skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your assumptions are unreasonable, insufficiently well specified, and are asking the wrong question.

If in a year out of a million hard drives only 5000 die, then you're projecting a 200 year average lifetime per disk drive. No real disk has that. A more reasonable 5 year average lifespan gives you 200,000 failures per year. Which is much worse.

Next, you're asking about the odds of 2 failing on the same machine. How many disks are on a machine? 1? 10? 100? Are failures independent events? It makes a huge difference. In fact they are not independent because when the motherboard craps out you lose access to all disks on that machine at once. At their scale it is too much work to figure out whether some of that data is recoverable - you just assume there is another copy somewhere and throw away the stale data. If you're wrong, then oops.

You are also throwing out the 15 minute disk replacement time. It may take 15 minutes to replace a disk, but that figure is irrelevant. To replace a disk you have to locate the machine, and it has to matter enough to you to send a person out. I guarantee you that the time before a person gets involved is going to average more than 15 minutes. Generally a lot more than 15 minutes. (Google famously takes the attitude that it is generally more work than it is worth to find the broken machine, and lets most dead machines sit there indefinitely. I wouldn't be surprised if other cloud providers imitate this.)

Next you have to consider that the end user shouldn't care about machines. For the purpose of redundancy Amazon is not going to keep multiple copies of the same data on the same machine. They are going to put them in different machines, and hopefully in different places. That will reduce the odds of a single failure losing your data.

All of that said I am somewhat shocked that Amazon would advertise a 0.5-0.1% rate of data loss as acceptable. I don't know Google's actual failure rate, but I'd be willing to bet large amounts of money that it is much lower than that.

For instance search for "gmail lost data". The only significant gmail data loss that turns up was in 2006. (See http://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-m... for more.) A grand total of 60 accounts got wiped out. Subsequently most of the lost data was restored from backup. (I doubt that the error was at the data storage layer.)

That's not just better than what Amazon delivers. That is ridiculously better.
Android-based Smartphones Outpaced Apple's iPhone in Q1 2010
Is terrorism really any better or worse that any other time since world war two?
The in/out naming for covariance and contravariance is pure genius! It's much easier to learn and to determine which one to use compared to notations in other programming languages. It would be even better if out weren't already in use for something else, I agree.
IIRC then he was "reported" by someone.
This is complete nonsense.

Front running your client's trades is completely illegal. Front running on an exchange is not even possible unless you hack the exchange computers (also illegal). The first person to place an order at a given price on a given exchange wins.

The only sort of front running which is legal is guessing ahead of time what a third party might do and placing orders before they actually do it. I.e., you might guess that Apple plans to buy Yahoo and buy Yahoo shares in anticipation of this event. Do you have evidence GS has done this?
Oh, great, one more condescending way to answer people when you are too lazy to provide a real answer but want to be """funny""".

Yay.

Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest that than that kind of sites.
Upserts through triggers
Why the Nokia N900 is fundamentally better than the iPhone and will remain so
Aquamacs 2.0 Released
Note: Forgot to include in the title that this post is from 2007.
and ten minutes after you posted this the guy posted a defense that at the very least passes the sniff test. You think maybe you should let an argument happen before you, you know, make snarky comments?
I don't know if this is true for content producers... Why would you care about the file itself if you can create and manipulate the content easily?
... because the search engine market has so long been dominated by serious-sounding firms?
Why We Should Learn the Language of Data
Nature by Numbers [Video]
LMGTFY is just a tool -- it can be used in good humor or malice. This site, likewise, but it has the added benefit of promoting DuckDuckGo and producing brand exposure, and is therefore less likely to be taken as a slight; with LMGTFY, everyone knows what Google is, so they don't take that as an informative thing; with LMDDGTFY, few people know what DDG is, so they may just assume that the linker is humorously and conveniently promoting a new search engine out of personal preference.
Peopleware Summary
Minimalistic Memoization (Python, 16 lines)
What is your "insurance" for hosting? I'm not aware of any SLAs that actually pay out anything near equal value to an outage they caused. If you're paying a hosting provider $500/mo for a sever that you generate an average of $1000/hr in web sales from and they have a 3 hour outage, you'll get an SLA credit for a couple of bucks applied to your next months service.

The Internet is filled with news about hosting provider provided backups being unusable for a number of reasons at inopportune times.

You should have a backup copy of your code/databases in your control, on a machine that is completely independent from whatever you are doing your production hosting on. You should have done a "warm metal" install and test of that code another server to be sure that you can recover operations in a reasonable amount of time (whatever is appropriate for your case).

For your scale (based on your posts here, my assumption: Single developer, or developer with a couple of contractors; production site; 1-5K visits per month; non time-sensitive/mission-critical service.) you probably don't need high-availability auto-failover. But, you SHOULD have your DNS hosted separate from your hosting provider, you SHOULD have low TTL's, you SHOULD have a backup server in a warm state at some other provider, and you SHOULD know how to at least do a basic DNS update to redirect traffic over to a backup site that either runs the service or puts up a basic, friendly "OOPS, BRB" page.

I've often thought of a startup that would basically human-automate these things for guys like you. You still wouldn't be 100% self-sufficient, but you would be able to outsource SOME of your entire reliance on 1 provider. You'd then have to have 2 tiers of total failure (your provider, and this service) to encounter complete down time.
Excellent article. If you are starting a company that is a marketplace, you'd better read this first. Really. I forwarded it to a few people I know who are...
developers can only do what most people can experience well. HTML5 uses today are on sites where most people use a primary alternative, and most of these people have a vested interest (Youtube for market share on mobile devices, hearts and minds and also future for licencing technologies etc).

It would be an irresponsible developer that let loose with full HTML5 site aimed at "normal" people any time soon if they didnt provide a full standard HTML version as well, which begs a huge budget question. Unless they have no marketing department or CTO to answer to of course.
>depending on whether any could be viewed as "sexual"

Society is chock full of prosecutors and citizens like the micro-brained David Cook who view almost anything 'natural' involving a youngster as 'sexual'.

http://reason.com/blog/2009/05/04/grandma-arrested-for-child...

The subjectivity of this topic lends itself to egregious abuse if minds have been soaked in morality acid.
Original story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059803
http://twitter.com/conanobrien yep it is working. Conan is following 23 people now. He only follows one person.
Google was a silly name for a while, and what do we think of it now?

Here, I'll invoke "Tara"

"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
- Tara Ploughman
You can get rich by following his advice to place a few big, good bets. Also, many of us would be happy to grow a 5 to 6-figure net worth into a 7 to 8 figure net worth.

Munger's advice may seem like common sense, but common sense is not so common.
I see the interest in promoting DDG, but the "let me take your hand and do that for you" is and will always be a bit condescending.

You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM", years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.
interesting stuff. it also gave me that weird feeling when one thing or person you've never heard of before crops up in several places in on day, as just an hour ago i was reading this: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2002/microbenchmar...
8 Insane Gold Products
We present to you the ways the super-rich are wasting gold.
Nice idea.

Screen recording together with (i) synchronized audio recording and (ii) an overlay visualization of touchscreen activity would be enough. Picture-in-Picture video of the user's face is a nice-to-have, but not absolutely necessary.
There is more than one exchange. If you see a Bid of 10$ come up on the NYSE you can put in a bid of 9.99 on another exchange and if that order gets filled you can then turn around and try to match that bid of $10 on the NYSE if you are fast enough.
How Facebook's Geo-Networking Plans Will Change Everything
WiGig gets spec and Alliance endorsement
I don't think tags are the solution. Human beings organize stuff by lumping similar things together, by spatial relationship. It's the way the brain is designed to make sense of things on a neurological level.

Tags create a meta layer of information on top of the actual spatial organization of objects, which is hard to comprehend naturally.
not very reliable source, i know, but try

http://www.google.com/search?q=goldman+sachs+front+running
I like that model, the question is what is the cut?
Hacking On Dynamic Capitalism
The search engine market started before all the "serious people" started coming to the Internet, I think.

I think it is harder nowadays to make a fame with a name like this.
Go Out. Enjoy The Day. NOW
> Everyone is attacking GS, from utterly clueless uneducated morons to utterly devious dumb politicians with a private agenda.

The above assumes that all attacks are baseless.

The SEC charges appear to be trumped up but GS was a major beneficiary of the AIG bailout. GS should lose money when it's counter-party risk assessment is wrong, as it was in the AIG case.
20 Stunning 3D Landscapes
If you didn’t already know, I am an avid gaming enthusiast and these 20 beautiful 3D landscapes take me back the days I was slaying boars in Hyboria and enjoying a quick pint of ale in the Ironforge Inn.
When I'm producing content, I don't want to care about the files. I do care, because the technical reasons behind my choice of formats, compression schemes or packaging methods are important. But I'd really rather not have to be involved in those things.

I'm looking forward to the day when the steady march of abstraction provides tools that effectively take "files" away from me.

(Edit: grammar)
"When you see a photo on your desk, do you think “a file!” or do you think “a photo of my family!”?"

The same applies to a .JPG file in my documents folder. I think "a photo". That last line ruined the article for me, because it made me realize that files are how we do things in the real world, just with other names. We don't deal with fridges, we deal with food. And you know what? We even have to know where to store the food! Some food, like milk, goes in the fridge. Other food, like pasta, goes in the cupboard. Same with spices. Yet other food, like frozen peas, go in the freezer, Still more food might be found on plants in the garden. There is no single app, just a lot of directories for me to search in.
Well it's hard to say in such situations without personal involvement in the case but.... certainly that's something to investigate. From the description of the images they are concerning enough to be questioned (why have you taken images of your granddaughter posed in this way).

As you say it is subjective. The main problem is:

- people plying their own agenda trying to prosecute people for moral or other ambiguous reasons

- inexpert officers doing an initial investigation/arrest; which leads to full investigations by experts into... ...nothing

The latter is always going to happen - and luckily we've got quite good at heading it off early (at least here anyway). The former is more of a problem - because if they are big enough (like this prosecutor it seems) to push it to court you can often get a jury onside by default :(

"It kind of boils down to a gut feeling. If it feels wrong, it probably is."

This is correct though; clearly his marker is a lot lower because my "gut" [based on a brief review] on that specific case is "probably ok". You do get a gut feeling about someone's intentions though (and the terrible thing is the number of times you just cannot, in honesty, prove it).
No, he hasn't. Jobs has outdone Steve Balrog, which isn't much of an accomplishment, and is certainly nothing to be proud of.

Gates' efforts have been dedicated to philanthropy, Jobs is becoming ever more of a control freak. My vote goes to Gates, in spite of not really liking Microsoft as a company. Gates has done FAR more for the industry and the world than Jobs.
You're presuming that you can do all the manipulating and creating of a file without being able to work with the file itself, which I have my doubts about.
The bid of 9.99 will NOT get filled before the bid of 10, except under very special circumstances, even on separate exchanges. The exchange with the lower bid is required to route the trade to the exchange with the higher bid as a result of RegNMS.

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

The only time this rule fails to apply is under extremely high latency scenarios. For example, last thurs when nasdaq left the machines on but NYSE switched to human matching, RegNMS was suspended.
I'm aware of mono, but the 'heritage' has really put me off.

The way microsoft has behaved in the past is such that if I can avoid using stuff that they have a hand in I will.

It's true that that may 'hurt' me in the sense that C# is probably a great language, but there are so many 'great languages' that this was a luxury problem anyway.

Between Python, Clojure and more exotic stuff like Erlang and Haskell there isn't enough time already. If microsoft had been a little nicer in the past they might have had an advocate in me, but enough really is enough.

With some other big companies, such as for instance IBM I've got the feeling that they really understood and have changed their ways, with microsoft I've never lost the feeling that they still don't get that they were in the wrong and are still just trying to dance their way around the real problems without admitting that they were wrong and bettering their ways.

I think that they will only change when the last of the 'old guard' at microsoft have stepped down from day to day management positions.
.Replace("GS", "Pirates")
Android Smartphone Sales Exceed iPhone
> You're working off of your terminal values, your moral judgement, that the outcomes in Afghanistan and Pakistan are bad.

Yes, the particular systems I'm referring to are bad, in my opinion. My base principles for making that assumption is that educational systems should not deny education to women, promote violence, or provide educations based on faith and mythology. If that is a purely moral viewpoint, so be it: we do not live in an objective world, and you're free to disagree with me.

But that is /not/ the point I'm trying to make here. Moreover, these are just an example of a potential failing of private schools. I could imagine several ways to defraud parents of the education they think they're paying for. My conclusion it's unclear what the incentive system for private schools to provide "quality" education (from the point of view of parents, students, and society as a whole) in an area where little or no educational institutions have existed before, and where institutions (public or private) do not exist to allow families to make informed decisions about the schools they're sending their kids to. It's a basic problem of incomplete information available to clients of these schools, that's all: can we (or someone else) come up with a way to allow families in these areas to make sure that the school they're paying is actually providing the education they're expecting to receive?

> what's wrong with a solely instructional institution that certifies competence in a given area?
I am referring to fraudulent organizations that award degrees based solely on payment, and provide no actual education, classes, instruction, etc. The system we have may be flawed but these do not do anything constructive to change it.
Localytics Raises $700K For Mobile App Analytics Suite
Can you illustrate what you're talking about? I'll see if I can youtube someone playing with an N900..

It sounds like you simply tap anywhere but the dialog and it's "canceled"?
For the most part, wage is tied directly to the amount of education required for a position. Teachers have similar education requirements to high-tech fields (bachelors is not required, but not having it is considered a special case; bachelor's is the low end; master's is typical). Which high-tech fields are on that list?
I think it's a matter of taste. A few people I've told about duckduckgo have mentioned it "sounded like a search engine's name" after I said that I thought the name wasn't that great.
Strategic Default - Stop paying your mortgage even if you can afford it
I don't know that files are broken.

Our brains are trained to "select" things: from the correct answer on a test, to the right phrase to say on your significant other's birthday.

Limiting user exposure from little bundles of portable information to hidden databases is exactly what MS did with the registery. It's all well and good until you realize that sometimes it's nice for data to be a little more accessible and visible

"Apps" that lock in data, like all sorts of old-school applications that stored your files in hidden folders, fail. They're closed. They're a black box that you can't easily leave when you'd like to move on to another application.

Hiding data in closed databases is not only counterintuitive (it's like hiding the mustard in the back of the fridge in your analogy, and chaining it to the door), it's harmful should you ever want to buy a new fridge.
Any coupon codes for HN?
This comment and the upvotes demonstrate the problems with financial stuff in this forum.

Go to the wikipedia page for front-running. The first sentence says that it's illegal. The first sentence. And indeed it is. Thus, it's quite a claim to say that GS make money from it.

Marltod, where did you get all this from?
This mentality has lead OS designers to come up with those "My Documents", "My Videos", "My Photos" folders that are auto-created on installation. It's been there in Windows, recently Ubuntu has them, probably Macs have something similar. It's always the first thing I delete after a fresh install.
Use Minnesota, which has a very different system of school funding, as a reality check on whatever you say about public policy and how it influences schools.

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...
> What those bailouts are doing is buying some time before the crash, so we can hopefully restart engines or glide to a safe landing.

That's the argument for doing the bailouts. The reality is probably that they're just delaying the inevitable and making it worse. And that trillion dollars is money that we won't have to help pick up the pieces.

To put it another way, the bailouts are like giving an alcoholic another bottle of Jim Beam. Yes, it stops their jitters now, but they'll soon be even worse off than they are now.
I strongly dislike this trend. Imagine if in the real world, the only place you could put food is your refrigerator, or if a bookshelf only allowed you to place books on it. While it sounds nice to say that a person only looks through their photo album for their photos, that's not, strictly speaking, true. There's also those unflattering photos that you leave in shoeboxes, as well as the photos of loved ones that you keep in your wallet. The idea of a generic file is an extremely useful abstraction to developers and users alike. Does it really make sense to have photos separate from videos? Or photos of your loved ones alongside photos you take for your job? I think that the classification system that folders and files have given us is much more useful to users than the vague lumping of items by what amounts to a filetype.

However, I do think that there are better abstractions for a user than the bare file system. I don't have much experience with either, but I'd guess that Win 7 Libraries and something like Leap[1] on the Mac are improvements on this.

[1] http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/index.html
Yes, think of all the additional IP lawyer jobs that would be created if only we approved patents faster.
You can read more about the video on the author's page: http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/nbyn_htm/intro.htm

There you'll find a page online in which the author explains the mathematical theory behind the movie: http://www.etereaestudios.com/docs_html/nbyn_htm/about_index...

It's an awesome and very interesting movie. I especially loved the animation of the Fibonacci Spiral.

Well, I'm baffled!
Why not? And then throw them into twison.
Whatever it was, got removed or keeled over...
Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 2
See, this is why I use Spivak pronouns...
Possibly not the threat. In my limited experience (I'm a late teen) the reality of attacks are much more real. WTC Bombing. Oklahoma City. 9/11. Those all happened in my lifetime.
Now that I've acclimated to Chrome on Windows, I don't think I could give up having the tabs on the very top of the screen. Me and my man Fitts love having the browser tabs at the top and the open applications at the bottom. It's really fast to switch tabs using the mouse that way.
> 5. Which races can be found in your founding-team?

I only had humans on my team, I never bothered to check what races they were, so I won't be able to complete your survey.
The top link just links to a criticism of flash orders, which are not front running at all [1]. Could you be more specific in your links?

[1] I'm undecided about whether I think front running is fair, but flash orders are a separate issue.
IPad & iPhone graph paper for designers and developers
Ahh. That is quite true. I stand corrected.

As to Jobs the control freak, I don't like it either.

As to Gates the philanthropist, he has done the world a load of good.
This post should be placed under an entrepreneur's must read list. We're doing a marketplace play with Cloudomatic and it was really re-assuring (and scary) to hear some things we've seen echoed.

a) Building two businesses is really scary.

b) Focus on sellers first is definitely right. You'll never have any buyers if you don't have any sellers. The worst case scenario for a seller if there are no buyers is an increase of zero / a loss of nothing. Things can only go up.

c) Pay per lead works great here. The listing fee up front is hard to do and usually penny wise + pound foolish. We have close to 500 apps. I bet if we tried to charge a small 50 dollar fee to be on cloudomatic we might have gotten it from some devs, but we'd have a lot less apps (maybe 25 total?).

d) Content is really important as a way to gain traffic on the buyer side. It worked well for Mint. I consider Mint to be a marketplace at its core (connect people (buyers) with better finance deals (sellers)).