skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting article, as fundamentally sound systems have been built which are "CA" within a single datacenter. BigTable is the premier example.

There are however several issues with this. First, eventual consistency means eventual consistency of data on the replicas; it doesn't mean that a client can't be presented with a consistent view. Dynamo-pattern systems use quorums to provide this. Even when a quorums aren't used (R + W < N), at least with Voldemort, the weak (no read-your-writes) form of eventual consistency is still only a failure condition: when the "coordinator" (first in the preference list) node for the specific key fails after a write has happened, but before the next read is made.

Second, a CA system means that the core switch (and there may be multiple within a datacenter, especially in the case of startups leasing colocation space or using a managed/"cloud" hosting provider) is now a single point of failure. The way to build around this is by building an "AP" layer on top of the "CA" layer, spanning multiple core switches. This is similar to Yahoo's PNUTS and Google's Spanner. Both of these had been multi-year projects, by companies with expertise in distributed computing, with very specific and limited requirements (i.e., they were building this for themselves, not selling them as general purpose solution). Which brings me to the next point:

"CA" consistency is much more difficult (that is, error prone) to implement than "AP" consistency. Two phase commit is one way to do so, but doesn't provide fault tolerance (it won't withstand the failure of the coordinator/master node). Paxos is one way to do so, but a high performance Paxos implementation requires leases and is still very tricky to implement. Again, it took years for Google to build, trouble shoot and perfect the Chubby/GFS/BigTable stack; the first version did not have a fault tolerant master and the query model is still much simpler than SQL.

That's why I am skeptical when people claim to be able to deliver to market (within months, not years) a commercial solution that provides strong consistency, fault tolerance, horizontal scalability (without a hard upper limit), supports multiple datacenters and still allows execution of SQL queries (even if without certain types of JOINs) with OLTP-suitable performance. That's not to say it's logically impossible, it's just a very bold claim to make.
Third generation programmer here too.

My grandfather worked on the guidance systems for the Australian missile program run out of Woomera.

Both my uncles are programmers, and my mother is a programmer too.

It's kind of the 'family trade'
I hate it and always try to avoid job postings that contain those terms. It's usually deployed by inexperienced/naive/arrogant teams and/or companies trying to sound "hip" and "with it". There's no way to measure what "rockstar" or "ninja" means ... for the most part, in my experience, I've found it most often to mean "superhuman", i.e., someone unrealistically and absurdly better than everyone else, who can meet 72-hour deadlines for a whole project (real encounter I had). It's definitely a bad omen when someone uses those words and an instant, severe reduction in respect for the company/interviewer.
The ideal domain name is memorable, easy to spell and pronounceable. I think these 3 factors matter a fair amount.

If that is the exact domain you want, I'd say $350 is a pretty good price as long as you're serious about the project.
I love this quote from the post: "If Ron’s awake, he’s working. He can be at a party, in his pajamas, or at the Super Bowl. Ron is always on the job and the network is always on." That's the world I come from. You have to work your balls off to succeed (as I discuss in tip #6 here: http://bit.ly/5Gccio). Fuck this part-time shit that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (at 37signals) are pitching. Ask Larry Bird or Michael Jordan if they worked part-time on their basketball skills?
Vapid in the sense that it makes no difference? Or that it has no context?

Ok, so right now I see ~300,000 (315, but let's round down - because 15,000 hps is nothing, right?). Let's assume DoubleClick has some very big customers who all do lots of traffic. Let's say they have at least 10 big clients like Amazon that could bring their peak traffic up to a theoretical 10x more than the current average of 300K. That's 3 million hits per second, minus adsense adwords etc.

That is enormous. Astounding. And from my point of view, impossible to do without an extremely well laid out infrastructure. This number is therefore not just a vapid boast but a telling example of how awesome their network and applications are for being able to handle load of such magnitude. Even if it were only 5x the current load, 1.5 million hits per second is no walk in the park. You can't handle traffic like that without a truly robust design and several really scalable, really reliable layers, from appliances to handle incoming dns traffic all the way back to the app and database servers.

According to this document (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nqfZBBPVbikJ:w...) in 2006-2007 DoubleClick's peak ad delivery rate was 250,000 with 900 servers (before they switched to using some . Right now it's current average is more than that.

I agree it would be nice to have some comparison to their peak capacity right now, but if you consider how tough it is to handle their current load and that they have to account for significantly increased load, the result is a network which is gigantic. To me this means I can rely on them to properly handle whatever meager site I throw at them to serve ads for.
What types of things do you like to do/are good at?
Stardust Particle System Tutorials - Getting Started with Papervision
Unless something has changed since the initial announcement, you cannot use the built-in widgets. It translates the flash directly.
His notes on MobileSafari were interesting. If the iPad is having a hard time keeping a couple of pages in memory due to the lack of traditional virtual memory, then it makes even more sense why Apple is avoiding Flash. Not just the CPU/battery issue, flash is notoriously bad at garbage collecting.
Without virtual memory, you run into memory fragmentation issues quickly, especially with allocation-happy object oriented code. Multitasking or not makes no difference.
And I probably will. It's just always easier to make a few API calls than to re-implement something in its entirety.
That's the real question, isn't it, whether I'm serious about the project. I'll give it some thought, thanks.
I think one of the most critical skills for a web designer to know is version control. 'Web designers', by which I assume you mean front-end development; JavaScript, CSS, and integrating UI elements into presentation layer views.

Working with a development team is different than working by yourself. Working with others means collaborating in some systematic way and version control is at the center of that collaboration.

I'd recommend learning how to use git and subversion to get a feel for decentralized and centralized version control systems and familiarize yourself with popular workflows with each.
Wait, you were told this verbally by a single Apple Store employee, but they didn't provide you with this promise in writing?
The B52 program was driven by Colonel Pete Warden. He's no relation unfortunately, but its birth was an amazing engineering story:

http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/b52-strat/b52_5...
Hard to say. Amazon takes all their AWS products pretty seriously. I am sure they have thought through email deliverability. I wouldn't discount their solution just because their EC2 IPs have been blocked in the past for mass email.
May I ask who designed the site? I really like it. Very clean and simple.
Reminds me of Martin Wattenberg's SmartMoney Map of the Market

http://www.bewitched.com/marketmap.html
Unless you are doing cutting edge research, it's impossible to verify an idea you've invented independently is truly original or not. Even then, there's no guarantee (see: Newton and Leibniz).

So I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make.
How Ubuntu startup script deletes everything
What a bunch of Brangelina.
looks a bit like oursignal.com, or like a treemap in general
The Agenda view in Emacs's org-mode has similar ideas. In the week view you see great detail for the current day and a short overview of the days to come.

Here is a screen-shot I found online: http://tiny.cc/3gwoj
The sheer amount of Governmental apathy shown for the debate around this was astounding. Add that to the underhand pre-election rush tactics and I'll take my gambles with the DMCA over here for now..
Scientists discover first multicellular life that doesn't need oxygen
thanks for the answer.

There's lot of different languages for front-ent development: JQuery, Ajax, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc etc...

What I would like to know is what languages are really important to master for someone trying to design a website.
SaaS(Hosted) vs. on-Premise Solutions
All about Steve Jobs - Long Bio
Fantastic idea, though I noted that the author said "I work the same schedule every weekday and I rarely meet with people.", which is something I can't relate to. I meet with a lot of people, regularly.

From my perspective:

- Last week is important on Monday ... but only on Monday. I do a quick review/plan for the following week and I use data from the previous week for accountability purposes -- as in: Did I deliver on action items from the previous week? I like to get that out of the way on Monday morning so as not to have it hanging over my head the rest of the week.

- Some appointments and meetings are more important or come with greater consequences if missed. The day view is dead on, but I'd expand it to be a pad of "Day View" (a.k.a. What's Important hour by hour) at the top with starred items beneath. For instance, my Dentist charges $75 if an appointment is canceled with less than three days notice (this is never enforced, but his time is important, too). My current method is to set a reminder four days before. Once I receive the reminder, I validate that I can make the appointment and reset it to remind me 1 day before hand so that I can cancel anything else that is short-notice that conflicts, then I reset the reminder to 20 minutes prior so that I get off my duff and drive to the Dentist office. I have a similar kludge for important meetings or ones that require a great deal of prep work. Since I check my calendar constantly, I could avoid all of this nonsense if it was just sitting under a thick line beneath my "Day View" as a constant reminder.
There are just so many uses for this... Everyone from print+digital content providers (local magazines, papers, etc) to ma and pa IT shops can use such a service...

I know that it's nothing new, but the fact the Google is putting it out there pretty much ensures its wide-spread adoption (more so, anyways)...
Android encourages this as well. With respect to multi-tasking, swap is an abstraction to save developer effort at the expense of performance and persistence.
Coimbra, here!
Foursquare cracking down on location cheaters
That Pesky Design Process
It hasn't happened because most communities grant a monopoly to their cable provider so their can only be one legal cable company in a given area.
If you're looking for an excuse to quit, you will always find one.

Get back in there and do it! At least then you can say "Google competed with me" :-)
I will trade vertical pixels for freedom any day.
But all of those were things that were left out of the Apple ][ project for various reasons: either they didn't exist yet (Disk ][ being the prime example), or were too expensive to add to the motherboard.

What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough?

The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are customizing their machines and adding capability, but they're doing it through the SDK and not the schematics.
Be prepared that SF != Silicon Valley. Different culture, different companies, 1 hour+ commute or so each way.
I use multiple cloud / VPS accounts and it's a much cleaner means for sending messages between data centers than polling.
this idea was posted a few months ago and I can not find it. anyone have references to it?
Removing the RSA Security 1024 V3 Root
I prefer not dealing with emotions because I think my emotions are generated by things and ideas. So, it seems quicker to achieve a good emotional state through talking about things and ideas than emotions.
You know, there's probably a whole class of professional athletes that have a hard time supporting themselves. I don't have the numbers, but I'd expect that most minor-league players don't make remarkable salaries, but they continue for a chance to make it to the major leagues.
Seconded, it's a fascinating book, both as a memoir of how to do fantastically ambitious engineering, and also how to manage a remarkable group of engineers. The analogue for the web would be something like reading an account of Google written by Page or Brin.
Have you heard of Google Apps' Email? the free edition? for up to 100 domains (IIRC.)
While the idea of Jobs vs. Woz philosophies seems basically accurate, they diverged a bit later than the author says.

Apple had no control over the software and hardware used with the original Macintosh. The author is just flat wrong on this. The serial connectors were a bit weird for the time, but that was it. There was none of the patented-connector, crypto-signed-applications, brick-the-hacked-devices tactics we see with the i* line. The Mac OS didn't even have kernel mode. You could just rewrite all of RAM with your own code and jump to address zero if you felt like it, and people did.

The Apple //c was as "closed" as the Macintosh, and I'm pretty sure Woz had something to do with that machine (you could even get a signed limited edition).

Modern Macs are made with plenty of standard parts, and the worst that happens if you mess with them is that you void the warranty--which is exactly what happens if you mess with the insides of a Dell or HP computer.

The true divergence is that Jobs now has Apple producing consumer entertainment devices in addition to computers. Obviously, the tradeoffs and rules are different for consumer entertainment devices. Whether it's an iPhone, a PS3, or the radio in my car, the manufacturer isn't interested in supporting openness and arbitrary hacking--they are expected to make a functional, attractive product that "just works", which requires maintaining some control over what goes into it.

P.S. AT&T Wireless is the result of AT&T absorbing McCaw Cellular, and separated again from AT&T years ago, so while it's fun to talk about the irony of Jobs' blue-boxing, that wasn't really quite the same company.
The (excellent Steve McQueen/Dustin Hoffman) film is available legally & free to watch online until Saturday 10th April 2010 if you're in the UK:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007bw8d/Papillon/
Emotional weakness is probably too general of a term. Two things seem to be true: men are better at pushing aside their emotions to achieve their goals, and women are better at not making irrational decisions based on things like egoism and vengeance.
I bought 'qrko.de' for nearly the same purpose: URL shortening with bit.ly style analytics but with built in QR support (and maybe user-agent tracking. It would be interesting to see the device market share for code scanning)

I'll probably still build it; it bums me out the the goo.gl shortener is semi-closed.
There is also one in the AirZoo in Kalamazoo, MI.
http://www.airzoo.org/
http://www.airzoo.org/page.php?menu_id=3

Picture of the SR-71:
http://www.airzoo.org/page.php?menu_id=108

It is a very nice museum, well worth some visits.
This is pretty true in general. Men go out and do the adventurous, more romantic type stuff. Women do the more mundane things back at home, basically ensuring everything holds together. Women tend to be the glue that holds society together and helps it function as an organic unit, men move society around.
I think this is what I saw the other day:

http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D249554,00.a...

And DP Review has a preview:

http://www.dpreview.com/previews/CanonEOS550D/

Whatever you get, have fun!
Full frame sensors almost completely remove the need for tripods. The light sensitivity is so awesome you can shoot up to ISO 64K without too much grain. This means you can take awesome pics in the dark with no shake.

I love the Nikon D700 but it's a bit expensive.
Right... Is it a common practice to get customer service reps from a reputable company to sign a contract when they tell you something that does not seem extraordinary?

Update: You guys scared me, so I just called Apple directly. They said that the official policy is that you have 14 days to exchange an opened Apple product, but in the case of the iPad it is common for Apple Store employees to extend this to 30 days (I now see the 30 day extension note on my receipt).

I did not get the phone call in writing though, but as I mentioned, you can verify it for yourself. ;)
>>I'm my own costumer.

Would you mind posting some designs? I'm always interested in seeing others' ingenuity in the clothing industry. (/pun)
While I'm generally against supporting the domain squatting industry, if I were you I'd sit down and spend an hour making a list of ten other possible names that don't completely suck and actually are available. If you still think that the $350 domain name is worth $350 after that, then go for it.
Google really could have done a cool thing by etching a unique QR on the back of each Nexus one. Instead we got android.com. Maybe next time.
IPad = Newton 3.0
Graphd - C graph-based tuple store
I like the idea of sharing todo lists, and if you don't mind some commentary on your list...

It's clear that some of those are just thoughts you have bouncing around, and are not very well fleshed out on your list. Or in other words, I read them on your list, and I'm not sure what you are trying to propose as a project.

I think some of the projects that you have marked "small" could easily become large projects if not careful!

And, I think the screenshot web page is a good idea! Would you be offended if someone else did that? (I probably won't, but I still think it's a good idea.) This is one of those cases where registering the domain name (I checked) might be a good idea, if you would get offended by someone taking that idea, at least force them to choose a new name.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't open source software come to dominate every single industry except perhaps defense? Apple has some nice stuff but it's proprietary nature is a throwback to the 80s.
This is in the Summer Of Code roadmap:

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2010/03/cassandra-in-google-summe...
We have a lot. This article is right on.
To be honest I used both terms in the title for SEO purposes.
Is it really because of a different country? Just have a look at trending twitter posts sometime. Some examples from grownups (judging from the pictures) visible right now: "dam why she my biggest fan", "doin' ur 4ends mom", "yur teaachers tryna fcck yu", "u wanna slap da smell outta ppl...? I swear i will slap da #FUNK outta every wet white person in dis f'n class..."

Those were all examples from people who say they're from US. I wasn't even looking for bad examples - they were on one screen. I know there's a difference between weird spelling used by natives and bad grammar from others, but a bad example in one place enables more bad behaviour in another. In some online games I couldn't tell a native English speaker from other people, because they don't care to write properly.
Luckily, you don't need the domain to get started. Keep working on the project and if it continues to excited you, grab the domain.
Yes it does, flying is faster.

It wasn't at first.

Yes it does, mainframes are smaller.

They weren't at first.

Yes it does, PBC is more mobile

It wasn't at first.

You seem to have completely missed the point. Technology doesn't happen overnight. It's all about costly, seemingly stupid incremental improvements. The shuttle doesn't make sense in its current form, what does make sense is the shuttle as an innovation springboard.
Sniffing iPad Traffic
Solar Airplane Completes Maiden Voyage
Hey San , I will be joining you in Philly this summer as well. Learnbat looks like an awesome product.
holy spit facebook r jerks
um, "Gowalla now supports PubSubHubbub" would probably make a better title
I can't access google calendar at the moment (at work), but when I use it i have it in a view that only shows the next 7 days. This ticks one of the boxes this guy's talking about.

As for having an expanded view of today, and a reducing detail view of the following days ... that's a great idea i think.
To add insult to insult to injury (the first insult was "Don't do that then"), the person handling the bug is a member of the "Canonical User Experience and Design team". It's like they're annoying people on purpose sometimes...
Ron isn't so much a connector as he is THE connector.
agree , should of asked to review
It requires iTunes to load content from local storage.
“AngelList is the real deal”
I'm a relatively active (but junior) angel investor.

When I need advice, Ron is where I go.
I will talk to a friend about a problem only if they can help solve it.

How can you determine if he can solve it without talking to him about it first?
Are there investor concerns about foreign-based startups re: unknown corporate structure/governance, etc?
I find the response of the maintainer to be typical of the kind of detached attitude that you come across every now and then with issues reported.

I've had bugs converted to 'wontfix' and 'unconfirmed' in spite of giving detailed info and / or situations where it clearly is a bug.

It shouldn't take a 'thinking over a cup of tea' to recognize this is highly undesirable behaviour, a fix is practically free and very easy, the results of executing that script are potentially very expensive.

It's a bug. Not a feature for the wishlist.

And I never did get why there has to be yet another way to start stuff up in the first place. /etc/inittab, /etc/init.d/ and now 'upstart'...

It doesn't seem to be a great improvement over the previous system but requires a bunch of new stuff to be learned and old stuff to be unlearned. That should come with a clear advantage of sorts and I can't seem to find any.
Why are weekends half-size?
Optimization mistakes that kill startups
Just spent 10 mins reading, good story but abridged version:

- An Italian Louvre worker, Vincenzo Perugia, stole the Mona Lisa, claiming his motivation was that the French had stolen works from Italy.

- Years later he attempted to give it back but claim a reward. He changed his story a few times about how he stole it.

- The revelation of the larger crime was that a slick con-man claimed he helped Vincenzo steal the work for the purpose of selling credible fakes to a handful of American millionaires since it was widely reported that the original was stolen.
For a 'side project' that is at the hobby level it is clearly too expensive, if you plan on eating of it some day you can expect to invest a large multiple of that worth of time and effort anyway, presumably you'll recoup that.

To date I have only bought a single domain ever from someone other than a registrar, usually with a bit of thinking I can come up with one that is not already taken, in your case that might be impossible, hard to judge without more info.

Best of luck with your side project anyway!
You're calculating it with speed of sound at sea level. At 80,000 feet the 3,530 km/h speed record is Mach 3.289 according to wolframalpha, still bellow the 3.45 claimed in the article. Although it is understandable that this mission wouldn't count for a speed record.
Another 25-year-old in the same situation (not leading a startup, participating in one). Many thanks to the OP and all commenters; it seems like there are a lot of eyes on this thread.