skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

"Out of all failed drives, over 56% of them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors, reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count."

Most drives that fail have no SMART errors. In other words they fail spontaneously. BTW, if you have a drive with even a single error, replace it now or at least make sure you have a spare on hand:

"After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors."

"After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one."
China has 24m young Internet "addicts"
Funny thing is, I clicked on "New Hubble camera photographs unusual comet inside solar system (nasa.gov)" to read the article and look at this pictures. I clicked on the comments of this one to see if anyone caught it.
why are you using google image search to look for "how to do X in LaTeX?"
About MacRuby -- I think it will start infringing on Objective-C turf soon.

There's also Rubinius. I think an exhaustive test suite for the language spec is a good thing.
the def self.foo(x): syntax does not interfere with such monkey patching because it gets turned into foo = {fn using (self, x)}.
I never understood that either. For years I've been hearing people say that web apps shouldn't worry about CPU speed, but in 100% of cases over the past ten years I've found servers with faster processors to be much less sluggish when serving both dynamic and static requests. In fact I've often perceived a bigger benefit from a faster processor rather than a marginally faster disk. I must be crazy I suppose..
You are arguing syntax, I'm arguing semantics. {"foo" : 25, "bar" : 32} is just not significantly different from <foo>25</foo><bar>32</bar> in my view (and I imagine in his view as well).

I think we should just agree to disagree on this one.
The thing you're not getting is that the writer is apparently a puritan and wants to force his world view on you.
Asynchronous design just removes some of the memory pressure and a chunk of CPU loss from context switching. If your thread stacks are short and you have plentiful memory, you're still CPU-bound.

But yes, if you have to hit a serialized disk somewhere for each and every request, then you really are screwed. But I don't think that's really often the case, is it? If it were, it would be a miracle that most web pages ever come up in under a second.
Did they reimplement the entire standard PHP library bug-for-bug in C++? I'm curious about that aspect of it..
> The Internet

Huh? I thought APRANet was a DARPA project, not a NASA project.

> LED's

The word 'NASA' is found nowhere on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED

> integrated circuits

Jack Kirby (He was working for Texas Instruments at the time and later won a Nobel Prize for it)

> CNC Machining

General Motors, General Electric, etc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnc_machining)

{edit} According to the Apollo project Wikipedia page, it looks like integrated circuits and CNC machining may have been driven by the project, though there is no mention on the respective pages (revisionist history on the Apollo page, or missing info on the other pages).

{edit2} A better page for reference would be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Spinoff

According to that page, NASA did not contribute to 'LEDs' as people would understand the term on HN (i.e. they did not invent the little lights that go blinky-blinky on consumer electronics). It seems to be talking about high-intensity LEDs for medical applications. In that vein, saying that the Apollo program gave us 'LEDs' is somewhat misleading (though maybe not on purpose).

I notice that 'The Internet' is only mention as linked to some 'Internet-powered oven.'
The Days of Miracle and Wonder - a story about cynicism
I buy the 'grow rapidly' part - but what does venture funding and hiring part have to do with it? Take 37Signals (your own example) as an obvious counter example.

I'd argue that 'scalability' is an important component of a startup though. I don't think anyone would consider a consultancy to be a startup - although many do meet your three criteria. They don't scale since there is an upper bound to revenue per employee (while a software product/website has no such bound).
I have trouble with limited definitions. To me, "startup" encompasses any newly started business, regardless of its aims. Why? Because I find most other definitions are set by someone with an agenda, or rule out companies most would agree are startups for arbitrary reasons.

"Acquire venture funding" was not a 37 Signals goal. Ask most venture capitalists and that will be in their definition, though.

"Hire more employees" is arbitrary. Why is that a goal any more than "buy office chairs?" Hiring employees is a side effect, not a goal.

Ask someone who thinks single founder companies don't work and their definition will likely exclude companies like del.icio.us.

Ask techies, and startup means "a tech company" but personally, I would call Ben & Jerry's in the 70's a startup.

In terms of goals, sometimes the process evolves--like hotornot.com and the goals aren't there at the outset. Sometimes the goal is "build a better search engine" and everything else evolves later.

For these reasons, I prefer an inclusive defintion of startups, rather than something that means "startup like mine, or startup I'm looking to invest in"
MediaPost Publications Cuban Rails Against Google, News Aggregators 02/03/2010
s/interested\/obsessed/bored/

I get to page 5 or 6 on reddit, just because I get bored, and read fairly fast...
I sure hope it does. I just bought a bunch of stock in a company that makes nose hair clippers. Forget the App Store -- this is the real gold rush.
>This is PHP, though, and you would have to jump through a lot of hoops to remove the IO overhead. At least HipHop uses libevent, so at least apps won't be blocked by slow clients anymore.

Really, in PHP you don't have to jump through many hoops at all to minimize disk I/O. Employ APC opcode and user variable caching, build PHP's Memcached (with the 'd' on the end, not the old 'Memcache' lib) into your data layer, and you're good to go.

If you're letting any process sit idle, much less a '100-400 MB' one, you're doing it wrong--in any language.
"As for India: what percentage of Indian kids get a full education?"

An increasing percentage over time.
The question at hand was about aspiration and what a society works towards, not the measure of success achieved to date. By this logic, unless you've conquered intergalactic space travel already, you can't aspire to a space program.

How many people in India aspire to give their kids a full scientific education? Practically everyone, even the desperately poor. Has the number of kids getting an education been increasing or decreasing over time? Teh former.

Does India deliver a high quality education to every kid born in the country? Not at all. But we are working towards it. There are huge problems to be solved and progress is slow.

And it varies over India too. In my home state of Kerala we have 100 % literacy and almost every kid goes to school till 15 years or so. (No evolution phobia either btw ;-)). In Bihar,(say) many kids drop out due to poverty and remain illiterate or barely literate.

The original question was "Is there a (developed, or developing) country in the world right now with a healthy respect for education and intellectualism?"

Respect for learning and intellectuals is the issue. A country could have a great educational system and still disdain intellectuals - the United States say?

The question was about societies that respected education.In India (and China I dare say) an uneducated man respects the educated man, vs disdaining him as an intellectual snob. We are proud that our Prime Minister is a PhD from Oxford. He doesn't have to face accusations of "elitism" like Obama does. We are proud that our last President was a rocket scientist.
Mock-ups Show a Google Chrome OS Tablet
Farm Firbas website - Bled
Throwing another hat in the ring, I've been working on a lightweight Hackernews reader. The major goal was to reduce tab overload for light browsing: http://hnaddict.com/

It's a bit green but fairly usable.
yeah, Motorola is being rather evasive about it, but we're supposed to get Flash support whenever we do get 2.1 on the Droid.
Well, if you also use jQuery, you can copy&paste your HAML code into a jQuery selector, which is nice.
Yeah, I pretty much gave up on reading the article at that line.
It would be pretty awesome if we lived in a magical world where the performance of code running on a web server didn't matter, but that's just not the case. To know that, one needs simply run top on a busy web server.
> Most of my revenue has been been from virus and malware removal. I coupled the virus/malware removal with an antivirus installation service for $19 and most people gladly paid it.

Once a computer has become infected, it's fairly impossible to determine if the infection has been completely eradicated.[1] I wonder that that $19 buys you. A few executions of anti-malware software until they claim "Clean"?

[1] I realize that even in the absence of a known infection it's "impossible" to know whether you're infected.
Venting with Google Suggested Lists
What Google 'suggested' lists tell us about people.
Looks like an artifact to me. If you look real hard there is a similar artifact on the right size of the black border just below the upper-right corner of the device. It's probably just a coincidence that the artifact is in the place were a webcam would go.
A Brilliant Web Usage Info-graphic
Freelance Web Developer Programmer SEO London
BestCoder is service offered by Abdi Gulaid a freelance web developer, Programmer, and SEO who delivers results to business both large and small. Skills include the following: AJAX, CSS, FLASH, MySQL, JAVASCRIPT, ASP.NET, PHP, XML, HTML, JSP
This has been known for well over a decade: volumes that use NTFS compression deliver performance increases as high as 50 percent over their uncompressed counterparts, depending on the type of data stored on the volumes

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc767961.aspx
And what happens when the guy down the hall leaves the company?
Notes from Facebook's HipHop for PHP Debut
I want to echo the "linear inefficiency, lol" meme.

But more importantly, the costs of inefficiency aren't clock cycles, it's the opportunity cost.

It depends on the situation, obviously, but inefficiencies can have a very real cost in terms of lost sales or customer dissatisfaction. The ROI will vary on a multitude of variables, but that's my point: these graphs simply don't reveal the complexity of costing models that really come in to play.
Give me the option to hide uninteresting stories (maybe ones I've already clicked), and I'll use this.

Minor suggestion:

A better format for the line below a link title would be:

9 Points | 2 hours ago | 5280 Comments.

b/c the comment link is the only one that's clickable, and the whole site is dominated by passing your attention back and forth across the frame boundary.

EDIT: What about some kind of sparkline for points & comments?
I pulled all of the examples from the NASA spinoff page that you linked, except for the Internet one which as we all know was initiated by DARPA. I thought that was under NASA, but can see now that this isn't so. Sorry about that, and thanks for clearing it up.

I commented because I (probably for the first time ever...) disagreed with patio11's comment that AI has contributed much more to humanity than spaceflight.
It does not matter if he considers himself a startup or not.

Think about it. He does fairly well doing what he does. Must a dentist "scale", or is the dentist perfectly happy running her practice until she retires?

Why do people have to scale? Wouldn't you like yourself to earn that regular money every month doing something that you like without thinking of constant expansion?
I agree with you completely in the difficulty of being certain that a computer is clean once infected, but some people (a la http://xkcd.com/694/ ) are not willing to deal with "starting from scratch" because it means having to backup their data, reinstall all of their applications, and redo their application settings.
The Top 5 Indispensable Chrome Extensions
Unlike most people, I'm very pleased with the ipad. Given that I'm a long time mac dissenter, I see the ipad as more of a muse for other companies to be inspired by than a legitimate tablet computer.

Here's a concept video of how chrome OS would interface with the user. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=debO2FroXA0

They used the hacker news homepage to demonstrate!
Not them by themselves, but they have you striking on the ball of your foot, or mid-foot at most. That reduces the sudden impact on your foot and leg. Heel striking is like driving a post (your lower leg) into the ground. Striking on the ball of the foot converts the force into rotational energy (pivoting around the ball, and around the ankle) and spreads it out over time.
My 2 cents on why Flash is irrelevant. Content is king. We all agree on this yes? People want that content through RSS, on a browser, on their phone, through email through etc etc... It must be open, sharable, free to see in any way the user wants.

Flash is merely one of these content delivery tools (often delivering it in a frustrating non-standard way). Repeat: a content delivery tool. Flash in itself is not content, aside from some visual senses when used as art or music or performance.

Now of course, the manner the content is delivered is important to some. Important to branding & marketing. That's an entirely nother topic. But to generalize, the manner of content delivery is becoming less and less relevant. A person wants to see a video or read an article. They want to read and write comments. They want to see related material. These are the absolute essentials, and Flash is absolutely unnecessary for this.

I do see one last branch that will save Flash until there is alternative. Streaming video. Live sports and events will be getting much much bigger in the near future. When there is an easier alternative, then Flash will be gone.
Today's empires are built on the megalomanic greed of a bunch of predatory chief executives and their political stooges.
There is just so much needless complexity and oddness, consider the way arrays contain a pointer (so that they can work like a stack) which has crazy odd behavior (which changes depending on which version of PHP you use) when you copy the array..
That makes "startup" sound like a kind of disreputable thing. What's wrong with building a sustainable business that you enjoy running, and continuing to run it, instead of looking for the quickest way to sell out?
On Safari, that link pinwheeled my MacBook Pro for about 10 seconds
Whilst I happen to agree the US has a sense of purpose, it fails the test by your own definition.
brew's documentation isn't fully baked, but this should do what you want:

$ brew cleanup git
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.6.5.4...
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.6.5.7...
Uninstalling /usr/local/Cellar/git/1.6.6...

Or just "brew cleanup" to clean everything. (That doesn't appear to work with projects built from version control repos, though, like emacs with Cocoa support.)

edit: Maybe you meant that you want to remove the whole thing, i.e., all versions, not just the unused ones. Looks like you have to "cleanup" first, then "remove". That seems like a bug to me.
This is the key point. You save time working with Haml and Sass if your designers can use them, edit them, etc.

I am longing to get to a point where the designers I work with can be expected to write templates using mustache or django template language...

Ideally the designer can check out a submodule of the project and commit ongoing UI enhancements by simply modifying mustache/django templates that they wrote in the first place.

This could easily be implemented by using a static site generator to populate the templates with static data so that the designer could check his/her work before committing.

With Haml you end up translating the whole mess over and over again, and if you decide to make a big change to HTML/CSS you are spending lots of time redoing the HAML/Sass.

The other key thing to realize is that CSS is an extremely expressive spec when used properly I really don't think that the small bit of conciseness offered by Sass is worth adding another layer...
FWIW, I plan on opening another location on the other side of my city. I also plan on hiring some help for both locations.

Paying a college student $9/hr is a win-win in my opinion.
totally agree with you. i hope you didn't interpret my comment as implying that scaling is something that everyone should aspire to.
PC shops like this one are the market for our premium product and it is extremely interesting to see these numbers. It wasn't obvious to me before (I'm sort of slow with these things) but if you're selling a B2B product, checking out a customer's books is really enlightening.
HP Goes Infrastructure 2.0
I've toyed with this idea for years. Maybe that's the case with others as well. I've got a load of tech savvy friends, rent is very affordable for storefront commercial buildings. I could even scrounge up some initial investment money. But it can't be that easy... can it?

I was sad to see this was the only post on the blog. I'd be very interested in knowing what steps went into setting up shop.
http://metaquark.de/appfresh/
I'd rather trust a geek with their own business than some HS dropout at BestBuy to run the anti-malware software. Or rather, I'd trust sending my friends and family to that person rather than BB. I can usually do the same pro-bono, but I just don't have the time anymore.
I plan on posting more in the coming days.
What's your premium product?
Some notes from Facebook's UStream event this evening: http://www.recessframework.org/page/notes-from-facebooks-hip...

High points:

the performance numbers were against PHP with APC op-code caching enabled

eval, create_function, and preg_replace with /e (basically eval), and conditional flow based on the existance of functions are the only features not supported.

Currently PHP5.2 with a roadmap of 5.2.12 compliant in the next month and 5.3 being the focus after that.
I agree with what you're getting at, but let's not equate inefficiency with a rush job.
Well, of the people who decided to provide answers on HN or reddit, the consensus was: merge the branch, delete it, then add a tag on the merge commit. And then on IRC the author of this book told me to do the same thing:

http://pragprog.com/titles/tsgit/pragmatic-version-control-u...

The only person who suggested anything else, out of fifty-seven comments so far, was one who suggested merging the branch and then keeping it around rather than deleting and tagging it.

Since that's all I have to go on, and since it seems to be a pretty clear consensus, I'm taking their advice as being a generally-accepted convention amongst git users. Granted, such conventions in git seem to be as ephemeral as branches (e.g., fads such as "rebase everything! rebase after every commit! No, wait, never rebase! Rebasing is evil! Nobody should rebase!"), but if you're trying to suggest that as a result there are no conventions, I'm just going to write you off.
Exactly. The textbook definition of a compiler is a program that translates a program from one language to another.
Out of curiosity, anyone else's Google results page look like this recently?
that's the what i normally mean by startup, but whenever there is confusion what we are describing is accurately described by the term: "growth venture"
Almost every single website on the internet is I/O bound, not CPU bound

This claim is patently false.

Under load, a surprisingly large percentage of applications are CPU bound. Disclaimer: I make my living doing web application load tests on a consultative basis--I don't have a study to cite offhand, just experience. I should publish a study, but that's a different issue.
Yeah... e.g. this poor guy, who got "auto-hellbanned" and has been talking to himself because the third comment he ever made was childish: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=efaith
OK, OK, you win.. hydrogen peroxide probably comes into that category too :-)
No. It's quite cluttered, isn't it.
Thank you so much for your wonderful commentary :) I really enjoyed reading that.
Are Dashboard widgets coming to iPad?
Yes, it is a rather strange bastardization of the word, but it has been used for e.g. fabrics for expensive ski jackets for a while now. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breathable

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterproof_fabric
"Breathability is measured by the rate at which water vapor passes through, in the units of grams of water vapour per square meter of fabric per 24 hour period (g/m2/d), often abbreviated to just 'g'. "
Here's a quote from an alleged Facebook employee on Reddit regarding this matter.

This entire thread needs to go fall in a well and die. If they had just called it a compiler, you nerds would be arguing about the same thing and saying it was a source code transformer. They just called it that because it translates PHP to C++, and to most people who don't have Asperger's that's not the same as compiling.

How do I know this? I sit 20 feet from the guys who wrote it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ax7k4/facebooks...
Use Compact Tablet Counters for Accuracy and Reliability
Building a JIT compiler for PHP in 2 days
I'd love to go, but it seems kind of pricey - did anyone go last year? And if you did, did you think it was worth it? (Not including the benefit of the free phone, which I don't think they'll do again.)
Concurrency: Plumbing for the Arduino
My co-founder and I make Ninite (YC W08) http://ninite.com

It automatically installs apps for windows fast. It's free for home use, but we charge businesses. Many of our subscribers are PC shops like yours.

It's fascinating to see the next step up the value chain in such detail. Thanks for writing that post.
Design for ColorBlindness
That's what I get in private browsing mode.
Appreciation for Depreciation
I have similar feelings, different place though: in my science class we were watching a video, and then the teacher changed it to the news.