skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll admit that one reason I'm unusually grumpy about this is that I feel rather unhappy not knowing what I need to do to safeguard data that I care about.

...backups?

This issue is not unsolvable at a technical level, but it probably is at a political level. Someone would have to determine and write up what is good enough now (on sane setups), and then Unix kernel people would have to say 'enough, we are not accepting changes that break this de facto standard'. You might even get this into the Single Unix Specification in some form if you tried hard, because I really do think there's a need here.

Or we could just have everyone perform regular backups like they already are/should be doing, and decide that if systems are crashing so frequently as to lose data often enough, trying to "fix" this "problem" by adding what would likely be another mass of design-by-committee complexity to filesystems is not addressing the cause but only its symptoms.

Then again, with over two decades of experience using the FAT filesystem and never a single instance of unrecoverable data loss despite sudden crashes while hearing countless tales of others corrupting their data frequently even when using far more complex and "robust" filesystems, it makes me wonder why I don't seem to suffer quite the same problems...
Actually there is a very smart and direct point, which is quickly relating to a large audience, not all of whom are versed on the finer points of international human rights violations, how badly a sect of people, however the dividing line is defined, are oppressed.

Seems valid to me.
What term would be more accurate than gender apartheid? It seems wholly fitting, even down to the literal translation of the word. I struggle to imagine a phrase more apt.
Event assuming that you can look at the source code for your filesystem/kernel the results of a given write still depend on the conditions and orders under which your writes hit disk relative to other processes' writes.

For example, if two processes issue writes to disk sectors that are adjacent but one of the processes' writes also affects a different sector farther away on the physical disk the I/O scheduler may re-order processes' sector level writes. Normally journalling addresses this issue but if the journalling transactions are reordered then it's no help at he application level.
> However, when you use Spritz, you do read every word

You're presented with every word. Whether or not you actually read every word is harder to gauge.
The problem isn't just the mainline source code, you also have drivers which of course vary for each device.

Then even completely beyond control of the kernel, devices have their own RAM caches, which means that even if the device reports that something was written, it might not have been. So there's no way to absolutely be sure.
One of the engineers at Google took the time to figure this out, and updated the page out code in the Linux kernel they were using so that the "correct" steps were known if you had to know your data was on disk. It was discussed on LKML as I recall but considered "not generally useful" and I doubt it made it into the main sources.

One of the interesting things about writes is that they disrupt reads more significantly than you might expect. Greg Lindahl characterized the impact at Blekko when we were crawling so that we could optimize writes from the crawl to not disrupt latency on the search engine side. Later we completely separated those functions for similar reasons. I believe every disk I've evaluated over the years is slowest on the random read/write 50% test.
Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?
I've written a response to this article. It echoes much of what's been said, but also adds some new things. Enjoy!

In response to Obie's where the hell are all the good senior software engineers and hands-on engineering directors

https://medium.com/@bradurani/in-response-to-obie-s-where-th...
Another case where the terms "Git" and "GitHub" are wrongly being used interchangeably.
As long as your hardware doesn't lie as well??

http://brad.livejournal.com/2094221.html

http://brad.livejournal.com/2116715.html
The phrase you're looking for is "toe the line", having the sense of standing with your toes behind a line on the ground.
Bad zoning is really bad, but zoning is useful.

What you need is mixed offices and housing with street level retail. Coffee shops, restaurants, places to go. You also want underground transportation because parking wastes space, cars interfere with pedestrians, and stoplights are a pathetic drag on movement.

Self-driving electric cars could have high utilization for underground tunnels. Like a subway, with stations in dense areas and on/off ramps to highways. Self driving cars can keep to closer tolerances (narrower tunnels, shorter following distance) and electric cars mean simpler ventilation (no carbon monoxide).
eh, you stood firmly with saudi arabia and the region descent into chaos was not much accelerated or hindered by that?
I think saudi arabia as a ally just reflects the sympathy of a "autocratic"-democratic-voted-in-presidential model for its non-democratic equals.

Also i think Iran is to similar as a culture to the us-evangelicals, to be ever "a reliable ally". Messianic (and thus innovative?!), having a drug problem and a "unwieldy" youth - and subtle racism. Nobody likes a mirror, when you are not in shape.
If you have a grasp on the dimensions of a banana, please make sure you've done so in the privacy of your own home.
IIRC, Card wrote Ender's Game in high school and later dusted it off, fixed it up, and published it.
There are, but they're harder to count.

In most studies the Chinese investors are counted by their foreign names. There is no public data on nationality of real estate owners.
I'm going to guess that your next step to chase further speeds is going direct to nvme just levering the block layer (per core multiq) skipping the filesystem entirely.
This does sound a lot more useful. The majority of GitHub users don't have any real projects. Maybe only showing GitHub users that have more than n followers would be better.
Isn't getting funding for science actually politics and not science? Using the funding is science, but getting the funding is politics, no?
> That's a bad idea, too. For example, in Fremont right now, there's a development that was built without being placed in a school district. So the students who will live there have no real school.

Perhaps abolishing the whole idea of school districts and assigning kids to schools via address as opposed to parental decision. The whole pay for schools via property tax and local levies has a pretty big negative impact on students from low income neighborhoods. Its classism baked into the system. Backpack tuitions would right a lot of wrongs in the education of our children.
How about GitHub-random: replaces a random file in your repository with the version from someone else's fork of it.
Maybe if the point was to impart on an audience that millions of women in SA are being rounded up and slaughtered, it would be a good term.

Like, it's a great way to describe what happened in Rwanda.
I think its better to give a same result to the empty-list case when its possible.
Saudi haven't been "given" any weapons, and they're rich enough that they could easily have purchased from parties other than USA.

You are right to imply that national interests that are commonly understood and discussed differ sharply from the personal interests of those agents charged with pursuing national interests.
As a general trend with reimplementing stuff in JS, I don't quite know whether this is exciting or horrifying...
Backups do not solve the problem of not knowing whether data you just wrote to disk will still be there in the event of a power outage or system crash. You know, before a backup has a chance to run. Sure, those events should be extremely rare but that doesn't mean that we can or should just ignore it, at a large enough scale even extremely improbable events are guaranteed to happen.
Introducing GPUImage 2, redesigned in Swift
The article wasn't about the decision of when to write to disk, but how to actually do it. Say you have a point in your program where you have made the decision that it is necessary to write to disk. How do you actually do that for sure? It's not write() or even necessarily fsync().

The author is finding this frustrating because there are several things to do that can seem arbitrary, random, and counterintuitive. His trust in the OS was damaged and now he or she is understandably grumpy about it.
"school district" - this is exactly what OP is suggesting. Another obstacle with classist and racist origin. It really blows my mind why some countries have such incredibly stupid laws. Can you image a law when you can buy only in one shop if you are from a certain district? That would suck tremendously. No competition.
A simple starter project for building Reflex applications with Stack
I've been told to type sync into terminal whenever I want writes to complete.
Homeschooling is underrated honestly.
Ask Microsoft: Will you consider fixing the most fundamental issue with Windows?
We have dozens of PC's in need of OS upgrades from 64 bit Vista. Why? Because that was our last upgrade cycle and migrating hardware with Windowns is, well, you avoid it for as long as you can.

Windows has always made this a painful experience. Our machines take several weeks to build. You have to install, configure and license dozens of applications and take a couple of weeks to make sure all is well before replacing old machines.

Why is this the case?

Because the underlying design of Windows OS does not create a separation between OS and apps.

If "C:\Program Files" could actually be an independent entity (the "P:" drive?), upgrading hardware and OS would be child's play. Buy new pre-built computers, move the P drive over and you are up and running. Your employees could even have machines at home and be given a drive with all the apps installed to work from home. It would be fantastic. Licensing could be dealth with through some TBD mechanism.

There are tens of millions of machines in the world that are not being updated because of this problem. Companies with thousands of workstations just can't deal with the painful realities of having to reinstall applications.

This business of OS and hardware upgrades requiring full from-scratch application re-installations is, well, getting old.

Why do we have to reinstall applications such as Notepad++ or our JetBrains tools? Why do we have to reinstall any application at all?

Simple app migration as described above would see PC and OS sales would go through the roof.

Today we are contemplating migrating to W10 on new hardware. It will be a costly nightmare. And we will be stuck with this hardware for many years. If it weren't for this we would probably migrate hardware every 2 years rather than when absolutely forced to do so, as it is starting to be the case now with some of our software.

Think about it. The status quo makes no sense. Not in the context of the next generation in computing.
The Linux Documentation Project has this to say about flushing of buffer cache: "In traditional UNIX systems, there is a program called update running in the background which does a sync every 30 seconds, so it is usually not necessary to use sync. Linux has an additional daemon, bdflush, which does a more imperfect sync more frequently to avoid the sudden freeze due to heavy disk I/O that sync sometimes causes."
If I read it right, the Act actually establishes a cause of action in any act of "international terrorism" in which "any national of the United States suffers injury in his or her person, property, or business." While there are at least half a dozen reasons a suit against Israel (in my hypothetical example) would fail, the Act is pretty expansive in where the acts can take place, and what kind of damage they do.
In This American Life's episode on "Take the Money and Run for Office" [1], Barney Frank said,

> If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district. [2]

A lobbyist is just a person seeking to influence decisions made by government. Another way to say this is a person who educates Congress. Education is just a nicer sounding word for society's desire to influence its upcoming generation.

Congress is made up of lawyers. They don't know everything about the industries they need to regulate. Drug companies are trying to get away with using unknown substances which they proclaim are safe. Some are life saving, some aren't. Banks are constantly coming up with new financial products. Some help the economy, some don't. We need people to debate these new drugs and market dealings. The people who debate them should be experts. They should publish findings which can be replicated by independent parties. These experts and independent parties often come in the form of lobbyists. One of the EFF's jobs is to lobby.

Lobbyists aren't inherently evil, and while I think we should further restrict money in politics, you're never going to completely remove it.

Fortunately, as Barney pointed out, we have the ability to fire our elected officials. The problem lately is not just with lobbyists. It's also that we're not turning out to vote during primaries and general elections. If we want to get better representation we have to study up on the issues and candidates, debate the issues with each other, and vote.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...

[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...
JavaScript may very well have the doubtful honor of being the language that people have spent most resources to avoid writing in.
Are Today’s Parents Getting a Raw Deal?
Great article, and if you really follow it to its logical conclusion, it all ends in buckets of money, and who gets to keep them.
Certain elements of the kernel aren't modified often, but the scheduler isn't one of them. It had been subject to a lot of churn. There is no generalization you can state about the Linux kernel scheduler that is valid for an entire decade of kernel versions.
If I'm not supposed to trust that line, how do I know what lines I'm supposed to trust.
This one is very approachable and thorough, and was the result of a Kickstarter last year. Really great book, and probably my favorite; these guys went over the top.

"Sega Mega Drive / Genesis: The Collected Works"
https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/sega-mega-drive-genesis-...

The other one I have stored away is in 100% Japanese and was more a canonical catalog of every released game. Released, I want to say, maybe a 6-8 years ago? Hard as heck to find.
I think the man page
http://linux.die.net/man/2/fsync
answers the questions the article asks about fsync().

fsync() = YES metadata, YES data, NO dir entry

fdatasync() = NO metadata, YES data, NO dir entry

fsync() of dir = NO metadata, NO data, YES dir entry
http://www.goodui.org/ is a good place to start.
You're conflating a strict definition of politics with "playing politics".
Title should include iPads and iMacs.
This will be interesting for codeschool.com and elearning projects, now they can have everything without requiring the backend at all to evaluate the commands that the user sends.
> That and I think a lot of women face quite a bit of harassment on these sites or at least used to.

Still do, there's plenty of examples online, like:
https://www.reddit.com/r/creepyPMs/
Did you see the or in my argument ? Zoning is what prevents someone building a nuclear waste plant ( or an industrial plant ) on a quiet, tree lined street.
I wonder what the implications of making an SQLite filesystem would be.
So there is a school district, and what you wrote first was mere hyperbole?
> Building limits are systemically classist and racist. They maintain a geographical segregation system.

This. Outlawing dense, urban growth does real harm to people's lives, and to the environment. It's one of the clearest examples of xenophobia and greed coallescing to extract wealth and concentrate it in the hands of the privileged few. Just because it's, say, a crowd of mostly Bernie Sanders supporters pushing to "preserve neighborhood character" in the Berkeley hills at a local city council meeting, and not a skyscraper board room full of bankers in expensive suits, doesn't make it any less nefarious or the impact any less real.
PkgsrcCon2016 call for presentations
The arxiv paper is just a repost of the preliminary paper, which is really more a design outline and rationale -- we may work on a more substantial paper later, we've been busy building the software.
"Notify me when the crowd outside [this] stall is below 50"

This situation demands the location of your device. Now, the app would hide your identity by using a hash in place of your name or MAC. This is our initial solution and if something better comes up or if a more complex situation arises then we would implement something better.
Just because something could exist, doesn't mean it is what is happening though. I think all complex systems modeling has things to teach us, and I've looked a lot at Schelling and other agent-based models, but arguably they don't hold up to empirical evidence. http://www.nyudri.org/research-index/2009/empirics
Backups don't help if writes don't make it to disk in the order and manner expected by the application programmer. There's an emerging consensus that there are crash protocol bugs lurking everywhere due to I/O scheduler reordering. For example this bug in gzip:

http://bugs.gnu.org/22768
And also height restrictions to protect views. You could still ask for nice architecture so views are pleasant.
In Boston at least I've had a far better experience with Lyft than Uber. I know the driver pool is very similar so it's probably the result of a small sample size on my part, but Lyft drivers have just been better, happier, and more conversational.

I've heard Lyft pays them slightly better, so perhaps that's part of it.
As I said, some zoning restrictions and/or permitting procedures in some places are too restrictive and should be relaxed. That in no way implies that it's a good idea to get rid of all zoning restrictions
Wow, I'd love to know what they mean by "imperfect". In Linux, specifically, the sync_dirty_buffers syncs all the dirty write buffers (nope - see edit) and isn't imperfect or incomplete in any particular way.

Edit: Nevermind, I'm remebering now there is a dirty_background_ratio separate from a dirty_ratio. It will sync some of the dirty buffers as long as it's above dirty_background_ratio and under dirty_ratio. And it was actually bdflush that determined all of this; the sync_dirty_buffer function just took a specific buffer object and synced that.

Edit 2: And I'm finding out that information seems to be outdated. Here's the old documentation about bdflush [1].
That was either moved or removed in the latest version, but I did find this [2], which suggests that there was an old bdflush vs something else now. Looks like I missed something important and have some research to do.

[1] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/sysctl/vm...

[2] http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/Documentation/vm/active...
Actually, there are many reasons, some of which are good for home-purchasers. It might interest you to know that the inspection regimes of different municipalities vary drastically.
This -- or this topic -- should be the top-level thread. I refuse to use Windows 10, and am not sure what to do going forward for software that I use which only runs on Windows.
First time applicant here as well. Submitted a late application on April 11th, and haven't heard back yet.
It's probably 2nd place. I imagine avoiding writing in C gets the top honor.
it may not be possible to conceptualize all parts of a system simultaneously but that doesn't mean nobody can fully understand the system. A layer of abstraction isn't about not having to understand what's beneath it; it's a tool to aid in understanding.
DoYogaWithMe: Free Online Yoga Videos
If you then expose that file system through a POSIX file system API, you have all of the same issues of underspecified or unclear behaviour that the article mentions.
Do you know if they address I/O reordering within the scheduler? For example transaction implementations often require that writes (distinct file system calls) hit the disk in a particular order to guarantee a sane state for the database. Prime example is the GNU bug for gzip:

http://bugs.gnu.org/22768

The the writes to the `foo.gz` file have to hit the disk before the unlink but the I/O scheduler can reorder these potentially and a badly timed crash could result in data loss. Note that journaling doesn't fix this issue because the transactions are distinct too.
I'm not getting what this is for. It seems to be something about automation around arbitrary people on the Internet giving you work to do. It seems like this is a flaw to get rid of? Email and bug trackers make it all too easy.
Language selection would be good too - possibly by excluding uninteresting ones rather than actively including them though. This would keep the results slightly surprising; the point is just to let you ignore languages that might otherwise be overrepresented.

See, e.g., http://githut.info/ - if you're not interested in one or more of Javascript, Java, Python, PHP, C, C++ or Ruby, you could easily see a lot of uninteresting projects.
>"and to the environment"

That's a great point, and one that has been largely missed here.

I used to live in a city with aggressive green-space initiatives. (85% of the city had to be green space.) Locals would tell me that it was "good for the environment".

I'm sorry, but no. Green space initiatives force sprawl. They're bad for the environment, full stop.
“From everything I’m looking at, we’re gaining share in all top 20 markets, which is where 80 percent to 90 percent of rides happen,” 80% of your ridership, not uber's.
Canada should be congratulated for selecting a PM who atleast takes the trouble to educate himself before spouting an opinion.

Here in the US, we elect politicians who actively deny science and are proud of their lack of knowledge.
That's not a conjecture that's not even fantasy, that's a complete ignorance of the political situation.

Israel isn't being lead by hard-liners (when comparing them to US hard liners / right wing), the "Likud" is called a right wing party, mostly because back when it was established the Israeli left still had a hammer and a sickle in their logo.

Israel has no reason to bomb the Palestinians out of existence and while I doesn't want to give up territory for many reasons with security being a prime one, it also doesn't show intent no has a reason to go out for an all out war.

Offensive operations are not viewed well by the Israeli public, not to mention that even if they did went all out on the Palestinians no one in the Arab world would really care.

The Palestinian issue isn't and wasn't anything more than a front in the wider conflict between the Arab states and Israel, that conflict is long gone and faded.

If the Arabs cared about Palestinians they would not block the UN from treating them as refugees, they would not force them to live in camps for 70 years passing their situation to their children and instead of denying them every right they could easily have resettled them by now.
I am not sure that desktop devices can still be said to be growing: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3054605/computers/pc-sales-pl...
On the nature of creepiness
We've changed the title from the linkbait headline to the informative subtitle and re-upped* this post. I don't think we've ever done that for a story that already had 100+ upvotes, but this article is so astonishingly in-depth, and the topic so little known, that it deserves a deeper discussion.

* Described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and the other links there.