ebooks with quick download links and last updated times for meap books. Been using it for a while now with no issues.

Sounds more appealing than "Windows for Submarines" - http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htiw/articles/20081225.aspx
Alternatively, take advantage of your commute. I switched from driving to public transit and I've found the time can be incredibly productive, as its in between work time and at home family time, which makes it much easier to concentrate on what I need to do.
Re:MS washes its hands of the UEFI/Linux mess on Tuesday September 27, 2011 @12:17PM (#3043943)
The issue with that is the ability to disable secure boot is not included in the spec, and therefore is not required by any of the OEMs to include.

Edit: reply to comments on spec and disabling boot loading.

FYI, I haven't read the spec, and I based my statement from the other article on the home page: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/26/uefi_linux_lock_out_...

The relevant quote is: "Garrett said that Windows 8 certification requires that hardware ship with UEFI secure boot enabled. A feature allowing secure boot to be disabled – necessary to run Linux and FreeBSD on certified systems – is not required for certification."

And further: '"We've already been informed by hardware vendors that some hardware will not have this option," Garrett writes in a flow-up blog post to his original critique of the technology.'

Re:Ask HN: What API to the physical world do you wish existed? on Saturday September 24, 2011 @04:02PM (#3034198)
Hrmm... sat here thinking about the question, then thought 'a weather API would be nice, let me see if anyone else already answered that'.. ctrl-f weather.. oh great, the one guy who mentioned a weather API is also from Seattle.
Re:Shen 1.7 available on Friday September 23, 2011 @01:22PM (#3030774)
For those looking for more information, check out the specification page which has a nice introduction and more in depth documentation:

http://www.lambdassociates.org/specification/shen_1.7.htm

Re:Announcing Amazon ElastiCache - Managed Memcached on Tuesday August 23, 2011 @12:45PM (#2917271)
I agree that the value add isn't significantly high for small cluster type of situations, and I would much rather just have a caching API available that charges on usage and allows you to specify an amount of redundancy.

However, the automatic failovers is very nice. From Vogel's blog: "Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios." That is definitely nice.

Elasticache does seem to be sitting in an awkward middle ground between renting of instances and paying for usage in an API.

Edit: after thinking about it more and reading some of the comments, I think an ideal setup would be an API to a memcached like datastore with buckets so I can specify max-size, redundancy, expiration methods, etc on a per bucket basis. Even nicer setup would be all of that plus redundancy and HA across availability zones and regions.

Re:SSH productivity tips on Tuesday August 16, 2011 @05:04PM (#2892886)
Nice trick using a proxied netcat command to forward ssh connections through a server. Was not aware of that, and I spend a lot of time running through a front ssh server, thanks!
For those of you just getting into this book, there is also a great course with video lectures up on MIT's OCW site: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
Re:What's a Closure? on Friday August 05, 2011 @12:13PM (#2850563)
Focused on javascript, but this is a great introduction to closures: http://jibbering.com/faq/notes/closures/
Re:SICP is Under Attack on Wednesday August 03, 2011 @08:50PM (#2843989)
A great way to dive into functional programming is to read the book that this topic discusses.
To clarify for the downvoters, I'm talking about this in the context of CouchDB, which I believe was a fair assumption to make seeing as Damien Katz is one of the principle people involved and it was announced today at CouchConf.

In CouchDB, running a filter on top of view results is something you can only do in list functions or client side, so I am very curious to see how they incorporate this into CouchDB.

The data is not necessarily unstructured, it just doesn't have a strictly inforced schema. So I'm very intrigued by this if they're adding it as a layer on top of CouchDB views. If they are, you could use your views to selectively filter on documents with a known structure, and then safely operate across a subset of your docs with unql. We'll see where they go with this though.
It can be a tricky problem because you have a 1 to 1 correspondence of hacker news posts to web pages, so you can't combine articles from multiple sources into a single discussion.

Its a design choice that has pros and cons. One related problem that I find more relevant than multiple posts from multiple sources, is the life time of posts on hacker news. Once something fades from the front page, it falls into irrelevance aside from reference for google search. Which is again a design choice, and I'm not sure the future goals of the site are to support long term discussion.

Re:Kue - redis backed priority job queue for node.js on Tuesday July 05, 2011 @12:14AM (#2728609)
I keep seeing these (admittedly cool) redis based job queues popping up for different languages, such as resque, pyres, now kue, etc, however I'm disappointed to not see any standardization among them. Obviously they're different projects created by different people, but it would be great to have a common protocol amongst them, especially since they're all just json based messages.

I want to be able to use a job queue as a standard way to communicate between various language backends, so I can use different tools for different jobs. I've started looking into beanstalkd as it has an impressive list of client libraries: https://github.com/kr/beanstalkd/wiki/Client-Libraries.

I'm curious to hear if anyone has any thoughts/experiences/recommendations on using open source job queues to facilitate background processing between different languages and backends. I'm already using redis and resque, something like rabbitmq is overkill, and I just started looking into beanstalkd.

Re:Clojure on Heroku Cedar stack on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @06:42PM (#2604998)
Ahhhh that would be why, I didn't notice the 'future' billing change that is supposed to happen tomorrow.

I'll edit my original post to clarify.

On a more serious note, thanks for the great work Heroku! Very excited to see you guys turning into a generic service platform with a strong API based addon presence.

Re:Clojure on Heroku Cedar stack on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @06:21PM (#2604916)
Following the steps in that gist, I have a heroku clojure app up that just created an invoice line item for 1 worker. It was only for a few minutes, but I definitely just got charged for it.
Re:Clojure on Heroku Cedar stack on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @06:17PM (#2604901)
This does actually work, however be warned this will incur costs on your heroku account.

EDIT: False alarm, Heroku billing has changed so the application did not fall into my free dyno range.

Re:Why Instapaper Free is taking an extended vacation on Thursday April 28, 2011 @05:11PM (#2495105)
I'm sad to hear his attitude towards android, I've been anxiously waiting for an android version of the app, and have been holding off on becoming a subscriber until he moved in the android direction. Knowing this, I will sign up as a subscriber to show my appreciation for the ability to export to kindle format, which has been great for me, but unfortunately it means instapaper is no longer a candidate for a long term solution, but rather an intermediary tool I use for reading articles on the kindle until something else comes along.

Marco I really hope you change your attitude towards android, there are definitely people out there who would happily pay for an android instapaper app. That said, I understand if you don't and want to say thank you for everything you've done so far, even without android support it has been a very useful application for me.

Re:Working Best at Coffee Shops on Tuesday April 19, 2011 @12:40PM (#2463147)
Silence is great, but sometimes silence can be, well, too silent. I bounce back and forth between coffee shops and my home office, because sometimes I want to sit at home in silence or listen to music, and othertimes sitting at a coffee shop with a lot of ambient noise helps me get into the zone. Something about having a lot of random noise around that I don't care about listening too helps me concentrate.
Re:Ask HN: Does anyone actually code at a hackathon? on Sunday February 20, 2011 @12:20AM (#2241123)
Yes, I just got home from a code for america datacamp hackathon at socrata in seattle, was a lot of fun and quite productive.
Re:Isotope - An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts on Monday February 07, 2011 @12:51PM (#2189891)
This looks interesting. I've been using his masonry plugin for quite a while now and its worked out very well. Excited to see that masonry appears to hook into isotope as well.
Re:Proof of extra dimensions possible next year: CERN on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @10:49PM (#1912817)
There is a great book about the Higgs boson called 'The God Particle'(http://www.amazon.com/God-Particle-Universe-Answer-Question/...) I haven't read the new version, but I thoroughly enjoyed the original book, highly recommended.
Same here, I can spend all day working on a computer, but reading on a computer monitor tires my eyes out. I picked up the new standard size kindle, and while it does not do well at all with pdfs, it does a great job with ebooks. The Oreilly ebooks can be downloaded directly in mobi format, so they work very well with the kindle. Overall I've been very happy with reading ebooks on the kindle, and with the $139 price tag, you really can't go wrong. I'm still looking for a good pdf device, but unfortunately the ipad is the best device I've seen yet for pdfs, but its price tag is way too high for me. The ipad does a surprisingly good job of zooming in on columns, something I haven't seen anything else handle well.
Re:Netflix on Android on Saturday November 13, 2010 @01:02PM (#1901249)
I'm not exactly sure what the underlying issue is on android devices, but at least for linux desktops, the problem is netflix uses silverlight which does have support for DRM, whereas the linux version moonlight does not. It could be a similar issue for flash on android devices, although that is just speculation on my part. All I know for sure is that I'm anxiously waiting netflix on both linux and android. I currently use a windows VM to watch netflix from my computer. On a similar note, one of the most appealing things to me about the ipad is that it does have netflix support. I would love to see it supported on android tablets.
Re:Top 5 Ridiculous Hacking Scenes in Movies on Thursday November 04, 2010 @11:35AM (#1869318)
Well give the Matrix (Reloaded) some credit, in the scene with trinity hacking the power grid, she used nmap to attack a known ssh exploit: http://nmap.org/movies.html
Re:Exercise More to Hack Better on Wednesday November 03, 2010 @11:54PM (#1867604)
Lately I've found the best way for meto consistently exercise is to incorporate it with hacking and work. I've started using my bike as my primary mode of transportation when I leave the house to program. So instead of driving to a coffee shop or library, I ride my bike. Its made a noticeable difference in my energy, creativity levels and ability to focus.

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