skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering the work we do (corporate and criminal computer forensics) backup strategies are about our second most important thing :D So naturally it gets neglected...

Gold Images: of the various OS configurations and requisite software so you can redeploy a server fairly quickly

Diff Backups taken nightly of our various data stores / databases

Weekly backups of main server data (MySQL, MSSQL, Hadoop clusters etc)

In terms of software we use a couple of commercial solutions plus Bacula (which isn't really that great unless your using tapes...).

Inspired by Tarsnap (the encryption and so forth) Im in the process of speccing up an idea to write out own in house version (I'd love to use Tarsnap directly but not a chance unfortunately) to replace our mish mash of software.
Good summary list. For most developers, there is a nice abstraction barrier for graph theory because tools like neo4j, efficient RDF stores, search libraries, etc. make it fairly easy to build apps without getting one's hands dirty in the details. (But knowing the details makes it more likely to get creative and novel apps.)

Off topic, but: since so many things are well described as graphs, the GraphViz tool is great for communication: few lines of code to write your data to a 'dot' file, and a few seconds later you have a visual representation of your data.
This is an NP-complete problem, so you need to know that no optimal solution can be found in a reasonable time for large problems.

Apparently, the interference graphs that arise from SSA code are a well-behaved sort of graph, colorable in polynomial time.

http://digbib.ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/documents/6532
I have this: http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Graph-Theory-Gary-Chartra... and quite enjoy it, although it's fairly beginner if you're a math person.

There's also a more thorough list by a real pro under the 'network theory' section here: http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/3/12/learning-about-m...
If sales volume (from limited time) is measurement of success and flop than OSX is a flop compare to Windows7.

I don't know in which world is selling a new phone of 135k units by a newcomer in the hardware/phone industry is considered a flop.

Nexus One is Google first shot at a phone on an already heavily competitive industry. Without having any experience is selling/producing a consumer product like this, I would say this is a pretty good result for a first time. Come back after 1 year and another iteration of the phone and than we can talk about numbers and perhaps decide whether its a flop or a success.

For now, the way I look at it, its an experiment in progress.

I don't even own an andriod phone. I am still happy with my iphone. But when my contract expires I most likely will consider an android phone.

USA is a matured and very competitive cell phone market, its not very easy to get existing phone users who are committed to their phone contracts. Getting a new phone is a fairly long term commitment for most users.
The car industry doesn't have this, and people still take a loss on their cars so they can buy a new one when they get bored. People want a new cell phone every two years.
Yeah, I just got the Nexus One full price (it's coming today) and I'm planning to do just that. Over two years I will save money.
Thanks to the author for a thorough and well-written benchmark article.

I have been following the development of gevent lately, I am glad it did so well in these benchmarks.
What I really love about CherryPy is that I can use its web server without having to use the framework itself.
I don't think I understand Jukaroo. (I'm not familiar with whrrl or eat.ly, so maybe that hurts.)

Is this like imgur or twitpic except by posting an image I'm saying I recommend the thing in the image?

I see it in your list at the bottom, but browsing the site I don't see how "tell everyone why you recommend it" enters into the equation. (Edit: Actually, I see now, in the heading under the picture. Might be nice to browse by those categories--ie. show me things that are recommended for "Fun" or whatever.)
I'm starting to think people post stuff like this just to get to the top of sites like HN. In this list I only see 2 items (Interview by E-mail and meet a potential employee's mate) that aren't common sense.

The rest boils down to Work Hard, Hire great people who get along, use Social Networking and Don't count your chickens before they've hatched. All advice that's been posted here 100,000 times in the past.
I'm not sure it's fair to say he likes the language and dislikes the JVM. More that he thought it unwise and uneccesary that they (along with the class library and the security model) were all being bundled together:

From Java sucks (2000) http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

"The fact is that there are four completely different things that go by the name ``Java'':

A language;

An enormous class library;

A virtual machine;

A security model.

Sun would like you to believe that these are all the same thing, and that the name ``Java'' implies all of them, but this is marketing fiction. Worse than that, the fact that Sun has tried so hard to push this idea has done grievous damage to the acceptance of Java.

Java-the-language is, overall, a very good thing, and works well.

Java-the-class-library is mostly passable.

Java-the-virtual-machine is an interesting research project, a nice proof of concept, and is basically usable for a certain class of problems (those problems where speed isn't all that important: basically, those tasks where you could get away with using Perl instead of C.)

Java-the-security-model is another interesting research project, but it only barely works right now. In a few years, maybe they'll have it figured out or replaced.
If Sun hadn't tried so hard to conflate these four completely different things, if they had first shipped native-code Java compilers, then the VM, then the security model, then Java probably would have completely displaced C++ by now."

and

"Today, I program in C.

I think C is a pretty crummy language. I would like to write the same kinds of programs in a better language."
Sorry, I forgot myself and just said 'No' rather than 'No blah blah blah.'
It's more of a longing to figure out what the heck I'm remembering. This happens to me all the time with people, too... someone will look really familiar but I can't place them at all, and it drives me crazy.
Diagnosis, Therapy and Evidence
The concept has some value to it -- although I would suggest focusing on a niche first. Then, evolving from there.
I prefer the riding a bike analogy, but it is the same principle.

When you start riding a bike, and the bike is very slow, you are making constant adjustments to get it going in the right direction and balanced so that it doesn't fall over.
A bike (unlike a plane) you need to keep putting the effort in and keep making adjustments, though after time, each proper input results in a greater result, until you reach a velocity where each input must overcome the aerodynamics before more speed is gained.

same story, but everybody has ridden a bike, not many of us have landed a plane.
Another Problem with Complexity
More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than iPhones – Nexus One Sales Very Slow
It gives you something you can quickly search for: hit <incremental search keyboard shortcut> followed by "i" twice and you're there. Do the same with a single-character name, and you hit any time that character appears anywhere.

I personally find the doubling awkward, and with modern editors I use semantic searching much more than raw text scans so the benefit of doubling is marginal, but there is at least one sensible reason you might choose to do it.
Cron + S3 + s3cmd + small custom script for DB dumps

Cron + snapshots + small custom script for EBS on EC2.

Basically, I store all non code files on EBS and redundantly backup to S3, which amounts to living or dying by Amazon's hand.

Recovery consists of firing up a new EC2 instance, attaching a snaphot and running a deploy script, which is handled automatically by a different EC2 instance, assuming I haven't lost all instances. Manual recovery in that case would be time consuming, but doable.

Snapshots are nearly instantaneous and uploads to S3 from an EC2 instance are about as fast as you can get.

Most annoying thing? Testing recovery.
Perhaps because we're paranoid techies that appreciate the fact that T-Mobile did not cooperate with the warrantless wiretapping of the NSA, unlike AT&T, Sprint, AND Verizon.
The New Commandments
If anyone is interested in a more academic (i.e., behavioral economics / information theory-based) discussion of "spin" or "slanting," I'd recommend this paper by Mullainathan and Shleifer:

The Market for News

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/mark...
I stopped eating wheat entirely on Jan 1, as well as most other grains, lost 25 lbs effortlessly, energy shot up, and my LDL cholesterol dropped precipitously. Though I now am sold on the notion that grains are simply nature's way of making you fat, some of the paleo folks go to opposite extremes. For example, IIRC, Dr. Harris (of the paleonu blog above) recommends heavy cream in your coffee. Perhaps this is ok, heartwise, but I think the jury is still out on the long term effects of saturated fat (cancer, etc...)
Build a Creative "Swirl Animated Menu" with Flash CS4
That's so weird. I love buying things online... physical stores are such time sucks.
Data de-duplication, when done well, lives in a heavily patented area, unfortunately. And the cause of many a lawsuit against small startups. sigh
product marketing!
Weird. If I "See 10 digits starting at position 186,557,264", the result is: 8912345678

But if I search for that result, it doesn't find it.

If I search for 12345678 it finds it and you can see 89 before it. Why can't I search for that number?
No way !?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky)
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wanted to sue Sun
>It is conjectured that pi is "normal" in the sense that the digits occur with equal liklihood.

That's only part of it. You need that every block occurs as often as every other block of equal length. So every digit occurs as often as every other digit; every pair of digits occurs as often as every other pair; every triple occurs as often as every other triple; and so on. So the number you give is not normal in base 3.

A consequence of normality is that every finite sequence of digits eventually appears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
x2

Break it down into clusters even. have a collection for coffee lovers, home made cookies, pho etc. and let people explore within those niches.
Do you have a link(s) to someone who appears to be doing this? I'd like to see that this idea has been implemented, and how.
Zombie vs. Ghost FIGHT
I think you pretty much got it. I recommend _ for _ is all it is. We came at it from a different direction than twitpic but we wanted the same level of simplicity.

We're going to soon add in search and most likely some type of category browser like you suggest. This is just our staring point.

Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.
END THE MADNESS!

Bring back Black and White...
Respectfully, I think you missed his point.

A lot of the repetitive stuff that professional programmers do could be automated. Writing code to automate the problem and then having the problem itself solved automatically tends to be both more efficient and more interesting than tediously coding up the naive solution many times. However, it also requires actual thought and understanding, where an entry-level drone copying and pasting from a web page can follow the tedious, repetitive approach. This is one reason why good programmers are much more productive than bad ones, and it's one of the reasons good programmers tend to dislike working with bad (naively written, non-automated) code.
We use MogileFS for redundancy (bandwidth costs from our host are still less than Amazon). However, we use cron/S3 for BACKUPS. Every time a file is added we back up to Amazon.
To be fair, their marketing spend compared to their competitors was WAY higher than Apple's was compared to MS.
Google did spend a lot of dough trying to roll this out.
I backup entire disks using a towers of hanoi algorithm with (wait for it...) good old dump(8) to a second local hard drive. This method keeps 7 full days of backups (using an incremental diff, so it's fairly space efficient). I've used this method for almost 15 years and have used it dozens of times to recover missing things. dump has never failed me!

On my other servers I use rsync just to keep a current mirror around. I always ask myself, "How hard would this be to recover if I lost it?" and "Will I need to go back in time for some things?" Depending on the answer to those questions I make my backup strategy for the server in question.

Yesterday's Daring Fireball post on the same topic said it best: "Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last."
Fantastic. I loved the Garamond = french font joke.
"All plants tend to be in a contest with predators who might consume them."

I think the opposite is true in the age of agriculture. Your plant genes will propagate if McDonalds likes you in their buns.
Coding standards documents written by people who think coding standards are about which side of the * the space goes on. :-)
So it's kinda like Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com/), except that you have to keep clicking a button?

I prefer my RPGs to be fire-and-forget, thank you very much.
No need to guess, though. You can buy a cheap blood sugar monitor and run experiments on postprandial (after eating) blood glucose levels. Some people are more carbohydrate sensitive than others, and high postprandial blood sugar is associated with diabetes and heart disease. Here's a post from Dr. William Davis -- sorta my hero -- on the subject:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-on-blood-suga...

Furthermore, cutting out grains is an easy experiment you can try for a month or so at little effort/cost. If you're like most people, you'll drop 10-20lbs without effort, and your hunger will markedly subside.
You are right, that was put too strongly. "Make some effort to allow the seller to make it right" is what I should have said.
Given that much of Europe is used to smartphones costing €600, Nexus One should fit right in.
After reading this, I'm pretty sure we generally agree but I didn't really say much in my first comment. Anything approaching full time work is really going to work differently than Rent-A-Coder style projects. I would expect the costs for my mythical Romanians to approach the costs of an American like your roommate, though their actual hourly rate might be cheaper.

I will try to be more explicit next time I make a throwaway one-line comment.
Yeah, I don't hold it against yummyfajitas though because the actual title of the article was not necessarily catchy enough for it to do well on Hacker News, so it seemed worth it to try something different.
I created a version of my own: http://jawadonweb.com/projects/pi

:)
"Most annoying thing? Testing recovery."

Indeed ... but at least you do that!

One of the great things about clouds like AWS is that you can now do an almost complete bare metal restore test (modulo stuff like your official DNS vs. test) for a small amount of money instead of trying to justify buying a separate system for that sort of thing (which in the real world I was never able to do, although I fortunately never suffered a total data loss despite a few close calls).
Dell sues LCD manufacturers over 14 years of price fixing
I wonder where the first item of "intellectual property" exists in pi (suitably encoded, of course)?
Similar story here. I stopped eating all grains on April 4, 2009. Essentially the same effects that you mention. I also experienced an abrupt end to 40 years of troubles with insomnia. (Someday I'll write an article called "How I Accidentally Conquered Insomnia".)
Maybe the keyboard isn't dead yet ...
Driveby culture and the endless search for wow
Intelligence Quotient Visualized
spokey just commented that we should have some type of browse by category. I'm wondering if highlighting some categories (by type of recommendation or what's being recommended) would fill in for a specific niche(s).

Thanks for the feedback.
It all looks correct to me. Some of it is a little "needlessly-surprised", honestly, like the bit about having to make a syscall trap to exit the program. Programs don't exit on their own: something needs to tell the kernel that the process is done.
That could also be because there are only a few countries where it is being sold, and the lack of advertising for the Nexus One. Many people haven't even heard of it, but I think once they know that flash wont apparently run on a droid, they will consider the nexus one.
Well, certainly I agree.
A cat pricks it's ears to increase fidelity of it's hearing, dogs point with their nose as a learned trait they don't do it in the wild. None of these behaviours are naturally evolved communication methods

This is pure speculation. Who is to say that learned traits can or cannot evolve naturally, over time?

Besides, your use of "it's" is wrong.

An underlying assumption of the statement "pointing declaratively" is that there's some one or some thing to be declarative to (as in an audience, or partner, or fellow pack member). I liked the article, but it did go about assuming that humans are the only creatures who know how to be declarative.

We're probably more verbally declarative than any other species, but I highly doubt we're the only "declarative" species out there.
Meeting a prospective candidate's mate might be a good idea, but at least in the US, it's illegal (or at least dangerous). To avoid discrimination claims for sexual preference, you can't even ask if the person is married or has a significant other.
Difficult to believe. Why would I have the Fluffy thing? I did not install that much crapware on my phone.

The Nexus One is great, and buying from Google seems to be the preferred option if you want to stay up to date with the OS.

Maybe people are not used to buying from Google yet, or they just buy what their operators push at them.
We've been using Bacula: weekly fulls and daily incrementals to disk, and weekly fulls to tape for offsite storage. As our data size grows, tapes are going to run out of steam. I've recently began experimenting with http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity to do encrypted backups to S3. So far it has been working great.
Bruce and danah are arguing from completely different perspectives. I think danah's talk needs to be read in its entirety - it fits in also with some of her other work around the demographic and ethnographic issues around social networks http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html
dump(8) on Linux?

An acquaintance with decades of experience in the hard disk industry including a fist full of patents including 2-3 in every disk drive you own says:

"One should start planning the death of the drive, and all one's data, beginning the day one buys the drive."
+1 on the idea that the Nexus One is Google's ideal (at present) Android phone.

Hopefully the success of the Nexus One will persuade other Android OEMs to stop forking Android and to keep their ROMs up-to-date (to allow consumers to upgrade, hardware be willing, to newer Android OS releases).
Unlikely. Emotions are hardwired into you, and at least all other mammals. It'd be like hoping to train yourself to not need to eat -- your biology doesn't allow it.
NPR and WSJ Building iPad-Only Websites
Yes it did show consumers what an Android phone could be, and what the sales data is suggesting is that so far it ain't cutting it.

I can't help but think that if this was sold by Motorola there wouldn't be any argument that it was flopping.

Does anyone know how the sales volume compares to the Pre?
Don't click! It's ad bait!!!
Craigslist in Seattle isn't any better. I've seen several postings looking for photographers who will shoot weddings for $200.
Unfortunately there are several problems being pointed out with this benchmark:

* Some of the servers tested aren't designed to interact directly with clients over a network, and are meant instead to run proxied over a local socket behind something else like nginx. The benchmark is inconsistent in whether it actually does this, though, which makes the numbers useless for comparison purposes.

* Several of these servers use preforking architectures which assume the ability to have multiple workers available to service requests. Yet the benchmark deliberately limited them to only one worker, which makes the numbers useless for gauging actual peformance under concurrent load.
Ugggh... OK? Maybe you don't understand the difference between a manufacturer and software vendor or even a platform. Android is an operating system, yes... they should market it as a platform. People need to understand the platform. FYI: Nexus One was developed by HTC.

So by your recommendation, Microsoft should promote each handset instead of Windows Mobile?

I'm suggesting that they build a marketing campaign on Android as a platform. This way if a user has a Droid, they know that they can still run their favorite apps on a Nexus One. This is where Apple excels; they sell an integrated solution. A platform to solve your problems. I think promoting the OS individually or the phone individually is a long-term losing proposition. I think it makes sense to market the Android as a mobile platform.
You're assuming common sense is common
The Nexus One is a way for google to regulate the android market. They control the phone, release features. It's a benchmark for carriers and phone manufacturers.
You'll end up paying a hell of a lot more than an extra $300 if you buy it subsidized.
This is badly titled. It should be "More Droids Sold In First 74 Days Than The First Generation iPhone Sold In It's First 74 Days"

The quoted article actually puts a lot of effort into pointing out how much things have changed since the first iPhone went on sale (for one the iPhone was being sold for $599 with contract)
More likely it's operator driven sales. Motorola and Verizon put (and continue to do so) a ton of muscle behind the Droid. The Nexus One on the other hand one isn't sold in operator channels and isn't advertised in the real world to any large degree. When the Nexus One arrives on Verizon Wireless it will be interesting to see if it stays outside or is sold internally.

It also could be that the Nexus One was simply a warning shot to the phone makers to shape up and start making powerful well designed Android phones and will never make it into real sales channels.
As a father of 2 yr old son, I concur.
You mean this? http://i.engadget.com/2010/03/15/confirmed-marketplace-will-...
Toronto has a similar courier service that only hires people with mental health issues: http://www.awaycourier.ca/

They use public transit for pick-ups and deliveries.
My uninformed stance: Eating grains is good, in moderation. Having about half of your calories come from corn (as is the case for most people in the US) is not good. Using corn syrup instead of sugar as a sweetener is not good.

Diversity good. Monoculture bad. For soil and for the body.

For the individual, the early (grain-based) agricultural diet was starkly inferior to that of the hunter-gatherer. Once the population gets to a certain point, people have to adopt agriculture; the alternative is fishing/hunting the available stock into extinction, and then starving. However, agriculture can support a larger population, by about an order of magnitude. Having 10 times as many people, in mediocre health, won out.
Has anybody been able to use the extension as described in the video? When I click on the install link I get taken to a blank page.

I use NoScript, but specifically allowed the site(s), and even tried enabling scripts globally, to no avail. Same thing after a FF restart.

FF3.6 under WinXP SP3.