skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Ford’s My Life and Work for Kindle is free: http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-and-Work-ebook/dp/B000JQUSUW
Video: Shape-Shifting Blob 'Bot Takes Its First Steps
My anecdotal evidence from a surgeon in the family is that the medical dictation is still very bad. His practice of 4 doctors spent a bunch of money on Dragon, fought with it for a month, and then went back to old-fashioned human dictation.
Ask HN: Any New Zealand HN readers out there?
Just curious as to if there are any HN readers from NZ, and if they know of (or involved in) any startup's on the go down under?

I realise the NZ market is very small but I am eager to get into the startup industry and what better way than working/volunteering for one in my home country (unless someone can make some better suggestions to getting involved.. working remotely maybe...)
The real reason Apple and Microsoft are embracing 'HTML5'
Hello, I already use fdatasync() in the actual Redis source code. Unfortunately it has the same problem about blocking write() but still most of the times it's much faster.
wow, you're really comfortable posting pictures of your children for anyone to see??

Anyway, as I, and many others have said here before, it's not just about what you post, it's about what _others_ post about you.
Can you write code on paper? Pseudocode or something resembling it. When I was a kid it was a bit of a luxury to own any kind of computer and I wanted one so bad that I basically learned programming (in C) from books and wrote my code on a piece of paper all the time so that once I get access to computer or parents buy me my own I would already be "prepared". As it turned out this helped me along the way to clearly present ideas to others on whiteboard or paper (code, that is). However there is still that bit of "experimentation" with code even on paper. Heck, I don't know anyone that can write code perfect from one go, you have to dance around an idea a bit first before you get what feels right to you.

tl;dr; Paper/Whiteboard is just a different IDE you have to get used to.
Open Office is now Oracle Open Office in Ubuntu 10.04
> Limiting the player to two weapons alone adds a nice pace and strategic element to the gameplay that I have yet to find in any other game in the genre.

Counter Strike had limited weapons and became hugely popular two years earlier.
Ironically, I learned a new word: 'confound' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding ). And then I realized that the last chart has confounds. Intelligence and vocabulary are correlated, but worth differentiating in this case.

A higher vocabulary is pretty strongly correlated with being well-read. I think we can trust that. And being well-read implies being exposed to different things (though it is by no means the only way to be exposed to different things -- i.e., those who are well-read [subset operator] those who are exposed to a wide variety of things.

But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things. And the latter group seems pretty well correlated with those who drink.

Note, intelligence only 'lurks' near vocabulary.
A total horseshit article... I mean to conclude from a lack of progress for a couple of years that AI is impossible.
World hottest news: Ahmadinejad to attend UN nuclear talks in New York
Same problem here in the Philippines a while back.
I guess I'm not gorking how the behavior of write() blocking when fsync is being called is considered a problem.

write() is documented and well known to be a potentially blocking function, for potentially a long time. If you are writing a small-number-of-threads process, that is doing Disk and Network IO in the same threads, you can definitely starve out the network IO when the disk system starts thrashing, but generally that is fine, because you can't keep up with new requests at that point anyways.

For that matter, read() can block too, people are just 'used' to their Kernels being smart and most important data being in cache.

If you want your event-style threads servicing network clients to be able to use write() or read without 'blocking' up a whole thread for apparently random times, consider using the aio_* style write/fsync, although you definitely would want to benchmark their impacts on general performance.

If you don't want to use aio_*, which is likely to be.. dangerous ground considering how few people use them, you end up adding threads to provide more isolation and parallelism to IO.
Kolakoski sequence
Very slick.

But you claim it tracks eye movement when it doesn't.
It took them 9 months to negotiate with Activision and they tried things with every possible major publisher under the sun. They seem to have gotten a sweet deal too (keep your own IP, remain independent, publisher basically just prints discs and ships them to the stores). They were going to have to pick one eventually anyways, so they might as well do it during the planning stages so they're not ending up building something that no publisher is going to acquiesce to.
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May I suggest Colorado? Cost of living in SF is 30% more than even the most expensive city (Boulder, ignoring resort towns).

Yeah, it can get cold, but the winters are orders of magnitude nicer than the midwest or northeast.
We use Freshbooks for invoicing and Basecamp for time tracking, but I'm trying to get that to change.

I have a cofounder that is very insistent on his system, as he takes on a huge work load and has to maintain high efficiency to keep up. I see some inefficiencies in what he's doing (doesn't track hours with a clock, writes them down on a sticky note before copying them into Basecamp), but convincing him is going to be hard because he's very stubborn about his ways.

I also want to maintain visibility of what he's doing, along with the other staff, so I haven't found a good replacement yet. I'll watch this thread intently :)
Hello. Write in non real time Linux is not able to guarantee that it will return in a given amount of time, still all the system calls have more or less predictable timing behavior when the disk and the CPU are not busy. What I mean is that if you remove the fsync() call from the other thread, what you get is a constant stream of "13 microseconds" delays.

So when fsync() is not into the mix the kernel will do the right thing, will use buffers and will make the write calls very cheap. This is important for many applications. But when there are more strict durability requirements this is no longer true and care must be used.

Non blocking I/O (aio_*) is an interesting alternative in some application, but in the case of Redis it is important to return "OK" only after we got an acknowledge from write(2). Doing this suspending the client and resuming it when the write was performed will turn Redis from a 140k operations/second database into a 10k operations second database, so this is not going to be the solution.

Real world software is written not reading manual pages, but checking how the underlying OS actually works IMHO. For instance Redis persistence uses fork() copy-on-write semantic of modern operation system. Also the fact that write(2) can block per semantic, does not mean you'll be happy to know your kernel is blocking a process for seconds many times as a result of a write(2) operation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but O_SYNC is the equivalent of calling fsync() after every single write, so even if you manage to omit one fsync() you're going to come out ahead.
If I read that graph correctly they're actually pulling out of it. (much to my surprise)
PageSpeed is good for your website
This was the problem of Livejournal, altho' you could set your journal to be friends-only, your profile page was not. So who you were friends with, what your interests were, what communities you were a member of were completely public. Your only privacy option was hoping that no-one you didn't want to knew your username. Interests you could skip, obv, but because of the way the security model works, the world knew who had permission to read your journal and whose journals you read. So you were only ever as secure as the least-discreet person you knew. And I have some very indiscreet friends...
Having grown up in Norway and currently living in Sweden I have to say I find the short summer evenings in the southern part of the world really jarring. I cannot get used to it being pitch black outside by (what feels like) mid-afternoon during the summer.
No, you would use a logarithmic graph for income.
Is that Omaha? Can't tell
Ah, yeah, thats what I meant, I probably should have specified that.
The idea behind homework is not that you deliver the right answers but that you learn something from it. As long as you're confident that you learn as much from the programming as you would from doing the homework there is probably no issue, but some day after doing a bunch of homework there are the final examinations, and you won't be using the 'solver' then.
I've done some first steps in J and it's really mind blowing. It's hard to get into it and you have to learn a lot before you can read programs. (Since I had too little practice, I can't read it.) But the underlying concepts are not too difficult, even to someone like me with not-so-good math knowledge.

I bought the e-book version of "Fractals, Visualization and J" by Cliff Reiter to improve my understanding. It's only ~7€ at lulu.com and I bought if to learn more about the impressive visualizations possible with J.
Semantically it's the same, but maybe it is somewhat optimized? Testing right now...

Edit: indeed it's different, this is the result:

...
Write in 219 microseconds
Write in 253 microseconds
Write in 264 microseconds
Write in 271 microseconds
Write in 246 microseconds
...

250 us instead of 13, but no big stops. So much better indeed... Even summing the times, every 10 writes this take 2500 us compared to 40000 us of fsync().

Definitely an improvement.

p.s. all this, in ext4 FS.
Kernel developer here - honestly, I'm not surprised that fsync() stops the world, and furthermore I suspect that even if you got past the vfs layer, you would see different effects on different filesystems (i.e. you still couldn't bet that fsync() would act like you want it to). The semantics of fsync mean "Please guarantee that everything is written to disk, flush all caches now".

The kernel doesn't keep a 2nd queue for post-fsync writes that it will then swap into the "real" one - think about what happens if someone else calls fsync(); does it spin up a 3rd queue for that one? Does the fsync block? I think it would quickly descend into Crazyville.
Is the British voting system fair?
3G iPads sold out in 49 of 50 states on launch weekend?
Pasta code
One of my best friends from university went on to write embedded systems for train controllers (this is in the UK). Given the amount of web stuff we did at uni I thought this would be the last thing he'd do.

He's more than happy and joined the company because they gave him hard, interesting challenges.

Not all good people end up at "trendy" places.
Fortune article has a little more on his methodology and said:

"Munster's team called 50 Apple Stores on Sunday and found that 49 of them had sold out of iPad 3Gs and most had run out of Wi-Fi-only models as well. But it's not clear whether that's because demand was high or supplies were low. Munster believes it was probably a bit of both."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/03/ipad-3g-sold-out-in-4...
The interesting thing about your timing is that I would expect on ext3 you would sill similar slowdowns, although perhaps they are harder to see, due to how the most common configuration of using sync=ordered behaves, which should cause effectively any fsync to flush everything to disk, and even then, the kernel will trigger one ext3 commit interval every ~5 seconds by default.

I didn't see it mentioned in the blog post, but what filesystem were you running this test on?

I don't know the details about Redis' threading and event model, but please feel free to share them;

Most event-y systems I've worked on end up falling back to a smallish-number of threads to provide the IO concurrency, because you just don't have the fine grained control of the kernel to provide a perfect level of service with a tiny-number of threads.

This is the model the Event MPM in httpd uses, its the model that Traffic Server uses, its the model that Lighthttpd tried to not use at first, but they added threads in later because of blocking stat calls, etc.

Kernel's like the liberty that POSIX standards give them, things will block, and even if you want to do 140,000 operations a second, if you want any durability at all, there will have to be a tradeoff, the most likely ones are things like multiple commit logs, and more threading.
Ogg versus the world: don't fall for open-source FUD
its not the same on filesystems like ext3 with ordered data mode (the default).

fsync on those kind of filesystems will flush everything, not just a single file, though I believe there has been some more recent work in 2.6 to improve this behavior.
If you don't want to use aio_, which is likely to be.. dangerous ground considering how few people use them*

Oracle uses AIO (you can strace it and see for yourself) and if it's safe for them, it's probably safe for you.
usually, they've got tough problems they need solved, so thinking up tough questions isn't really necessary

send your best people to startup weekend and similar events. It should take only a few hours to identify the top people and establish a rapport that may lead to a successful hire.
a lot of us don't create code on command. especially if we aren't coding in the language of interest on a daily basis. and we reuse our old code and code we find. then we iterate and iterate until its solid and the customer is happy

and then many, like me, don't have a software engineering background and don't exactly speak the same language (don't even know UML).

I discovered recursion and binary search algorithms as I programmed, but if you asked me about either topic, I would not have known what you meant even though I had experience with them, until much later.
New Jersey Institute of Technology has recently switched from Java to Python. I remember seeing my classmates struggle with the syntax of Java rather than struggling with the actual problem, I'm interested to see the results of the switch.
Hello xpaulbettsx, thanks for your comment!

Yes I guess the implementation may get more complex, not sure about the actual implementation it's just a linked list of operations to flush like it happens looking at a few source code fragments, then it's just possible to put a "sentinel" in the list that will block the first fsync() when the first sentinel is found and so forth.

I mean, I'm all against the complexity myself in the code I write, so I can't really question this behavior and the "fsync every second" policy is not a huge use case indeed, but still it's important to now that. Googling a bit around there are tons of people that appear to be pretty confident that moving fsync() into another thread is the way to go, while instead stuff are working in a different way.
Well, then you need to get a desk ;)
Thanks! Moving to Montenegro.
Sorry for not mentioning this, but I'm using ext4.

About using more threads, it seems very unlikely to me that tis is going to help in a persistence model where an Append Only File is used in order to persist. All the clients will eventually write to the same file object and will get automatically serialized.

Btw as a proof of how the same filesystem will behave in a very different way check the O_SYNC test above: same ext4 filesystem, but an order of magnitude faster doing things in a way instead of in another way.

Unfortunately POSIX or not the real world kernel implementations are full of small implementations details that a programmer doing system programming is required to know to write fast code :(
A strong +1 for Notifier & little +1's for MyWi, 3G Unrestrictor and Backgrounder.

It's amazing to me that Apple hasn't done anything to sort out the issue of notifications on the iPhone since day one. What's that? Your genre defining device requires me to swipe & unlock my phone just to see if an email's arrived since I was left it? Hmmm.
MP3 suffers from all the same characteristics that he says is a threat to our artistic culture. Yet it did not kill our musical culture. Arguably, it lead to a vast expansion of musical culture.

There's no reason to believe that H.264 is any more of a threat than MP3 was.
SliTaz GNU/Linux: SliTaz is a free operating system, working completely in RAM
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The guys at TheRegister went a bit into that: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/23/google_on_facebook_o...

(Not much, but had some info. Submitted here last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294542 )
Full control over a device that you have bought ?
I've spent the past two years ducking it out with my Masters course. Once finished I'm going to throw myself into getting my startup up and running.

Couldn't imagine doing it without my significant other by my side supporting me every step of the way. She's not involved in IT whatsoever, she is a surgeon however.

Neither of us know each others profession other than the fact that it's pretty hard to be good at either one. It gives us the excuse to talk about things that matter to both of us that are not work related.

Make sure you make time for each other, jobs come and go, business fail and succeed, but you want someone there with you to enjoy your success. It's not worth it otherwise.
How To Create A Simple Vector Face Illustration ? [Tutorial] 
Here is a simple illustrator tutorial on creating a vector face illustration using adobe CS3.
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I use FreshBooks with the mac dashboard widget and just turn it on and off as I do work so my time tracking is completely accurate.
The same holds for reddit#programming. My blog analytics in month view are now almost useless: usually 100 pageviews-a-day, and have two or three peaks of 2000-4000 from hn/proggit. Not like I didn't enjoy it, mind you :)
Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50.

However, when you start the axis at 0, the differences between the differences seem very small, while they are what is interesting. That is why this graph start at a different value: the author isn't interested in the absolute numbers: he's interested in the differences from a baseline. Now he could have shown a graph where '0' was the average and plot all the differences, but then many more people would have become confused. Instead he choose the '50' as a baseline, arbitrarily.

Both you and the grandparent are completely wrong in acting all indignant that someone would display a graph like this, when it is a well accepted way to draw attention to the aspects that matter. If I started such a graph at 0, my thesis advisor would rhetorically ask me "What are you trying to convey here?".

From any graph, you can draw right and wrong conclusions. You insist that this graph is wrong because the simplest conclusion you can draw from it is wrong. Well, that's not the fault of the graph: that is the fault of you trying to interpret the graph in an overly naive way, without considering the point of the graph.
My wife is also the non-coding co-founder of our startup. If you're totally stormed by the founder bug, it's actually great to live with your co-founder. We can talk about conversion rates in the bed between snoozes or on invitation improvements while washing kid's hair.
I'd like to bet against that opinion. I suggest this metric: on May 3, 2015, Facebook will still be listed in the top five websites in the world by Alexa traffic ranking (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/Facebook.com), and it will be the most popular social networking website in the world, again as measured by Alexa traffic rankings.

USD$200, proceeds go to winner's favorite charity? This bet is open to ams6110 or anyone else. Feel free to suggest different terms, metrics, betting amounts, or to make it a personal bet, not a charitable bet.
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Show HN: Hacker News like site for South Africa: ZA-Coders
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That's one hell of a profession she has for you both to fall back on just in case the startup doesn't work out.
Yep :) I just go to traffic sources and limit it to search engines - unpaid. That's what I'm mainly interested in, my organic search traffic growth.
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Gartner: Over 70% Of IT-Led Social Media Initiatives Will Fail
this has been already discussed in detail on SO. link : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4689/recommended-fonts-fo...
At least she can secretly take my organs and sell them in case the worst comes to pass.
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C++ for C programmers, part 1/2 (the non-OO features)
The concept of phonemes isn't undisputed either. When analyzing actual speech it becomes clear that there are no real steady states, but much coarticulation between the "segments". Of course, part of it could be attributed to the fact that speech sounds are produced by articulatory gestures, which necessarily overlap in time. On the other hand, these coarticulation patterns are not language-independent. So, a purely (articulatory/auditory) phonetical explanation of why these differences exists is rather unlikely..
I know this seems rather off-topic with regard to speech recognition, but the question of the basic building blocks of language is kind of at the heart of the problem.
I'm on an ipod Touch, not iPhone, but mine are: SBSettings to enable/disable wifi quickly to avoid battery drain, scummvm to play my old collection of LucasArts games and lockcalendar to have a calendar in the lockscreen. Only this, but only this pays it off quite often.
I'm like that when I visit CA. CA has no weather. No seasons. Just sun. It's ok for a week or 2, but after a while for me it's like spending a year at Disneyland. Starts to wear a bit thin. It gets tiring. I get sleepy.
It'd be interesting to see if TechCrunch would talk more about some big company in Redmond.

(Also, couldn't resist - this is like Dr. Frasier Crane's move from Boston in search for "mixing things up"; Hope Arrington is listening to the Seattle startups :-)