skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Backups not working when you need them is very very common.

I've heard, experienced (for a client) and read it so very many times. In fact someone told me that pretty much all backups are useless unless you test them frequently (not just once!).

There are lots of tools that do backups - not so many that check if the backup actually works. This might be a business opportunity for someone.

It's not enough to check if the files wrote successfully - you also have to check that you actually backed up the files you need. And that you didn't miss any.

Something like a full restore with unit tests to make sure you actually have the data you care about.
IMHO, punting a problem down the line isn't dealing with it. Better to face things directly than escape into other stuff.
You should be careful. A lot of security features that we take for granted nowadays (stack protection, privilege separation, etc.) are poorly featured or nonexistent in Windows XP. If you aren't running any services and are running behind a firewall it may not be a big deal, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.
Thanks for the relatively (lol) concise response. But really, thanks.
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Loved flipping through all the memories. Not sure how I'll interact with it now that I've put most of my history in. I've sent it to all my co-workers and I can definitely see it making for good conversation for the next few days. I wonder what jtauber has planned for future interactions.
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They actually wrote an article on this? They might as well have wrote one on how the iPad is bigger too.
Of course, you don't really get as many page views (or, sadly, upvotes on Hacker News) if you just write another blog post about why everyone should adopt Ayn Rand's philosophical system. You have to string everyone along for several paragraphs first.
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Best pattern I've seen to guarantee backup availability is for upgrades/deployments to occur on the hot failover first, swap the hot failover to primary, move primary to hot failover status, then upgrade what was previously the primary. This, combined with your general data backup (database dump to tape, etc.) gives you much more resilience should something go badly. However, it doesn't take the place of regularly testing your data backups, and only works if you have a full failover environment.
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While it's technically a huge leap forward, I still just can't grok the UI. My wifes machine is on Windows 7 and it just (for whatever reason) is unusable to me.
let me guess ... you are an apple user ? ;)
They screwed up the MB/GB suffix--wow:

Vronko based his opinion on the 256GB of system memory that the iPad contains. "That was a pretty big surprise," he said last Saturday after finishing his iPad teardown. "I expected 512GB or more. The 256GB shows that it's a single-core processor [inside the A4]."
This is a violation of his privacy. Not cool. :(
Forgot to mention. Integration of wordpress with other opensource software is also possible.
I don't know how long i could stay like this;
I don't know how far i can stay unmarried (remember, i am an Indian and 29).

I can relate to that .. :-). I think you are doing great, and am sure this would turn out really well for you.
The problem is if r&d grows above 10% on desktop os market. They should punch apple now.
That's encouraging.
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For the Tl;dr ers out there, here's the short version. And no, I don't agree that the Objectivists get off so easy...

The atheists claim to be able to explain ethics, but they provide no ultimate foundation for ethics. Instead they point to intuition, evolution, game theory and community standards. However they are confusing descriptive talk for normative talk.

Where the atheists criticize religion, they presuppose an ultimate foundation for ethics. That is, they can only criticize religious atrocities from the ground that religion provided for them.

However, the idea that we ought to do what we want to do magically fills in the holes.
Well, I don't think any book/teaching method would entirely dismiss linearity, it would just make things less linear (as compared to the current way of teaching).

As a start, I suppose you could have a topic in algebra... then use that to discuss probability. From there, you can view something as geometry and teach some of that, etc...

Maybe that doesn't work. So maybe, you teach math by asking a question and exploring to find an answer. As you explore, you inspect different approaches to a problem. Later questions can use earlier points as analogies.

To be honest, I don't know quite enough math to even give a list of questions/topics. But, I imagine a good math teacher could do something of this sort.

Its probably best to start at the University level and move your way down as you learn lessons about teaching these things.

As for your idea, CYA-Math, I like it in some ways. "To see how this connects to this, go to page 34. To see an analogy to something else, go to page 54." I agree though very tough to build.
It just detects them as binary, its not any less efficient than SVN AFAIK, possibly MORE efficient.
Flip to the part about longjmp, and see if you still are.
Would be nice to see this in html5 HD as advertised. Kind of off topic, but did anyone else try playing this with html5 video in the Chrome dev build for Linux? The controls keep disappearing before I can adjust them...
I don't know, but Symbian does have the largest value share of the platforms at Nokia (S30/S40, Symbian, Maemo).
I'm in Armenia at the moment, actually :) but I did move to SF post-acquisition (with a stop in NY on the way) per the deal. I'm probably moving back to NY when I get States-side, though. Cambridge was definitely on the table, but alas, Brooklyn won.
I could not get past this section:
/ Did these killers— and the millions of people in the Middle East who celebrated their actions— ack an innate conscience? Or did their innate consciences house different contents than those of Americans who reacted with horror to what they did?/

The argument these and other atheists are making is that religion is, by design, overriding any innate sense of morality we might have built in. Or as Steven Weinberg put it:
/With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion/
Sounds like a pretty typical case of depression. Take it seriously, it's not just "feeling down" or something, it's a serious problem. Luckily it's treatable with meds.

However, I'd try some of the other ideas seen here first. Especially intense exercise. That's a powerful antidepressent.

Good luck my fellow HNer!
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How low is his lowest price usually under normal price?
I think you misunderstood the point of the article. It's not trying to support religion as the source of morality, quite the opposite. Instead, it's showing that the morality these New Atheists present is no more grounded in reason than religion is - they ground it in feelings. The alternative is Objectivism which bases morality on facts and reason.

I agree that Harris presents utilitarianism, though he oddly avoids the word. That it is a variation of altruism, where each individual sacrifices himself to the group. Harris does not give a rational justification for this, just assumes everyone will feel it's correct. Feelings are not reason, so you have to ask where such feelings come from.
The main thing that you're missing is that people are social animals. That's how we've evolved, and why we have most of the cognitive biases/moral standpoints that we do (eg. punishing defectors/fairness/not killing other people for their stuff). This is Richard Dawkins' argument in a nutshell - you are essentially a paleolithic tribesman in a suit.

If you prefer to look at it from a purely sociopathic amoral viewpoint, your ability to be a lone, rational actor is largely dependent on your interactions with society. You just have to look at people like Ted Kazcynski to see how completely independent actors live.
vim, ssh, *sh scripting & Unix tools in general, rsync, git, GitHub, Basecamp, python, web.py, sqlite3, Apache, Firebug, DropBox, Mac dev & Linux prod (mostly), Linode or EC2 for hosting. also Gimp, Grab, Skype, Gmail... these are the tools I'm not uncomfortable admitting in public to using.

however, i'm pretty much also forced to deal with PHP (yuck) and SVN (bleh) due to legacy issues, though hoping to convert the masses of unbelievers eventually
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I have read neither K&R nor the C++ book cover-to-cover, but the C++ book is standing practically unused on my bookshelf, while my K&R is noticeably worn.
Pathfinder looks really cool, but the screencast has some really weird music and a TTS voice! Prince is cool too, but expensive!
What do they expect? Apple says 300,000 iPads were sold on Saturday, whereas last Christmas there were 42 million iPhones, not including iPod touches. Of course the numbers are going to be far smaller, the customer base is still growing.
The article does not describe Objectivism, only refers the reader to look there for a rational ethics. Objectivism is not "ought to do what we want to do", that would again be ethics based on feelings, but instead of arriving at altruism as the New Atheists do, you arrived at something like hedonism. And that is the point: feelings are not a means of knowledge - everyone will arrive at something different. Feelings don't help you understand biological evolution, nor morality.
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A keyboard. How quaint.
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Does it seem weird to anyone else that iTunes, ostensibly a music library program and music store interface, is now in charge of activating phones and tablet PCs, as well as managing their applications and shared files? Shouldn't there be a separate purpose built program for that?

Seems to fly in the face of Apple's vaunted design and organization.....
"Because I usually feel bad when I harm others, and I usually feel good when I help others."

I do, to, but I also feel that often it's because it has been drilled into me.
It's also the only OS that has full scalability. You raise the DPI, everything on screen is increased in size, and 95% are still crisp.

Only think is I wish you could make the dock icons bigger.
Yes, Ayahuasca can have serious side effects (serotonin shock) when combined with other antidepressants (specifically SSRIs).

No, don't shut yourself in a closet listening to trance. If you're serious about using Ayahuasca to help heal your depression, I suggest you find a shaman.

Do some research before jumping into such a powerful medicine.

http://forums.ayahuasca.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=7957
I came back here to this comment. How has anyone dealt with this situation?
Pivotal Tracker for project management. PBWorks wiki for organizing our information, collaboration. Google Apps for email. Dropbox to share files, backup. Google Voice for phone (love the forwarding). Chrome as a browser(just stopped using Firefox/Firebug... too many crashes). We also use Zendesk to manage tickets, provide customer support and a knowledge base. Google talk for chat.

Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio for development. Notepad++ for other random text files I want to open. Git for source control. Hosting on Amazon EC2. Fireworks CS4 for design.
I think they're tacking on features to iTunes instead of creating a separate application because iTunes already works on Windows.

edit: well, for some definition of work anyway.
I feel like a lot of people missed a pretty important point...

Why does the $499 seem inexpensive to the people who DID NOT WATCH THE SJ presentation? There is no text on the apple website that says "pundits said it was going to cost $999, but we made it for $499"?
Even even if it's un-rendered, we're still talking TBs of meshes, scenes, textures, mattes, etc. That part didn't make sense to me. Maybe it was in the storyboard phase.
Yeah, I live in The Netherlands where cyclist are taken good care of. I've got a 25 minute ride to and from my work past a canal with almost no car traffic (this is actually part of it: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Jan_Verme...)
Some hard numbers: with 6 sales over two days and a pretty bad app - I was at spot 27 in the paid books category of the iPad store. The equivalent spot in the iPhone store would require 60-80 daily sales on average over a 7 day period.

According to the Free Books post yesterday, Colin is at #3 spot in the free Books category and has had 20k downloads in 3 days. That's 6.5k downloads per day. The #12 free app in the books category of the iPhone market has 2300 downloads per day over a 7 day period.

iPad sales are still low, but the iPhone market is not a techie market, it's a consumer market. When the normal consumers get familiar with their products, sales will go up.
> there are stories about former meth addicts going down to South America and coming back all serene and mellow.

I've met at least a dozen. Coke, meth, pills, booze, herb, cutting, you name it.
IPad simulator
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I'm sick of this "oh my" thing. Commence down votes. Nice article though.
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If you really want to get out of your head, turn off the lights and crank up the Shpongle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qt2WbfotkU
Meh. It doesn't work so well, you realise they are just constantly on the game to avoid the same problems.

Eventually it got boring too; I figured out that there was actually no real challenge in it.

However, short term it might be useful. It helped me grow - but I wouldn't say it is sustainable long term.
I also highly recommend this book.

You can get it in audio format.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002LYTNR4
Altruism does not mean doing things that in some way, directly or indirectly, benefit others. Nor does it have a monopoly on being nice or friendly to others. Instead, it means having a moral duty to serve others, acting in ways that avoid helping oneself. Some very influential altruist philosophers take it so far as to say you should suffer when helping others. Always, for your entire life. Contemporary altruists may not demand so much, but they do demand sacrifice, and deride self-interest.

Game theory doesn't explain altruism. It wouldn't even convince people that capitalism (with full protection of individual rights) is a decent system to support. It's a game, and can be interpreted many ways, including self-interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
Cool site. If you want a laugh, check out RMS's: http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com
"edit: well, for some definition of work anyway."

I agree heartily.

When downloading podcasts, an activity that could be handled by a perl script and wget, iTunes likes to use my entire processor. I have no idea why, and its done so for several versions now.
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"There is no step three"... once you figure out you should use the program whose icon is a CD (who uses CDs for music when you have iTunes?) to manage your phone and tablet, neither of which have optical drives.
Lots of good comments. Some consistent themes:

1) physical labor (gardening, kitesurfing, etc): provides endorphins you're not going to get from a desk, and Vitamin D from the sunshine. Both are needed for a stable mood.

2) Socialization (mass, relationships, travel): plus-minus. Without some retooling of your thought patterns, more talking with the same people isn't necessarily going to help. Regarding travel, I wonder if there is an element of physical labor and sunshine in that as well.

3) therapy: the standard for depression is cognitive-behavioral therapy, which has two main components: a) identifying problems and making concrete progress on resolving them b) re-tooling your automatic thoughts: "If A then B". Andy Thompson, a U of Virginia psychiatrist has a very provocative theory making the rounds, which I'm somewhat partial too: the analytic rumination hypothesis. Fits in well with the effectiveness of the first part of CBT. (http://andersonthomson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Andrew...)

4) meds: he SSRIs appear to be not so helpful for mild-to-moderate depression (http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/303/1/47). Different story for major depression. If you don't remember 8 months of your life, then Prozac may well be for you. Regarding Omega-3 fatty acids: yeah, they raise your HDL a little bit, and maybe they're ok for maintaining optimal complex fats for the nervous system (myelin, etc), but few Americans have any problem with adequate fat intake :-)

Finally, I'm starting to wonder if depressive tendencies are a recurring theme in the HN population in particular. Certainly negative thinkers are well positioned to identify new problems early and work on fixing them. How would one test this hypothesis?
A friend of mine who may identify with your situation recently quit his job and has gone to volunteer full-time to help recreate a forest in the Pondicherry, India (Sadhana forest). Cliché but absolutely true: The world is a big and exciting place. Look out to immerse yourself in something completely new. Don't worry too much about the choices. Pick the first sensible choice (use stochastic efficiency).
A family friend committed suicide on Saturday.

Admittedly I'm not in a position to fully empathize with her plight, but I'm pretty sure it was a poor solution.
> except for web development, I like a native nix shell

I like the shell for anything nitty-gritty, and cygwin doesn't quite cut it. I figure if they would build a Windows UI on a *nix core- essentially the same feat as OS9 -> OSX- so long as it was at least decent, I'd probably willingly pay full retail and never stray, at least for desktops/laptops.
pg presented his setup, too: http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/
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Writing a family essay might actually be a fun thing to do, if you are one who looks at the lighter side of life. Most of the time, this may not be possible. There are so many societal issues that you need to focus on
I like this site. They dress up their publication to look like a scientific journal, and then write like they're in the middle of a 4chan thread.

Actually, 4chan is nicer because everyone there knows they're dumb. Nobody has let these folks know yet.
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Do you feel more intimately/emotionally connected with anonymous media (PostSecret, FML) or media "with a face" (Facebook posts, etc)? What does a concrete identity add or subtract to make something more or less impactful?

(Note: this question is part of the @dmediaproject)
What does that make Windows 95 with its insanely hyped launch?

"Windows 95 was an event. People lined up for blocks outside computer stores (like Egghead) at midnight to get their copy of Microsoft's newest operating system. Rolling Stones' song "Start Me Up" set the tone for the launch." (http://www.betanews.com/article/10-Years-On-Windows-95-Remem...)
As much as I dislike Kant and Descartes and numerous other philosophers, I have to defend them here: they didn't define philosophies for the purpose of answering trivial questions about what to do while hanging out at a bar.

Beyond simple pub stories, moral questions about how to dispense justice in a large, diverse society and global gets really difficult, and we need a system of principles for that.

In addition, making all of the decisions for ones own life is complex, and a decent philosophy will provide a guide, principles to help you achieve goals. Most philosophies are not decent if one's goal is living a long, happy, fulfilling life, say with an excellent family and career.
Hark! The sound of some blogger loudly boasting he discovered the classic Existential Dilemma.
And thousands of years of philosophical thought cry out in the darkness.
Perhaps more importantly, everybody already has iTunes. Apple can leave out an entire step from the user experience (and one of the more frustrating ones, at that): "install new software".
Wow, the alchemists had no idea how far off they really were.
Not being able to copy my files in and out is a deal breaker for me. That's sad as the device looks really neat.

I'm not interested in encouraging Apple to build an ecosystem where I have to pay every time I move my data around.
Spoiler Alert: It's all Mac.
RMS' setup just makes me sad
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Re-reading that makes me think pg is thrilled about his iPad (which I'm assuming he bought)
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That, and the fact that there are literally millions of iphone users out there and less than a million ipad users.

I think the sales figures are actually pretty good once you take that factor in to account.
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I've read Ayn Rand's books, so I feel confident in stating with Wikipedia that for the Objectivist the moral purpose of the individual life is the pursuit of happiness or rational self-interest. I don't feel like I overstated the position.

I don't think there is much space between hedonism and devil may care rugged individualism. Unless you provide a foundation for ethics, there is no way to compare my self-interest against your self-interest on the merits.

And in particular the critique of atheists still applies to Objectivists unless Objectivists provide an ultimate foundation for ethics.
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Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTU0Nzc4MDQ5) is cool, though the iPad only lets you save pictures.

Airsharing (http://avatron.com/apps/) lets you (sort of) use the iPad as a target drive.
There are (apparently cludgy) ways of moving your informationi about, but the impression I've had from this and other sites is that the iPad is more of a read/watch platform than a text-input one.

Unless you attach an external keyboard, the speed limitation of entering punctuation and numbers would be more of a deal-breaker for me if I were on the lookout for a very portable semi-work machine.
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pretty embarrassing for all involved. backups not running for a month? no excuses.
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75821M, Oct 27 2009, 19:48:32)

>>> from itertools import product
>>> twokids = product('B G'.split(), 'M Tu W Th Fr St Sn'.split(), repeat=2)
>>> boytues = [t for t in twokids if t[:2]==('B', 'Tu') or t[2:]==('B', 'Tu')]
>>> twoboys = [t for t in boytues if t[0] == t[2] == 'B']
>>> len(twoboys)
13
>>> len(boytues)
27
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...and how do you plan on attaching that external keyboard, since the iPad doesn't seem to have any ports?

It's a closed system, by design.
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It's not actually all Mac, fwiw. I try to find interesting people more than interesting setups, and this is what they tend to use. :)
iTunes could be the bootstrapper that installs a slimmed down version of itself and the other broken out applications.
I read RMS' setup and found it inspirational. He has strong convictions and he lives by them, even though they cause him personal pain.