skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, what about a falsely "functioning" SSD in a system with an SLA of 99.999%. Backups may not be the answer.

Ok, it may be RAID1+0 but, what about data corruptions?

If primary fails, and secondary is "ok" what will be the state of your data? You don't roll back an image when everything is green.

The point is that in critical systems according to the SLA or the critical aspect of the mission (flight recorder, medical instruments...) silent failures, silent data corruption may not be ok.

However for 99% of the business that is making money out of SSD right now in the world (advertisement, marketing) this is not really a concern. They don't aim at an absolute reliability. Most industry just aim at good enough.

Some small islands of IT aims at doing a legally accurate book-keeping. Like banking, accounting, legal electronic archiving for instance...

This topic is covered in Signal Processing in the first chapter of the cost of False Positive and False Negative.

Security and risk management norms force to enumerate and evaluate the costs and predicting the outcomes of failures in terms of costs.

Here, the paper is saying SSD works pretty much fine all the time. But for failure, there is a lot we don't know.

How do you evaluate the cost of a risk you cannot compute?

And how does another solution that maybe slower rates in risk management with a better failure model that can be better predicted?

The scarriest part in the study is the implication that their could be propagation of failures by coupling in certain environment and that some failure could be snowballing.

SSD are affected by heat/memory usage, CPU load is affected by failures, heat rises, SSD are more likely to fail ....

They are implying that failures can propagate or spread or happen like a contamination.

1 SSD failing alone is already a problem, even small chances of coupling in failures is making the potentiality for a massive failure.

Would you take that risk with a SLA of 99.999%?
It continually depresses me that privacy and software security products have such a difficult time. I very much hope that Silent Circle makes it, but the landscape is littered with privacy/security products that went nowhere.

But there have been some billion-dollar success stories. Off the top of my head, they are:

(1) Security Dynamics who invented the little token with ever-changing 6-digit numbers that you have to enter to login to your remote office computer. You probably know it today as the RSA SecurID:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/RSA-Secu...

The hardware was simple (microcontroller, real time clock, and an LCD display) and the proof of concept for the software could've been written in an afternoon by a crypto-knowledgable programmer. I genuinely admire this idea as having the least amount of technical development required to create a billion-dollar market.

(2) Paper shredders. Fellowes created a billion-dollar market for personal shredders. Seriously, before this market existed, if you told the average Joe that they needed a shredder for their home, you would have been laughed at. Then came along all the brouhaha about identity theft, and now Office Depot and Staples sell dozens of home models.

(3) Firewalls. When I first heard the concept of a network firewall--and this is going back a long time--my first thought was "What a stupid idea, why don't they instead fix the bugs that would allow you to penetrate the network?" Turns out to be a multi-billion dollar market.

(4) Password managers like LastPass and 1Password. I doubt these have reached a billion in sales, but I figure they will.

(5) Certificate authorities. An early implementation of that idea made Mark Shuttleworth into a billionaire with enough money to visit the International Space Station just for fun.

Looking at the list, the threats are sometimes abstract. I do have a home shredder, but I'll admit that it's very unlikely I'd be a victim of identity theft if I never shredded. However, the threat that Silent Circle addresses is proven worldwide surveillance, yet it's a much harder sale. It's very difficult to predict what privacy/security product will succeed.
The more verbose name is infinitely more preferable to me. If I am tasked one day with doing some maintenance on this code and have never encountered it then at least I have a hint that I should be researching the aquatic properties of mariachi bands.
i was one of beta users and was really impressed by tech.
I'd like the one where this whole thing is put in a function with a name describing what it does, no matter whether the math-like one or the one with long names is used. that I'd consider readable. And any sane compiler inlines it anyway.
> Real work, in my world, means programming.

Yup. The iDevices are Apple's products and one should think that integration is in their self-interest. Instead, they're being restrictive, prohibitive, unhelpful and let us wait for a product like this to enable what should have been possible from day one. In that light, this app is a well-deserved slap in Apple's face. I've never had contact with the C# / F# ecosystem but this might possibly lure me in.
Ridiculous Blog Rebuild with Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL
Great list. I am wondering what is going to be next?
Sorry I wasn't clear--I thought he was talking about a bug that had been introduced since the release, but it turned out it was the other way around. The bug was present in the latest beta-1 release but fixed in git master since then.

I hope to have a beta-2 release out in the next week or so.
China lacks garages. I mean, they have underground tenant garages everywhere, but there is nothing like the western detached garage anywhere, even in the countryside. This might be the next best thing.

However, 798 was an old factory complex that was taken over by artists for awhile before that success caused gentrification that then kicked them out. That...would be cool, but the Chinese government doesn't think so innovatively (they would never think a bunch old work shops would make a better startup workspace than an abondoned shopping mall - sigh).
Can you elaborate? Is this some kind of xenophohia like we see in other parts of the world? Or is it they want to learn how to do everything in the entire vertical chain (with a focus towards moving up the value chain)? Or something else entirely?

I see Chinese tech companies open up R&D shops in North America, and I'm curious what they really want out of it.
Oh wow dude you watch Silicon Valley also? Great reference! It sure added a lot to the conversation. Please continue making useful comments like this in the future, you really got us thinking with your pop culture reference. (And I sure patted myself on the back for recognizing such witticism)
First Washing Machine (Part II)
The history of first washing machine goes back to 16th century or even earlier. However, nothing practical happened until 1790s. The first washing machine was invented in 1797. It was usually referred to as “scrub board”. So, women didn’t have to scrub the laundry against rocks anymore. Unfortunately, there isn’t exact evidence of who invented the first washing machine.Read the whole article here: http://maxglobal-appliancerepair.com/first-washing-machine
> I'm having a really hard time of getting my head around “random fluctuations” that seem to have an effect but no cause

So you're saying God does not play dice with the universe? :)
It's not like you have to pay a dime for every character in your source code. With halfway-decent autocomplete, longer identifiers are easier to use than shorter ones, I've found.

I'd hope you'd at least put a comment header to explain what the parameters actually are for anyone who doesn't have the paper handy, or god forbid, used a paper implementing the same thing using different nomenclature.
Those demos are both part of The Lab, a set of VR demos distributed by Steam. To everyone else with a Vive: get it. It's free, and it's frickin' awesome, even though the Steam description spoils one of the games.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/450390/

I tried a Vive the other day. It's the closest experience to magic I've ever had which didn't involve sacrificing chickens.
Physics (as far as we know) doesn't care about the direction of time. Cause and effect depends on a fixed direction of time.
This similar thing was posted here a while ago: https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic
The United States does not have anything as sweeping as this, but in the limited area of credit the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) requires that lenders that turn down your credit application give you an explanation. From the Federal Trade Commission's site:

The creditor must tell you the specific
reason for the rejection or that you are
entitled to learn the reason if you ask
within 60 days. An acceptable reason might
be: “your income was too low” or “you haven’t
been employed long enough.” An unacceptable
reason might be “you didn’t meet our minimum
standards.” That information isn’t specific
enough.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0347-your-equal-credit...

(The ECOA is at 15 U.S. Code § 1691, for those who want to go find the gory details)

In one of the lectures from Caltech's "Learning from Data" MOOC the professor mentioned that problem came up at a major lender that he had consulted for. He did not say how they solved the problem.

I wondered if you could generate a satisfactory rejection reason, at least as far as the law is concerned, by taking rejected applications and running them through the system again but with some of the inputs tweaked until they get an acceptance. Then report that the rejection was due to the un-tweaked parameter value.

For instance, if you picked income to tweak, you'd raise the income by, say, $5000 and try again. If that is rejected, raise it another $5000. If it then passes, you can tell the applicant they were rejected because their income was too low, and that an additional $10000 income would be enough to qualify them for a loan.

You'd have to put a bit of sophistication into this to make the explanations reasonable. For instance, if a rejected application would be approved with a very large tweak to income or with a small tweak to employment length it would probably be better to give employment length as the reason for rejection.
You have the same feature on stock android as well. The only difference is that you long press instead of swiping.
15 Social KPIs Every App Should Be Tracking
Sexist Trolls Are Literally ‘Losers’ Say Scientists
Yes, I've yet to read the third installment of the series, the "Slow Zone of the Zones of Thought" barrier of space travel provides an interesting setting.
I made a couple of experiments on discrimination free machine learning models with naive Bayes, and I changed my perspective on data science.

Usually people are concerned about maximising prediction accuracy, and never stop to think about what correlations is the model finding down below, and the human biases present in the data annotations.

Removing sensitive variables (gender, race, etc) doesn't always help, and specially if the models have high impact on people's lives (applying to loans, university, scholarship, insurance), we cannot afford to blindly use existing annotations in black box models.

All of this excludes the fact that companies will probably maximise to profit, and will use "algorithm" as an excuse to turn down people disregarding ethics.

Edit: here is code for the curious
https://github.com/sergioisidoro/aequalis
Avast Announces Agreement to Acquire AVG for $1.3B
Why we use the Linux kernel's TCP stack
They have a diagram that emits a single gluon in the head of every particle physics article in Wikipedia. Is that a make-believe diagram? I couldn't expect that from them.
Top 8 Tech CEO’s Blogs You Will Regret Not to Follow
If Bitcoin were simply a ledger without the currency the carefully balanced incentives to run the network wouldn't be there. Similarly, if there was no stored value to steal then we wouldn't have digital money, but a tokenization system that still entirely relies on the existing system. This is in large part how Ripple already works, except with an intermediate currency XRP for technical reasons. It's also an extremely strong deterrent to various forms of denial of service on the ledger itself as a crucial but auxiliary purpose.
Doesn't this violate iPhone SDK Agreement section 3.3.2, or has that changed?
Avast acquires antivirus maker AVG for $1.3BN
"(ii) knows or has reason to believe that infringing the right will cause loss to the owner of the right..."

so copying that damages the owner, actually causes them to lose something, rather than preventing them from gaining.
I haven't used AVG or Avast in years. Personally, I have found that Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes antimalware has been sufficient for me.
Well, that's not a problem - when you say "my training data indicates that they do" what you really mean is "our previous experience shows that applicants with these factors have a significantly elevated chance of not paying back our money", which by itself is a valid reason as it is objective and based on real world facts.

A bigger problem would be when your features actually turn out to be proxies for 'undesired' features. For example, if you do put names in as features, then any credit risk system will learn that e.g. "Tyrone Washington" is a higher risk customer (assuming everything else is equal) than "Eric Shmidt", since those names are highly predictive of most socioeconomic factors; however, you'll risk a judge saying that this implements racial discrimination even if you exclude race directly, since those names are even more predictive of skin color than income.
That's not how Windows GUI works, to some extent it's the other way around with all controls being implemented in client's user space code. The difference is that for windows, there is one standard client toolkit that is part of the OS API. BTW, even window decorations are drawn by the client.

The kernel side component does even somewhat less than X server, as all drawing is done either by direct writing to frame buffer from userspace or thru DRI-like direct rendering mechanism. Kernel side "display server" then only handles message queues and input and tracks which screen region belongs to which window (and set's up the shared memory accordingly, in theory).

For 16 bit windows, one might say that the userspace libraries are somehow part of the kernel (as there is no user/kernel split in win16 and one of the libraries is even called kernel.dll), but in win32 case these libraries are userspace.

On the other hand, NeWS principle is that server implements turing-complete virtual machine (based on postscript) that executes arbitrary code uploaded from clients (which then can define behavior of widgets, specify new ones or even create windows whose complete behavior is server-side).
My main problem with literate programming is that it is difficult enough to keep short comments up to date vis-a-vis the code they describe. Longer comments would be even worse.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I have found the opposite to be the case so far. It’s all too easy to overlook a couple of small comments out of 20 when you update a screenful of code. You can’t really miss a whole paragraph of text that separates a few lines of code you’re working on from everything else.

I’ve also found that with literate documentation the emphasis is naturally on explaining the big picture and why things are being done, and that kind of information tends to remain relevant through minor code changes anyway.

You can still add short comments about particular points in the code as well, and maintaining those is much the same whether you’re using literate programming or not.
Yes, the US does have a problem with police violence. And through mobile tech, it's being better documented.
Here's an OPML file with 101 of the most popular web design blogs to follow
Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has almost an exact 1-1 mapping from syllable to character, but far less number of commonly used syllables in Mandarin, you simply cannot reconstruct the meaning by looking at the pinyin spelling of a Han character and retrieve the meaning of the character the pinyin spelling maps to. That's what I mean by context.
Does this also delete location history?
Why Most ‘Free CRM’ Aren’t Really Free, How We Made CRM That Really Is Free
And unfortunately how constructive it is to technological process at the same time which is one of the justifications.
Marketing Chatbots 101: Discover, Try and Create a Chatbot
A potential problem with this is that if you "tell the applicant they were rejected because their income was too low" then if this is disputed then they will likely be able to point to many other applicants with even lower income that were accepted, because their total combination of factors was better.

A simple explanation "factor X is too low" implies that there exists a particular cutoff that is required and sufficient; but an explanation that accurately describes why you were rejected would likely be too complex to be understandable.

But yes, probably the intended result could/should be simply identifying the top 1-2 factors that dragged your score down compared to the average accepted candidate (which can be rather easily done automatically even for the most black-box ML methods) and naming them appropriately.
Even the top of the line Mac Pro is not good enough. I've used it with the DK2 in Windows, and judder was still a huge problem.
You can just import this file into Feedly or your favourite feed reader and then use it to skim through to the best web design articles of the day.

Includes sites such as Fast.Co, CreativeBlog, CSS-Tricks, SitePoint, WebDesignerDepot and other major web design influencers.
Try digesting milk after antibiotic course. We are mammals only by birth.
Got Fuji as a second system for the wonderful, wonderful 56/1.2 and the film colors.
Music Downloader
A simple hack to easily download music from web.
Repo : https://github.com/sukeesh/Music-Downloader
Try it here : http://vsukeesh.netai.net/
Banning Sites That Don't Respect Adblock
Certain sites that are linked to here are very difficult to navigate for those of us with adblockers installed. Such a site would include forbes. I propose sites that break adblockers, or are generally horrible to use because of advertisements be banned from hackernews.
Comment: Stop the Hyperloop hype
A simple hack to easily download music from web
If you use more registers as storage it can go faster. 'rep movs' uses no registers for storage; only source, destination and count.

There are many, many tricks like doing 'look ahead' to start the L1 cache bringing in the next line before we actually need it, to hide that latency.

And the article describes how there are various code paths for big blocks, short blocks, aligned, unaligned, etc.
I saw stargates and thought about human transportation. It’s really exciting to explore other galactic, bring new technologies in our world and exchange our experience. Can we be sure that someone like Jack O’Neil fights with replicators now? I don’t think so. Maybe one day our successors will call a cab to going to another planet.
Freshdesk CEO on crowded markets, going global, and beating Salesforce
Embedded scripting languages (Table)
Ever since I accidentally fell asleep in an Alcatraz prison cell[1] while being Vive's room-scale VR, I started to appreciate my carpet on a whole new level.

[1]realities.io http://store.steampowered.com/app/452710/
I had always assumed they were different companies. Apparently, I am in good company, as the quoted Natalie Mizik, Professor of Marketing at the University of Washington, didn't know either. And the Michelin guide spokesperson, Tony Fouladpour, acknowledged this, saying that people tell him all the time that they didn't realize it was the same company. So fix that!

> Won handedly

Won handily? One handedly? Odd typo, especially when it's a highlighted link text.

> repair show

Repair shop. No further typos detected.
I don't mind pkg-config that much: if anything, it's one of the more sensible portability mechanisms out there.
One issue could be that the crimes foreign terrorists are accused of tend to be particularly heinous, so courts would be more likely than usual to make one-sided rulings to make sure they got convicted. A potential example can be seen in the recent trial of domestic terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, where serious questions about the impartiality of the jury were apparently ignored:

https://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/01/23/just-another-term-o...

The decision not to change venue was later upheld on appeal, with a dissent:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Perhaps in this particular case the decision wasn't wrong but it's not hard to imagine other, worse scenarios. And in these foreign terrorism cases there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on, like bribing random governments to identify and kidnap suspects for us to interrogate. Faced with the choice of (a) not doing that kind of stuff anymore, (b) letting the accused terrorists go free because our questionable activities violated their rights or tainted the evidence against them, or (c) interpreting the law to make all this stuff allowed, I'm not sure I want to find out what we would pick.
When implementing complex algorithm, this kind of code is usually easiest to understand.

When you look at the code, you use the paper that describes the algorithm as documentation. Using same short one letter variable names in the code and paper makes understanding much easier.

The thing I hate most is when the the paper uses 1-based numbering and the programming language uses 0-based numbering. We should settle for 0-based numbering when describing algorithms.
We should move away from the megapixel red herring into a sensor-size-based metric instead. I'd like to know the size of the sensor in this camera, because that's what's going to make a difference in your photo, and not how many millions of noise pixels the camera can give you, but that information is absent from the article.
Exactly.

For me the pattern is: I subscribe to	any new	social /
communication service and see what happens. Probably because I work
in IT, I'm an early adopter, and when	I first	subscribe to a
service, I have nobody to talk to, and I let the app 'simmer'. With most services this never
changes, but occasionally one of them makes it big, and all of a sudden 'everybody' in some group that I participate in uses the service.

My social world mostly self-selects into neat silos, e.g. Europeans
rarely use LINE, older people rarely use Snap,	and I amplify this
tendency by judicious choice of whom I communicate with over which
channel, e.g. work contacts don't get on my Snap. I learned from the
Facebook disaster.

The smooth interface of a modern smartphone makes switching between different apps near seamless, so I really don't care which one I use. They are all good enough for me. Each app is completely fungible, and if one of them disappears, we switch to another one.
So the network effect is still there, in that an app is as useful as it has members, but there is no longer a strong lock-in.

I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.
Hmm. I'd have to sign in, giving up even more data. I'd rather delete all of my cookies every day.
Can anyone even answer your question without breaking the dev license?