skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like you're making rolling updates across your app server cluster, version n -> n + 1. You have to separate database updates into innocuous and harmful, and your developers have to signal that state for deploy.

Changes:

a) Schema changes and row updates that are compatible with 'n'. No downtime, no worries.

b) Schema changes and row updates that are _in_compatible with 'n'. Ideally this requires downtime, but I've seen architectures that get away with live rolls by grouping app server updates by shard.

c) Database changes that will have a severe performance impact, e.g. index/update a massive table or hit some other perf corner of your db. Downtime or you invest in a key-value or FriendFeed-style architecture.

Most agile updates tend to be (a), luckily.
In practice this works really, really well. I've used it quite a bit in my own internal stuff, but I'd love to see a wider adoption among other developers -- there currently aren't many applications with this support built in (including Apple's own). The dirty/clean marking mechanism is pretty simple; as long as the number of dirty calls equal the number of clean calls, it's considered safe to kill.
Taiwan is not the counterexample to this article to prove that China needs the sweatshops and they are excusable because the ends justify the means.

First you overestimating the extent to which the sweatshops in Taiwan are the cause of its progress and ignoring what other factors were involved. There are plenty of countries in the world teaming with sweatshops, few are growing into Taiwan 2.0

What are those other factors?

1) It is a smaller country.

2) Taiwan's opposition to China was/is very valuable to and respected by western nations. Is it a coincidence that the country that most antagonizes China is supported by the US and gets a lot of business/help from the US? I know companies that refuse to outsource to China but will to Taiwan in a heartbeat.

3) etc

Second, it doesn't _have to be this way_. There are manufacturers in China in less competitive industries that follow more western practices. The really competitive industries have these sorts of problems (and yes, slave wages and total control of a workers life are problems even if they aren't living in a toxic waste dump). The only way to solve that problem is systematic change because fixing any single factory just puts it out of business. Since systematic change from within China the way it happened in Western countries is not happening due to the lack of free speech and political forces, activists put pressure on western companies to stop outsourcing to these places.

And where would they go instead? Probably Taiwan.
Your analogy is incorrect. For every point of view there is a personal anecdote, and while personal anecdotes can be revealing, they hardly count as a substitute for rigorous data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_example

A better analogy might be, "Baby, I know X told you this would hurt, but that's based on his subjective experience. Now come over here."

Personally, I think this sweatshop sounds pretty tame in comparison to others.
Link to actual article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21b/ugh_fields/
I appreciate your anecdotes and I had similar experiences, but I don't think those examples are comparable to the life of a factory worker in China.

I agree there's no simple way to define the standard, but there should be a higher bar than this.
Hi Folks:

I blogged about using Cappuccino to make the MemoryMiner web viewer here: http://www.memoryminer.com/blog/?p=131. I think Sproutcore is very impressive, but I chose Cappuccino because I could leverage a lot of existing code and knowhow.
What copyright issues? The US Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress. One of the LOC's responsibilities is to maintain a collection of all copyrighted works.

The Library serves as a legal repository for copyright protection and copyright registration, and as the base for the United States Copyright Office. Regardless of whether they register their copyright, all publishers are required to submit two complete copies of their published works to the Library if requested—this requirement is known as mandatory deposit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress
for mac, i like gitx, but i wish it had built-in diffing.
You're completely right. Thanks for the find!
A lot harder than just pulling the plug and forcing the devs to do the work of investigation/guessing and reinstatement.
But what would you gain from converting an MP3 to a FLAC?

Isn't that in the same vein as converting an existing 64kbps MP3 to a 256kbps one?
With Apple, at least you can blame it on Steve Jobs' overinflated ego. With Facebook, it is most likely some middle-tier lawyer "just doing his job." That seems to have been the case with IBM and TurboHercules.

That said, as we move to more "cloud-oriented" platforms, we are most likely going to see more and more of these types of issues. And suddenly, regardless of how open the platform that you are running on locally is, all of your data and applications are living in a world that is locked-down and has arbitrarily-enforced rules and regulations. My only hope is that open platforms "win" in the end..
There's also a game and social validation aspect to those services. They aren't quite dead yet.
Make a device simple enough that a cat can use it, and only a cat will want to ;)
One factory in China. It's quite a difference. I bet the article would be a lot quieter if the author visited more factories there.
Time for nonprofits to leave proprietary fundraising software systems behind
According to these numbers, Twitter is bigger than Yahoo and Bing combined!
Argh, I don't know how that happened. It was actually submitted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264738

If an admin could update the URL to the correct one, that would be great. Thanks.
> I think I'd of heard of this.

Two things are wrong with this statement. The second one is the presumption that just because you work on one project you would know about all the rest: http://www.loc.gov/tweet/how-tweet-it-is.html
So,for example, if a family need money and they sell their young little girl as a prostitute, just to make money, you know, but in a country where the State is not so hard in fighting that behavior, the "buyer" should under no circumstances be held accountable for that Country's inability (or unwillingness) to regulate its economy?

I think your point of view it's too simplistic and auto-absolving.
That's great to hear! Thanks for the update (if a bit of a strange venue.) :)
They are getting cheaper relative to American workers, not 3rd world workers. I did an automation project last fall, the reason was the risk of the current workers sueing over carpal tunnel syndrome. That was more of a driving factor than the cost of salaries (the robot will be paid off in about 5 years, but still, defending 1 suit is more expensive than a robot). The workers in the US cost about 40k, the workers in the article cost 1.5k. The workers in the article have no hope to sue for anything related to repetitive strain injuries. I doubt robots will be taking over chinese factories for a LONG time except where precision beyond human skill is required.
I always find it extremely humorous when some bean-counter working at a telco looks at a peering agreement like this and says "Holy crap! We're delivering their packets for free! We should be charging them money!" The reality is that having a peering agreement with Google saves that telco a ton of money. If they didn't have the direct peer with Google, one of their other Tier 1 peers would have to provide it to them, which would surely change the terms of their peering agreement (cost them $$$). What's more, if you can get traffic from a peer for free that is destined for an endpoint on your network, you ALWAYS want to take it. After all, you'll have to deliver the traffic anyway; better to get it for free than to pay someone else to transit it for you.

This is what happens when accountants try to understand how BGP works.
We are rich because they are poor. The horror of the problem is only ever counterbalanced for me when other people recognize the macro-feudal nature of our economy.
Exactly. People on first world countries (especially Americans, for some reason, but I won't go into that) seem to forget that the same dollar buys different things around the world.

For example, the workers in that factory pay ~$1.50 a day for factory food. I don't think you can get food for a day with that amount in a place that accepts dollar as the main currency.
Although I'm comfortably ensconced in the USA working in my own business, I've done my share of physical work, starting at the age of 14. It could be tiring and nasty but I went home with pride and money. I'm not doing that kind of work now but my point is it was a good start.

I'll tell you precisely what provokes outrage in me: the use of physical violence or the threat of physical violence. Example: "When I tried to quit this disgusting, dangerous, demeaning, and exhausting job, the manager struck me in the face and locked me in a room until I apologized." Example: "When I mentioned that I might quit this horrible job, the manager said that there was nowhere to hide, and his people would find me and make me sorry."

Now that is the kind of thing that really outrages me. But consider this: "I was raised on a farm and came to work at this factory and I hate every minute of it, but I'm still working here because I'd rather do that than go back to the farm or wander the streets homeless."

That does not outrage me. It saddens me, yes. I'm very sorry that this individual at this time in her life only has such poor and few choices. However, I must allow her that choice. The worst thing I could do is use the threat of violence in the other direction, as in: "If you try to work in a factory for 80 cents an hour, I will physically restrain both you and the factory manager." The only thing I would accomplish by that, apart from violating my own code of conduct, is to limit the options of this individual, consigning her back to the farm or streets.

The very best thing I could do is compete in the labor market, creating new opportunities and offering higher wages and better conditions. Although I am not a factory manager, that is always my aim. For many years in my business it was just my partner and I doing all the work. But I'm proud to say that in recent years we have been contracting with others to do some of that work, and it is feeding families.

In conclusion I would say that the armchair outragers should first do no harm, and then ideally do more good.
That's not what's happening here at all. While Google might or might not have peering agreements in Europe like they do here in the US. Google isn't free loading anywhere. It either pays someone to carry it's traffic from it's data center to the next ISP or it already has that infrastructure and trades bandwidth on its network for traffic on the other ISP network. Since google bought a large chunk of dark fiber, they have lots of capacity and are making a sweet deal, it seems, to other ISP which allows them to pay nothing almost nothing for bandwidth except for the infrastructure.

What these ISP want is: when one of their customers wants to access a google site, google pays them for the traffic that goes over their network.

What doesn't make sense with that is that the traffic is already paid for twice, once with the customers subscription and another time before the data reaches this particulars ISP's network. (If google peers directly with them, they have some sort of deal currently, if the google doesn't then the ISPs inbetween already have a deal with this ISP for the traffic). In effect they are trying to find a way to charge another time for something that already paid for.
I'd say that applies more to unions than it does in this case. It's possible the reductions in funding or a lack of funding increases could very well reverse the trend. But when it comes to funding and politics studies like this will always be used to 'prove' that the problem is 'solved' and that we no longer need to worry about it; therefore we can eliminate funding to the cause with no consequences. [ Of course, none of the politicians actually bothers to fund studies into whether or not the funding is needed to keep the trend from reversing. ]
And 1941 was vastly removed from 1841. People were writing these EXACT same articles in western countries in the mid 19th century. Other people argued against them with exactly the same argument you just made, along with many others just like the ones in these threads. Nobody in countries that have long since passed this part of their history would say we would have been better off if not for those damn sweatshop busting muckrackers.
Why is Google Chrome Fast? Spotlight on WebKit
Or the other extreme - 65 years on, infinite sleep off.
The Guile VM can run Emacs Lisp. So the only thing that has to be changed is Emacs itself, all the elisp code out there will run unmodified.
What we're doing is this: when doing upgrades that actually changes the data model, they go in two phases:

* First, an upgrade that understands the old model and the new model, internally uses the new model, and writes in the old model. This means that this new version is 100% compatible with the old version. We launch new services, test them, add them to the load balancer, and remove the old services from the loadbalancer.

* Secondly, a new update is launched: this one is almost the same as the previous version, except that it writes its data in the new model too. The same process with launching new services and adding to the load balancer is repeated.

Using this two-phase upgrade has the major advantage that you're always running the new services next to an old version that is completely compatible, data-model-wise, and thus allows you to do an emergency rollback to a previous version if required. The trick with adding to the load balancer also ensures that no downtime is experienced for the clients.

All this requires quite a bit of work (especially since you need to deploy multiple releases), so it depends on how much zero-downtime upgrades are worth to you.
For Facebook things, you can go through a session proxy instead of using the private key. I'll imagine storing a private key on the app (on the iPhone) is not desirable anyhow. The public key is, obviously, public.
That's definitely a possibility. It's worth noting that the plugin was created with a specific use-case in mind (a non-technical user generated content site) and that outside of that role it's clearly not going to perform as well...
I think you have been misinformed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek
Consoles are what people seem to want. "Just works" is more appealing than "can work".
Actually it sounds worse than that:

NodConcept's Chris Diskin, makers of the Emoti for
Facebook app, said he was contacted via e-mail on
Monday by Apple saying that Facebook believed his
app was infringing on their rights. They provided
him with contact info at Facebook and said he had
five days to resolve the issue.

Diskin told CNET that he immediately called Facebook
and was told they would get back to him to explain
the issue. They never contacted him, instead choosing
to delete his developer credentials from the system.

They bothered to give him time to fix a problem that they didn't bother to specify. When he asked them for specifics, they blew him off.
http://www.justin.tv/twitterchirp/all#r=QcLevkA~
I thought about that after the top comment. The only issue with that approach is that it would be easier to game the system if it were setup this way. Simply include your content in an indented block to bypass the filters.
They are acting in bad faith to people, but in good faith to getting profit margins.

My take is that Facebook is preparing a new release of an iPhone app and a marketing campaign to boot.
Sorry, but after what they did when they closed the free private accounts some time ago, I ain't going to touch it again.
I replied to the other thread, but basically, you're not supposed to put your private key on your iPhone app anyhow, as it can be taken. As for the public key, it is obviously public anyhow.
They try to make themselves out as the good guys that are fighting for the rights and privacy of their users:

"We ensure that applications that access Facebook user
data adhere to Facebook Platform policies," Facebook's
representative Malorie Lucich said in an e-mail to
CNET.

But really they are only being petty over small issues:

Diskin finally got a call late Tuesday saying he is
infringing on Facebook's rights because he uses the
word "Facebook" in his app name to let people know
what it does.
No, but I can certainly get equal food for less than $10 a day in NYC where I live now. Hell I basically buy whatever food I want when I go through the grocery store without looking at price tags (it's food, why skimp on the basics?) and Mint.com is telling me my average food in a month - including liquor and restaurants, is about $450 or $15 a day. (I cook at home almost every day, so for me eating out/liquor is about $150 and groceries about 300).

In contrast - minimum wage is $7.50. So making the absolute bare minimum I could pay for food in 2 hours in the US, and roughly 3 in China. In exchange I eat chicken, fish, steak, or ground beef for every single dinner with some vegatebles and something else. I have eggs a lot of days for breakfast, and a real lunch every day. I have dessert, fresh fruit, coffee, juice, milk.

That's everything I could possibly want. And you can pay for it in 2 hours a day in the US. What would it cost these kids to pay for that kind of food? More than their whole day's salary.
This article lost me at the price comparison, honestly. How many people have a $3000 computer that do not actually need it, or at least something in the same ballpark? If you compared the $700-1500 range to the iPad, maybe. $1500+? You're a pretty serious power user, or you have enough disposable income that this argument is outright irrelevant.
Industrial jobs don't have a stigma in the US to a lot of people either. But in the US a manufacturing job means you work 40 hours a week and get a living wage. There is nothing like this in the US. A job like this is not comparable and is definitely something to want to avoid.
I have relatives in Taiwan and you are grossly exaggerating the situation to support your argument.

> Okay, my mother worked as a child sweatshop laborer in Taiwan in the 60s, before the country bootstrapped itself out of abject, agrarian poverty, and I take issue with this.

Much of Taiwan was poor because of Japanese occupation. Some were rich because of it. That divide is the sole reason Taiwan seemed poor to you.

My relatives prior to that, had enough land to farm and have a comfortable living. They were able to hire people to help. And from what I heard, that was the middle-class at the time. It is annoying that people look at the poorest farmers who probably had barely-arable land and tilled by hand as proof that all farmers are better off being in a sweat-shop.

When WWII came around, the Japanese began to militarize. They seized some of the best land, and they demanded ALL the rice and other staple crops from every farmer. One of my relatives hid some rice to eat, and was beaten to death when the Japanese found out.

Meanwhile, the Japanese were trying to assimilate Taiwan quickly, so they artificially consolidated economic power into the Taiwanese who hated China: the rich and nobles who fled from the Communist uprising. This redistribution of wealth impacted my relatives for generations, even today.

The outcome? The new upper-class were able to own the natural resources, the capital, and the businesses, while my relatives and many others were left with less land and a decade of lost wealth. Those people lived the life of luxury throughout the 1960's. Tales rebounded of bosses that sat around playing mahjong, harassing female workers, or flying all over the world, while exploited workers worked for their enrichment from 6AM-10PM. However, even this did not last very long.

Many companies already started to relocate their sweatshops to China by the late 60's.

Taiwan did not need sweatshop labor to pull itself out of poverty. That is highly insulting. It was not because of laziness or stupidity that much of Taiwan was so poor. Like you, my parents' brothers and sisters all graduated from college with graduate degrees. They were forced to to waste 4+ years of their life and money, just so they could be of service to the ruling-class.

Meanwhile even today, my college graduated uncle with 15 years of experience is being outranked at a bank by one of the privileged who is fresh from high school. Because businesses pay out workers far less the owners, the gap created by Japan will never be closed.

This is why I am not a gung-ho free-capitalist, but I realize that if I were in their shoes, I would definitely be one.
I'm tickled that their build system, a slicker replacement for Ant, is called Leiningen.

http://zef.me/2470/building-clojure-projects-with-leiningen

It's a reference to the classic short story "Leiningen versus the Ants", which is a good read:

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html

And the build system looks nice. It has the pleasant feeling I get from scons, with the advantage of being Clojure-specific, so common Clojure tasks are easy.
That doesn't really make sense. They probably live in a very poor region of China. If they weren't doing factory work they would probably be doing agricultural work to try and get money to help out their family. There's no "education" route for those in this situation.
The point where all "Not HN!" misanthropes are automatically downvoted probably means HN is jumping the shark.
I agree that we shouldn't judge other cultures based on the standards of our own culture. However, I somehow doubt that kids working 15 hours a day actually prefer that to having more free time. Nobody would work those hours unless they actually had to. And that is the problem. The fact that those kids have to work under these conditions, instead of going to school, hanging out with their friends and so on. Perhaps some of them would actually like to get an education, to work as an engineer, or a scientist, or something else - but they don't even get that chance, they're stuck working on that assembly line.
The primary difficulty is that the Library is attempting more than just live-capture of video streams. They are going for full archival quality. They're not simply saving streams to tape but but running extensive qc processes on everything and transcoding coding the material into multiple formats. Technically, the technology exists, but the Library does not have the hardware to run the software. (Unless someone knows of some efficient, off the shelf content-validation program that we don't know of...)

Other problems include, yes, storage. The projected aggregation rate will outstrip, not only the Libraries current physical facilities, but all planned new facilities, by 2013 (at which point we will be looking at 250PB of storage.) The rate of growth will continue to increase from there. Unless tape technology improves at an exponential rate, this seem unavoidable.
The "Weather Icon" app from Cydia accomplishes this. There's a similar WinterBoard extension for the clock ("LiveClock"). Both work wonderfully.

(Edit: it changes based on the weather and the time, not based on geolocation.)
What are the other differences? I'll take 5 extra hours a week for keeping a much larger part of my pay after taxes and avoiding the unemployment they have.

And I'm not a conservative at all, I'm one pushing for higher taxes when necessary, but even I think that hours at work is a terrible way to measure happiness at work. I had a 40 hour a week job and I hated it, now I have a 50 hour a week job and love it.