skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you keep adding servers indefinitely, it becomes slower and slower to commit every transaction to every server.

The point of database partitioning is that a transaction that doesn't span partitions only touches a constant number of servers (usually 2 or 3).
How To: Take Photos with Your iPad (Sort of)
Johannesburg, in my case.
Approaching corporate foundations might be a good start. If you have a compelling idea, they have deep pockets, and your success would reflect positively on the overall organization (e.g. MicroPlace at eBay)
Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/
I changed my keymap in the OS cold turkey. Making the keycap labels wrong was the easiest way to force myself to learn touch-typing. I was back up to normal speed within a week or two.
You do not copy data to all servers; in practice you may choose a replication degree of 3, so all data is written to 3 servers. In chain replication the first server in the chain will decide on the order of writes (i.e. he will serialize the writes), which is very fast. In a P2P system you'll need to do some kind of distributed consensus for every write, which (when conflicts happen) will be much slower than having one node serialize the writes.

Having multiple masters will most likely add overhead for conflict resolution and should be avoided, but it's really orthogonal to the whole CAP stuff. If you allow writes to multiple masters without conflict resolution at write-time, then you will need to do the conflict-resolution at read-time, which is going to be much more complicated, because your read may yield multiple versions.
My dad passed away a few years ago. He worked in defense electronics for 30+ years. It's kind of weird that I know very little of what he actually worked on. I know he did a lot of work on what became GPS and on Tomahawk and F/A-18 projects, but so much of what he worked on will probably always be a mystery to me.
and starts eating Apple's lunch

Take a better look whose lunch Android eats (hint: it starts with "S"). And Windows Phone 7? Is it out already?
By the way, 2010 - 2007 is three years, not two.
The primary problem is that everyone is stuck on this Username+Password mentality. This is an ancient model that needs a rethink.

I'm working on a solution to replace web site logins. Please ping me if you're interested or have some expertise in this area. Shamenski of Gmail.
I was CTO of an early-stage non-profit for a year and can provide some insight into how they went about raising money, feel free to email me.
neat, but the next thing I'd like is to somehow route this into a client on my laptop. if I'm having a conversationw ith somebody via sms while I work, I don't want to have to keep stopping to use my phone.
I think this is spot on. It's not iTunes per se that is the connecting point for all these devices. It's the iTunes Store that binds all of these devices together—all of them are dependent on the store for content and applications. Getting the music player thrown in gratis alongside the iTunes Store is really inconsequential.
Jon, your running "Me Real Time" is extremely distracting. It kept changing while I was trying to read your post, and my eyes would involuntarily shift for a moment. It's frustrating.

I didn't realize I could click to pause it until just now when I went to find out its title - I was trying so hard not to read it! But it's also not a good idea to require your site's readers to click something so they can focus on your posts.
Although Carr is talking about the iPad, I think a similar analysis could be applied to Internet openness and the net neutrality debate. Is the old architecture of the Net truly superior or does it just agree with our biases and desires?
IBM is so funny. There are large incentives to get patents there as an employee. Prior to when I left and went to another company, there were even expectations that senior level engineers would regularly generate patents and patentable work as part of their normal work.

I remember one funny year when they pushed the patent expectation down to the lower banded employees (of which I was one at the time). We all dutifully submitted (internally) a number of patent "inventions" to meet the requirement and get the magic bonus $$ if you actually got one awarded. At the time, it didn't feel like an honest effort to generate innovation, but rather just another out-of-normal-process to heap on employees who were mostly trying not to get laid off.
You can still do plenty of tinkering with cars. In fact, one of the things that I love about Hyundai is that last I looked, they provide their entire tech/service manual free, online. I used this to swap out my thermostat, to replace the fuel filter, to swap in a bigger sway bar, to take apart my dashboard, all kinds of things I'd never really even thought of handling myself, except that the information was there for me.

By comparison, you're not supposed to change your iPad's battery by yourself.
Quorum protocols are the simple mechanism he's talking about. The argument he's making is that you shouldn't be so binary about saying 'well this subset of nodes is unavailable, so the system is not available'. That's why CAP is so overapplied in the real world: just because some fraction of your nodes are offline, that doesn't mean the whole system is offline.

Your sharing your statistics on WAN partitions happening regularly would be a welcome contribution to the debate. There's a hierarchy of failures, and I think it's generally accepted that WAN partitions happen less often than, say, one node in a cluster crashing. Statistics that show otherwise would let us talk in specifics rather than the abstract.
x10 and home automation.
A pipelined, non-blocking, extensible web server in under 1400 lines of Scala
Horrible rant. Author also has this in comments:

Without Flash, how would content owners monetize
their content? Most of the advertising in this
world is Flash banners.

Google AdWords?
Guelph here.
That's one answer for some people. Regardless, it's missing the point that this study isn't saying "stop going out with friends for drinks!" It's an examination of social customs and their effects. That I can order a Shirley Temple with a straight face while others drink straight Jameson is largely irrelevant.

Yes, there benefits of going out for drinks. Those haven't been disputed, that I can see.
The Dark Side of Negotiating
"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak's ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: "Everything we knew, you knew." To point out that this is no longer Apple's policy is to state the obvious."

I suspect the resurrection of this vision is what will begin the fightback against Apple's closed universe vision. If I could get the same (or better) hardware, with roughly the same formfactor as the IPad with a lot of connectors and a completely hackable software stack for a decent price, that would be awesome. The only competition shaping up on the hardware front seems to be HP's slate. Maybe I should buy one and install Linux (or something else) on it when it comes out.

(If I am wrong correct me, what is a good tablet that competes with the IPad?) I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days. As a thought experiment if just the hardware part of the IPod were available for say 350 $ or so it wasn't closed and were completely open like the original Apple so we could hack whatever on it, how many of us would buy one? I would. If i had the harware chops i'd build and sell this myself.

Linux is awesome but there isn't a competing (with the IPad) hardware platform to run it on. Hopefully some one will have the cojones and talent to go up against Apple soon. Remember, once Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut who were on track to dominate all of computing.

I hope to live to see the day of the withering of Apple.
I back-up most of my important files as an email attachment.

is it just me who does this way?
tis the nature of many products in an evolving economy to grow more capable, complex inside, more simple to use and more taken for granted.

the iPad is just one more of those things and the Woz stood in line eagerly to get his.
Tell HN: AdMozi Mobile Advertising Platform Early Access
I work out of DPL so I'll see you all there.
I think you could blame Facebook (and other social platforms) for 25% of this misuse and human nature for the other 75%.
Ok, and one more thing -- poetic license. The guy is a great storyteller.
I don't recall anyone ever wedging my jaws open and funneling beer down my throat.

That's really why I made the post. Just to explain that this study fully understands that most people do not have beer forced down their throats and instead examined broader trends. My point was to show that there is a whole spectrum between not feeling any pressure and being threatened at gunpoint.
Paxos (which you'll probably use to implement a strongly consistent distributed system) allows nodes to reach consensus as long as a majority of them are able to talk to each other. So if a partition includes a majority of nodes, this partition will just continue working like before. The minority partition will not be able to reach any decisions at all and will be unavailable. Strictly speaking, the minority partition doesn't even know it's a minority partition, because this is an undecidable problem in asynchronous distributed systems. But the important point is: At most one partition will continue making decisions so that consistency is guaranteed.

So you're right in that the minority partition will be unavaiable, but I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff.
I thought this was interesting because I've seen a few cases where the business people were gung-ho, but you could see how the relationship would turn out from the negotiation. No doubt a commission incentive doesn't help, but this can apply to employment negotiations too.
I (really) am a boy born on a Tuesday. And I have one sibling, a sister. Anyhow, this looks the same as this problem:

Given a standard deck of cards.

(a) "I have two cards and one is an ace. What is the probability the second card is also an ace?"

(b) "I have two cards and one is the ace of Hearts. What is the probability the second card is also an ace?"

Answers (a) and (b) are different.
It is a common and somewhat legitimate reaction, to say that geeks just want computer systems to stay geeky so that they have more control and power.

That's a ridiculous strawman and I'm amazed that so many people believe it. Most geeks would be thrilled if more people could perform basic computing functions without constantly asking for help.

Apple is essentially setting the stage for the same thing to happen in the mobile space but far worse since they have quite literally given themselves veto power over any application making it to consumers.

Exactly this. Microsoft was only able to delay the rise of the web; with the power to prohibit disfavored applications they very well might have stopped it completely, or twisted it into a proprietary architecture deliberately dependent on Windows. If Apple has Android shut down in the courts and is able to form a cozy duopoly with Microsoft, we won't be seeing that sort of innovation anymore and we won't even know what we've lost.
BBC News - Solar plane prototype in first test flight
vim, git, ssh, firefox, pen+paper, Python interpreter, wget, ion3, find, sed, cat, grep, awk, bash, sort, uniq, colrm, ...
That Nick Carr, whose Luddite rantings on his blog eventually persuaded me to unsubscribe, likes the iPad is good enough for me - he's convinced me it'll be a dead end, sooner or later... :)
HDMI does have error correction. Every 8 bits of video data are sent as 10 bits on the wire.
Second one from Poland.

Btw. http://www.hackrtrackr.com/index.php shows some HNrs on the map.
Me and my wife use fogbugz (free 2 user license) to do this.
Flash games will be crazy slow on a 1ghz A4 without hardware acceleration. You're talking about pushing software rendering AND an interpreted language on to a 1ghz ARM core, without the benefit of the crazy amounts of cache, high IPC and hand tuned MMX rendering that you'll find on Flash on x86.

Definitely none of my games would be playable (see http://www.rocksolidarcade.com). They're 800x600 and quite detailed, but very well optimized, so they'd probably be in about the middle in terms of requirements of something that you'd find on Kongregate or Miniclip.

And iPhone users are not exactly starved for games. If anything, too many games are being released for it.

Flash video, maybe... but I think it's clear by now that the iXyz platform is not going away and I'd be surprised if every major video site didn't have a seamless solution in a year or two, including porn.
Clever marketing: include the objections which are false, ignore those are true.
I think I may give it a shot. Thanks for the feedback.
I think of Apple as the Bose of computer hardware. Many Bose products are looked down on by audiophiles, but many people are in the market for the level of integration and convenience they provide.

Instead of Hobbyist, perhaps he should have written "non-consumer." Afficianado? Pro-Sumer? Perhaps the slant changes with the term, but the basic idea still stands.
What's the big deal? Moral questions have no yes/no answers.

#1, If your moral standards on privacy is above Google's, you can view Google as evil for giving US government its users' emails.

#2, If your moral standards on censorship is below Google's, you can view Google as bluff for calling other governments evil for trying to censor the Internet.

And if you satisfy both #1 and #2, you can call Google whatever you want!
Can you be more specific about what the idea is ?

I assume you're not worried about someone stealing the idea and it'll help us point you to appropriate sources of funding.
I should also add that I have a vested interest in this - after being forced to put up with perhaps the most horrible popular modern environment to develop games under, anything that threatens the Flash platform makes me very happy. So maybe I'm seeing the decision through rose tinted glasses.
What's really sad is that 70s-era technology is better than what we have today. No more SR-71. No more Concorde.
A travel website where you enter the date and the amount of money you have to spend on a ticket, and it tells you all the places you can go.

Isn't there a YC-backed startup that does this? I seem to recall meeting one of the founders at one of the parties after last year's Startup School, but I can't remember the company's name for the life of me.
Sure, but quorum protocols only provide strong consistency in the absence of partitions. If a partition occurs you may not be able to get a quorum (where R + W > N) and, again, you're stuck with either being unavailable or potentially inconsistent. There's really no way around it... AFAIK it's a logical impossibility.

I'm not sure I get your argument re: CAP being overapplied. The key point the whole "AP" camp is making is exactly what you're saying - "just because some fraction of your nodes are offline, that doesn't mean the whole system is offline." What it does mean, though, is that some of your data may be stale. But eventually it won't be.

As for WAN partitions, I agree, they're not as frequent as single node failures. But as far as CAP is concerned it doesn't really matter. A partition is a partition, whether it's one node or half your cluster. The frequency that "WAN partitions" occurs depends on how you define a "WAN partition." If you consider a single lost TCP connection a short-lived partition (it pretty much is), or if you consider a DNS or power outage a WAN partition (in the sense that a whole cluster might disappear) then I think we can all come up with lots of ways WAN partitions can and do occur. I do agree that the entire Internet doesn't go down very often.
Yeah, I'm also curious if there's any research on how these things vary. I assume it's not the case that 100% of male-male friendships are like X, and 100% of female-female friendships are like Y. But how close is it to that? If we assume that a description like this one accurately covers a "typical" male-male friendship (not necessarily true, but granting for the sake of argument), are roughly 90% of male-male friendships similar to that, or more like 50%, or what? In short: the distributions are as interesting to me as the median points.
I'm one of those few Belgian visitors too.
Look at jobs adverts for the type of job you want and see what they ask for cert wise, etc.
If Apple has Android shut down in the courts and is able to form a cozy duopoly with Microsoft, we won't be seeing that sort of innovation anymore and we won't even know what we've lost.

I think this is overblown. If Apple gets too high-handed, some Chinese company is going to come out with a cool new platform slick, cheap, and open enough to support the next killer app.
You clearly appreciate the central theme of the post but have less use for the manliness trappings that surround it.

It's illustrative for the author to share the personal experiences and thought process that led him to this conclusion. It's equally interesting to see other people reaching the same conclusion after approaching the problem from a completely different perspective.

It looks like there's another level of analysis left to be done here. If "making" is a marker of true manliness but not specific to men, then what is it that we're really saying? Making is adulthood? Making is being in touch with oneself? Making is not buying into corporate consumerism?

I'm still digging for the simple truth at the heart of both this post and the ensuing discussion.
Last week's news
Where can I get the database design of Tally?
You see, one colleague at work claims that he designed the database for a payroll system but I am certain the design isn't his, and that he found it somewhere online in which case we will be facing serious copyright issues. Is there any place where I could find the database design of Tally software? I just need to know the table names and the field names. Thanks in advance.
what objections are true?

(i've not seen them raised anywhere?)
I hope this becomes an example for other companies in the future-- if you make your platform more closed than it needs to be, you will have things like custom firmwares, jailbreaking and other such attacks made by customers looking to utilize their own devices.
That's kinda true for software too. Symbolics Lisp machines still have features that no other OS/IDEs have.
It _may_ be a worthwhile tradeoff. But if you're in three datacenters and one of them splits you could have a third of your requests fail. Depending on what you're doing, that may be unacceptable. I agree that it's a tradeoff. I disagree with the people who are saying that emphasizing consistency is always the right thing to do.
Always Innovating's Touch Book is probably close to what you want. The hardware specs are open, there are pins for serial on the board, and it can run a variety of ARM based Linux distros (Android, Ubuntu, etc).:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer:
http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part
I do this with notifo right now. It's quite useful. I've gotten Boxcar and messagepub to do the same thing for me, but I like notifo's UI.
Flevo Racer Clone – Testament to human persistence
Maybe off-topic but does anyone know of a Cassandra hosting service? I'd love to try out Cassandra and hopefully put it to production use but I'd rather not deal with managing the servers.
ISuppli: $499 iPad components estimated at $260
Posters!?
[starts Googling]
In my experience, most people speak of acquaintances as such, like "I know a guy..." or "I worked with a guy...". Maybe I'm just not rich enough to have associates who try to impress by name-dropping.
Nagios is very powerful and capable of doing almost anything that you want, but it is an eff-in' nightmare to configure and almost impossible to quickly add and remove things that you want to monitor. If your answer to my request to add a new monitor is "well, just open up the configuration file..." you've lost me already.
What's a good source for finding the average salary for different occupations in India?
You're ignoring the real benefit of Drobo: mixing heterogeneous drives. Unfortunately, the cost of that feature is now really high, since it seems like regular RAID has gotten faster and cheaper while Drobo has stayed expensive and slow.
Hone your grant writing skills.

Cheers
I don't how long that will be true though. Xbox Live is integral to the Xbox experience and now has a fb application and all sorts of social games (1 vs 100, etc).

Between that and the internet TVs which are accruing hype by the day, I think the distinction is largely going to be moot.

Basically everything is just going to be a content portal with some ancillary proprietary benefits (it has an app store, it plays xbox games, etc).

The only distinction will be the form-factor and screen size.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything. As a kid, I built a model that was supposed to be the "super secret stealth fighter" before people knew what it looked like. It was based on all the leaked reports of what the aircraft might look like. In the end, it was similar but not identical to the actual plane (owing to the fact that nobody predicted how jagged it was going to be). In fact, it looked a bit like a miniature SR-71.
more like Steve Jobs final step into the dark side
Apple rejected iPad app for using pinch to expand gesture
I really really wish your comment was reality. I think Apple's intentional hobbling of their platform in many ways is annoying, horrible and otherwise bad.

However, android has HUGE issues still. They don't have a single platform, they have 4 (android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.1) so developers have no way to hit everyone. They don't have a sound library worth a crap, their video player isn't much better, and they don't have a viable in app purchase model (although they have something good enough that it will prevent them from really making a real in app purchase API a la Apple). For people who haven't happened to sign up for a google checkout account at some time in the past, you don't even SEE paid apps in the store (and there is nothing prompting you anywhere about that fact).

Flash, the version most sites use on the web, vastly trails in release time for android phones, then trails even more for the carriers to update the phones with it. For instance: http://phandroid.com/2010/02/27/what-android-phones-will-get...

I'd really love for your version of events to be true, but it isn't yet.

--- Developer for both platforms
UX, Emotion, and Free Coke Machines
The vibe I got from the book, which is why I asked the OP's opinion was that Steve Jobs did not believe in their movie business, his vision was that Pixar would market computers capable of producing Pixar-level graphics to ordinary consumers. He didn't see Pixar as a movie studio.

But the folks at Pixar wanted to make movies. So what they did was convince him that by doing work on movies and commercials, they could advertise the capabilities of their tools.

Eventually, they were able to buy enough time to get their work recognized and the Toy Story deal going which validated their vision and won Steve Jobs over to the movie studio idea.