skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It only took a few days of recreational learning to get the basics down. I found a number of lame flash typing games online that helped a lot. There are also a few sites with dvorak-oriented typing tests that can help too.

To get started, I simply switched OSX into dvorak mode in the International preferences panel and then turned on the keyboard viewer to see the layout on screen. I started just doing things like facebook messages, and it was painful. Minutes just to type a few sentences. But within a day it seems reasonable to be up to 15 wpm or so.

The main thing for me was only using it for social communication or typing games, which allows it to remain a fun challenge rather than a big frustration.

I still use qwerty often for dev-related things because the muscle memory for shortcut keys seems harder to overcome than it was for typing words.
change mapping, change keys, type until done
Bombay (pls don't dare call it 'Mumbai')
Manchester here too.
ACID transactions require consistency (C in CAP) in order to guarantee atomicity. So if you ditch C, you'll just be unable to perform transactions at all.

In general, weakening the consistency guarantees is not done to improve scalability, but rather to improve the partition tolerance. There are replication techniques (e.g. chain replication) that allow very high performance without sacrificing consistency.
The main speed benefit of SSDs is not throughput, but random access speeds. That's what makes it feel so magically fast. SSD over FW800 still gives you that.
No personal experience with an early-stage non-profit, but it seems like the best way to acquire funding would be to look for government grants or grants from larger non-profits. The government funds a lot of ideas which they don't have the manpower or expertise to implement themselves. Once you have some early work done it should be a lot easier to get donations from the community at large.
Here's a good interview with Paul Rand where he talks about his design decisions and reflects on the value of his own trade:

"I've been thinking about this for many years [..] I concluded that we are not very important."

"A good designer who understands his business can make things memorable, make them easy to recall and improve the general quality of life, which is the only reason for our existence."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta4ef1xBeMA

Great designers leave their ego at home and build things for a purpose. Or how Paul Rand put's it: "Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good."
Wow. That's just plain scary. It also makes me appreciate more why high jet fighter suits look like space suits, without it the guy would have surely been dead.

Another interesting bit: "The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude".

And "The ejection seat had never left the airplane; I had been ripped out of it by the extreme forces, seat belt and shoulder harness still fastened.". Just wow...

What a pity his buddy didn't make it.
Montreal but soon Toronto here.
Email to SMS Gateways, Complete List
AdLib: Apple’s Secret Weapon For Making Better Web Apps For The iPad
Technically dowry is a gift given by a father to her daughter when she gets married. In-laws exploit this saying that once the girl "marries into a family", everything she owns now belongs to the family.

I don't have an authoritative answer to your question, but I know that there are marriages where no dowry is involved at all.
He passed (at 82, I believe) about seven years ago. It was both sad and not sad, as he lived a long and amazing life.

He programmed the guidance systems of one of the Titan series rockets. He also was in the Navy in WWII. At one point, his destroyer was sunk, and spent a few days in the open ocean before being rescued. He was also present at the Japanese surrender ceremony.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of learning to play chess with him over Christmas vacation. He was a truly kind man, and an inspiration to many.
I think of the iPad as a kind of dumb terminal. An end-user device with limited uses. I don't think it will bring an end to other devices. The primary reason being that you have to create apps on something. Also, I see this as something confined to the Apple universe - while it is a bright universe, and sometimes blinds us to the other Microsoft/Linux etc. universes, it's neither the largest, nor the only area for us developers to work and play in.
They could, but I assume SendGrid has more checks in place to prevent their users from sending unwanted emails. That way SendGrid has little risk of getting blacklisted, whereas a presumably uncontrolled service like Amazon's would.
Nagios is ugly and dated. The problem I have is that nagios checks services and does alerting, and cacti checks services and graphs the results. If I want to graph results and be alerted as well, I need to install, configure and maintain two separate pieces of software? Fortunately cacti, when patched to have a plugin architecture, has a plugin that can alert when a threshold is breached, but it is nowhere near as flexible as nagios.

Ideally there would be one separate, modular system for collecting data and nagios, cacti, etc would all use that.
It (obviously) works fine for small to medium projects, but I believe the bug tracker-free approach doesn't scale at all. I don't know if the author thinks it does or not, I just want to point it out to prevent people from getting ideas. :)

Scenario 1: A salesperson or customer advocate reports five bugs found during deployment of application X. Some of the bugs crosses several products, and you have to "pass on" the bug to backend server developer Bob when you find out your code is working as intended. How should you communicate the reported bug and your analysis to Bob? Assign the bug to him in the tracker, and he will get access to the complete bug history - initial report, discussion, reproduction steps, analysis, why-this-isn't-a-problem-with-module-Q-even-though-it-looks-like-it, new comments, screenshots, log files and configuration file attachments from the customer. How will you (and Bob) communicate progress to the salesman? He is CC-ed to each bug in the tracker.

Scenario 2: Your team is responsible for 4 products, which it switches between focusing on every few weeks. When you're hard at work on releasing product A version 3.1, and you spot a nasty and subtle problem with the design of the message queue in the upcoming version 2.3 of product C. Immediately drop development on A? No, you have a deadline to respect and the product C bug isn't affecting anyone yet. Forget about the bug and hope to rediscover it or remember it (and 5 others) in 6 weeks time? That is irresponsible. You put it in the bug tracker, and when product C time comes around, you look at the bug database before starting work.

Or as larsberg says, when your project reaches a certain size and userbase, you will get several hard and timeconsuming bugs at the same time. You can't always fixemrightaway or drop them.
Israel.
I get a 404. Try http://danielmiessler.com/blog/verisign-vip-a-weakest-link-c...
My problem with the iPad is that it's more closed than it needs to be. It's fine to provide people with a simple, immediate, intuitive and trouble-free interface to information. Not everybody needs to be or wants to be a content creator. But why not allow people to install apps outside the App store if they manually opt-in, as Android does? Why the absurd secrecy around the sdk and developers agreements? Why the seemingly arbitrary rejection of apps that in some way impinge on functionality Apple reserves for itself to implement?

The almost paranoid and unduly aggressive control Apple exerts over its platform is worrisome, particularly for a company poised to dominate an important emerging platform. This is why, as much as I respect Apple's engineering and design prowess, I do not use its products. After two decades of a suffocating Microsoft monopoly I'm not eager to spend the next two under another.
That applies to other places in Asia and the middle east (go arabic ninja, I guess?)
How To Write Java In Lisp
I think this is the best line in the piece...

"Doctorow is not the only Geek God who's uncomfortable with Apple's transformation of the good ole hacktastic PC into a sleek, slick, sterile appliance."

Though it's an anathema to most here I think the majority of people want their computer to act more like their stove and less like the highly hackable Apple ][. That's exactly where Apple is aiming to go with the iPad.

Honestly, I personally don't have a problem with that. One thing that's been proven in recent weeks is that there will also be bushels of hackable Android tablets out there so I say let the masses have their iPad and stop complaining.
Steampunk, Progress, and You
I often find bugs when I'm too bleary eyed to care about fixing them. If I just go to bed at that time, I'll have forgotten about it in the morning. Instead, filing a 2 line bug report serves as a good enough reminder for when I wake up.

Also, what everyone else said :)
Quite a guy, that's a grandfather to be truly proud of.

You're privileged to have known someone like that from so near.
I have friends that use google calendar for this.
Pickfu: cheap and instant market research
I also enjoy weightlifting and trained both powerlifting and olympic-style ("true") weightlifting back in the day. But the same thing applies: I lifted weights to improve my performance in other sports that I enjoyed for their own reasons. I ended up enjoying weightlifting quite a bit for its own reasons.

But never once did I lift weights because I wanted more women, nor do I think someone would be a hypocrite if they liked athletic women and but weightlifting in favour of playing another sport they enjoyed for its intrinsic value like Badminton :-)
Well said, you managed to articulate my feelings spot on.
with bodies buried by family members

Dealing with death is considered unclean in Shinto and many of the various traditions it was synthesized out of, which is why only Japan's untouchable caste (burakumin 部落民) did gravedigging, and one reason why they were ostracized. It has been, ahem, a very long time indeed since burying one's family members would be considered normative behavior.

For more on this and other interesting topics, see your favorite Japanese Civilization 101 textbook.
It must be a pilot thing. I've read a bunch of books by Richard Bach, and he falls in to this 'mode' quite a few times as well.

Agreed that it's a way to take it out of the technical area, but I don't think the story needs embellishing, it is already more than powerful enough by itself.

Great read anyway, be sure to check the story linked elsewhere in this thread as well.
An Open Question About a Pledge
You're right, except discussing why one might not want an iPad is not complaining. It's just expressing an opinion.
Very insightful. So much of our culture glamorizes this sort of manipulative conquest, it's reached the point where it's some sort of deep insight to realize such chicanery is wrong!

When I think about this sort of thing, I start to wonder if the religious right doesn't have a point.
Or do it right now with Twilio: http://www.twilio.com/sms/
Give me some iPad app ideas
title says it all
Very interesting. I've considered putting an SSD in my Mac mini, but opening them is a pain and I was under the vague impression that latency would suffer over Firewire. Glad to hear it works well, what enclosure are you using?
This is the way technology has always progressed. The first cars required extensive knowledge to drive and were completely open to modification. Modern cars don't even allow you to adjust the choke and the gas pedal isn't hooked up to the engine directly. When you push on the gas the cars computer decides how much gas to feed the engine. Modern cameras come in two different varieties: cameras for normal people and professional cameras. Why would computers be any different? I can't think of any technology that became mainstream without there being a dumbed-down version for people to use. I think by your definition most people are luddites. They aren't interested in technology, they're just interested in the benefits it provides.
I don't believe pedagogy has anything to do with it. I've had classmates who were really good at history and civics but only one of them went on to become a lawyer. The rest of them either became deck officers in the merchant navy or computer programmers. Both professions associated with a lot of money and foreign travel.
Slightly? The account was so moving in its description of supreme, beautiful engineering achievement, I f-in cried -- no joke.
The design space of continuations
Before reading the textbook, maybe watch "Departures", the film mentioned in the article. I'd wager most people will find it to be easier going and more moving. Half the cinema was sniffling by the end when I saw it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departures_%28film%29
I think a big part of that frustration is to think of what this piece of equipment could do in the hands of hackers if it were truly open.

Hopefully it won't be long before linux is available as a 'third party option'.
The C in CAP and the C in ACID are not the same C. Consistency in the ACID sense means that all constraints are met, Consistency in the CAP sense means all servers have the same data.
What Does Palinspeak Mean?
AdLib Framework - make iPad web apps look native
This is not just in Japan. During heat waves, as observed for example in France (http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5006569197) and Chicago (http://www.amazon.com/Heat-Wave-Autopsy-Disaster-Illinois/dp...), death tends to strike the socially isolated.
Become a for-profit : ).
In the US, they sell something called http://www.lifealert.com/ (very scammy late-night commercials) but I wonder why there couldn't be a free/cheap version of this. Kindle sells for $260 and has free life-time downloading via 3G. So it is possible to make devices that do not have monthly/annual fees that can hit a URL every now and then.
There are also addons for graphing the data from nagios: nagiosgraph, nagiosgrapher, etc.

On the other hand, if you're looking for something less ugly / dated from the architecture point of view, maybe you'll like http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/ ; I never actually got around to deploying it, but the docs look quite good (and it is nagios-compatible, so theoretically there's an easy upgrade path).
Same here. Plus awkward integration with the actual filesystem (/ should be C:), and I've always hated cmd.exe as compared to virtually any linux xterm
Otherworld - giving applications a chance to survive OS kernel crashes
Apple is taking a surprisingly risky gamble by telling the Farmville and Internet porn addicts to get lost. Though I technically agree that Flash is a buggy platform, I'm surprised Apple thinks they have enough clout to kill it by ignoring it.

Google is taking the appropriate route by cozying up with Adobe on Android and Chrome/ChromeOS.

My prediction is that the tablet scene will play out exactly like the smartphones have. The iPhone was groundbreaking and set the bar for interface and performance. Two years later everyone else shows up with polished products (Android 2, Windows Phone 7, etc.) and starts eating Apple's lunch (http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/03/iphone-os-still-do...).

Expect the Android or Chromium based tablets to start springing up "real soon now" and to be able to do most everything an iPad can do plus have Flash.

Keep in mind that deciding to go closed was what doomed the original Mac to also-ran status for twenty some years.
Agreed, but he's addressed WAN partitioning very well. Editing: "[Consider] a partition in a WAN network. There is enough redundancy engineered into today’s WANs that a partition is quite rare ... the most likely WAN failure is to separate a small portion of the network from the majority. In this case, the majority can continue with straightforward algorithms, and only the small portion must block. Hence, it seems unwise to give up consistency all the time in exchange for availability of a small subset of the nodes in a fairly rare scenario."

That last sentence is a very strong put-down of NoSQL; if it wasn't published on the ACM website, it should have a "zing!" at the end of it.
I'm sure the lower-ranking Saudi princes could use something to do.
What is the difference between an iPad and a Wii/Xbox/Playstation?

Locked down? Check.

Can't use with programs that haven't been blessed by the device manufacturer? Check.

Can't develop your own programs for it unless you pay again? Check.
At least two things at play there:

1) Intuition. His non-conscious brain has developed an understanding of the machine.

2) Focus. When you're a warrior in his situation, you can't be second-guessing your horse. That calculation was made on the ground, and now he's committed -- to be effective, he needs to be fully confident that he's well-taken care of. The human brain seems to be wired for a euphoric reaction to complete and utter trust (parental/social/religious bonding?), and that he was able to let that system kick in at such a moment speaks a lot about his abilities as a pilot and about the engineering feat embodied in that jet.
The Genesis of Common Lisp
Have you looked at Pepsi's Refresh Project: http://www.refresheverything.com/

Also, be sure to learn about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)
I know. I actually explained this not too long ago here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191003

But what I'm saying here is: You cannot have ACID transactions without the C in CAP.
If only the Apple could provide the same wonderful Flash experience engadget had on the JooJoo...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/05/fusion-garage-joojoo-revi...
fwiw, here is the formal version of the theorem from the gilbert/lynch proof paper:

Theorem 1. It is impossible in the asynchronous network model to implement a read/write data object that guarantees the following properties: * Availability, * Atomic consistency, in all fair executions (including those in which messages are lost).
What's a body shop?
I'm pretty sure you can disable this behavior with a checkbox.
Well, after ninja coders, we now have ninja bakers:
http://www.ninjabread.co.uk/b3ta/remove-sleeve-and-film.jpg

Ok, this made me laugh, and coming so close to this story, it could hardly be a co-incidence, so I had to share.
Assuming you have more work than resources (which is what one should plan for) I would find it hard to sacrifice the 'strategy' aspect of bug tracking systems. A good bug tracking system allows you to balance quick/low-overhead logging with an ability to create categorical data points that let you analyze your work & workload.

Having this data collection & reporting allows you to identify & trend problem areas that can not be seen looking at a single bug at a time by different people. It also allows you collect similar/overlapping areas of work to strategically manage your resources and productivity - saving you time and money.

Maybe the case is that the article comes from a company that's just too small to realize the benefits of planning.
It's called the "Inverted Pyramid" and anyone who has taken a journalism class worth anything learned it.

It's there so that editors can cut down the story easily if it doesn't fit on the page. Page design is really hard if you can't change the size of some of the stories.
They assign IP addresses to each of their clients. If a client sends spam, only that IP gets blocked.
Without knowing much about it, I can imagine that chain replication could reduce the problem of copying data to every server from O(n) to something like O(log n).

But can it also manage simultaneous writes (of possibly conflicting data) to multiple masters, to achieve write scalability? Won't it get slowed down, checking every master for conflicts before committing?
"That's not a very fundamental why."

Hmm Money isn't fundamental to why people choose one job over another?

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1247440
Is Net neutrality dead? (FAQ)
Pointblanknews, just the news
I think that statement illustrates his bias. He puts people objecting to Apple's control into the basket of "hobbyist", impugning them at the same time as implying that there are no business or professional reasons to dislike closed platforms over open ones. In his view, the only uses for open systems is so that people can fiddle in their spare time and make mischief, causing ordinary folks pain and suffering.

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. However there is a very real non-hobbyist problem with closed systems. I don't think anybody would agree that it was great that Microsoft was able to stymie the growth of the entire internet with their domination of the browser market. And IE / Windows was relatively open, compared to iPhone OS and Safari. The damage done by holding back the growth of the internet has hurt consumers enormously, even though most of them don't know it and couldn't articulate it if they did. 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.
Actually he's not really addressing it at all. What stats does he have that show WAN partitions are rare? I find that short WAN partitions occur regularly. And how does the small portion "block?" How does it even know that it's the "small portion?" If a read comes into the "small portion" (maybe because the client's in the same data center) what does the small portion do? If it responds, the response may be inconsistent. If it doesn't, the data store is unavailable (at least as far as that client is concerned).
less "why" and more "how". Which is a shame, because "why" would be interesting.
Amazing how a single word and a question mark can convey the idea that somebody is crazy for mentioning something.

Thanks for the link though. I had gotten a whiff, probably from statements like yours, that hushmail wasn't trustworthy, but hadn't known the source of this.

Your link, actually, is very enlightening. For those not willing to read it, it turns out that hushmail provides two services, their original one, and one that is geared for people not willing to install a java applet. The 2nd one can be exploited by hushmail to decrypt your messages, and hushmail can be compelled by law enforcement to do that exploitation.

However, if you use the java applet, you're golden.
The difference is very simple. Nobody replaces a laptop with an Xbox. The iPad, on the other hand, is a first-class citizen of the net and could easily become somebody's primary interface. Consequently, it matters a lot more exactly what kind of limitations the iPad imposes. The iPad has implications for film, literature, music and communication that consoles just don't, which is exactly why people find it both inspiring and troubling.
Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me?

Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back end. Combine that with an iPad App that opens a special purpose browser/Ide to run them in, and I think you'd have a business.
I'm curious about how generalizable the male:female difference in "how" friendships differ is along that dimension, because the men featured in the article are unlike many men I know.
From what I gather a lot of people use munin to do their monitoring.

http://munin-monitoring.org/

http://munin.ping.uio.no/ping.uio.no/tetra.ping.uio.no.html

Myself I use nagios, but I don't do any graphing, i've set up a couple of nice templates making it easy to add and remove services and computers, and I get SMS alerts when things go down. When we get more traffic I think I will look more into munin.