skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That leads into a whole other debate. Death vs. Debt is straightforward when you're 30 or 40 and looking at $100k to cure a snakebite. It's an entirely different issue when you're 70 and looking at a $2m cancer treatment, the only problem is then you know that your debt will be payed for by the government.
If "to work properly" you mean that a cluster can suffer the loss of one node with no data loss, you only need two nodes.

The consistency guarantees Cassandra gives you are based upon configuration values (ReplicationFactor) and a ConsistencyLevel provided at runtime when performing an operation. A perfectly available, partition-tolerant and perfectly consistent system is impossible so adjusting these settings lets you specify the tradeoffs you desire.

If for all operations you specify a consistency level of ALL, you are guaranteed consistency. However, you lose availability if one server (for a given part of a keyspace) goes down.

Conversely, you can also use Cassandra in a way that offers few consistency guarantees by specifying a ConsistencyLevel of ANY, or ONE. Further, you can perform reads with ConsistencyLevel ONE that don't give you a guarantee that the information you read is consistent. As long as no servers go down, you have consistency, and as long as you have one server left, you have complete availability.

The QUORUM consistency level guarantees at least (ReplicationFactor/2 + 1) nodes agree on a write and gets the latest timestamp from a majority of servers on read. This offers both consistency and availability. For three servers with a ReplicationFactor of 2 this is the same as ALL; if your ReplicationFactor is 1 you lose effective consistency guarantees.

So, to be able to use the full range of options in the consistency/availability tradeoff space one needs a cluster of at least four servers. Someone let me know if my reasoning is incorrect.

See http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/API for more info.
Try this browser search plugin To get old design of Google
You also need a name that has some common usage. I have a decent vocabulary, but I did not know this word. Frankly, it sounds like a condition that might have one sitting on the toilet half the day. Just my $0.02
Launch Conference founder will invest in winning startups
I'm sure they're talented, but they sure do lack presentation skills...
RDoc isn't just an abomination because of its approach -- it's an abomination because of its code. I'm in the middle of a project that requires making RDoc do things that other more modular systems would have little problem with... but to solve the problem I ended up private forking the entire RDoc codebase.
Incidently, on EC2 the extra cpu in an XL or HMXL makes all the difference between "oh shit, we ran out of capacity and bootstrapping more slows things to a crawl" and "we ran out of capacity but we can limp along during the bootstrap." YYMV.

Reddit was originally on L instances.

(HMXL is generally the sweet spot for Cassandra price/performance on EC2, IMO.)
Well, they have to convince people to give them money. I found it fitting and didn't even give it a second look.
I don't think the numbers mean much. After all, this stunt was based mainly on advertisement for the bundle page, and such advertisement seemed to be focused on techie websites (hacker news, slashdot, reddit). There is also the "finally, games for linux!" novelty that may or may not wear out quickly.
This is why Facebook will eventally fail. Someone will come out with something better, and they will be so mired in their own spaghetti that they will not be able to react.
Nobody thinks it would be efficient to privatize the federal highway system and turn everything into a toll road.

The key word there is "everything." It is efficient to turn some parts of the Interstate Highway system into toll roads, and if you have driven in certain states you have seen that done.

"The Indiana Toll Road is part of the U.S. Interstate Highway System which runs 157 miles through Indiana connecting the Chicago Skyway to the Ohio Turnpike."

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

"Historically, the Chicago Skyway was signed as, and was widely considered to be part of, I-90 from the mid-1960s forward. However, around 1999, the city of Chicago realized they had never received official approval to designate the Skyway as I-90. The city subsequently replaced most of the 'I-90' signage with 'TO I-90' signage. However, the Illinois DOT has always and continues to report the Skyway as part of the Interstate system, and the Federal Highway Administration apparently still considers the Chicago Skyway an official part of I-90.[7]

"The Skyway's official name, referring to it as a 'toll bridge' rather than a 'toll road,' is the result of a legal quirk. At the time of its construction, the city charter of Chicago did not provide the authority to construct a toll road. However, the city could build toll bridges, and it was found that there was no limit to the length of the approaches to the bridge. Therefore, the Skyway is technically a toll bridge with a six-mile-long approach. This also is part of the reason that there are no exits available until after one has crossed the bridge and paid the toll."

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

Where it is most economically efficient to operate a road as a toll road rather than as a road supported by general taxation depends much on local geographical factors. Note that Adam Smith has a very thoughtful discussion of the economics of road tolls (he considered them a remarkably fair form of taxation) in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations. Many of his economic arguments apply well to taxation of gasoline to fund road projects.
Yes. I just wanted to know how much I will be surprised by using the FREE plan.

thanks.
PyGame.
http://www.pygame.org/
In other news, scientists say they are 'appalled' to discover that Physical Review Letters does not instill good prose style among its readership, before going on to characterize their emotions with several other superficial and unnecessary adjectives (N > 3).
> Nobody thinks it would be efficient to privatize the federal highway system and turn everything into a toll road.

David Friedman does. I do. Don't pretend that people you disagree with don't even exist.

> I've been biking recently, but I used to take the subway. That's socialist. Taking a cab would be capitalist. Did I care? Not really.

What are you talking about? Capitalism is capable of producing bikes and subways.
Events For Nerds
a distributed social graph is visionary if it can be done well.
The High Frequency Trading Scam (2009)
Styleneat - CSS Organizer
Cameron is new British Prime Minister
I'm not understanding what underlying datastore you're referring to in the case of LINQ-to-Objects or LINQ-to-XML. These frameworks perform "queries" on ordinary objects or XML data stored in memory within the .Net process, not on some other machine as with LINQ-to-SQL. You use LINQ-to-Objects in place of a filtering foreach loop, and LINQ-to-XML in place of XPath et al.

PLINQ is just a parallel implementation of LINQ-to-Objects and LINQ-to-XML. It works in the same scenarios .Net programs work in, i.e. multicores or SMPs running Windows (not sure if PLINQ works with Mono).
Calacanis Splits With Arrington, Boots Up New Tech Conference
Verizon confirms it's working on a tablet with Google
Google could leapfrog into the next "Facebook" by doing to VNC/Remote Desktop/Hosting what they did to email with gmail. Give everyone a usable remote pc (whose interface adjusts according to the device accessing it) , one with cloud capabilities and the ability to install web applications with a few clicks. If there will ever be a decentralized FB that works through the semantic web, each application will need to be hooked in and have the ability to spider and data-mine, and always-on cloud-based pc's are the answer to that. Open sourcing such a system should also go without saying, otherwise all the hosting companies out there would probably go out of business :)
A lot of us were living quite happily in the land of Facebook until disquieting changes in official policy began driving us to the four winds.

Which is not to say that I disagree with you.
I initially doubted you however http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphon agrees.

Nice catch.
Also for layout algorithms. The people behind lilypond have thought very hard about what makes a score beautiful and legible and have pushed the art of computer engraving forward immeasurably. This is the TeX for music. Sibelius, Finale et al. have only recently begun to catch up.
I can't believe they were originally on L instances. I assumed they chose HMXL considering their pageviews..
I love this bit:

“Dad, there are poopy turds on the floor,” my daughter said.

“I know, I’ll clean them in the morning.”

“Dad, there are poopy turds on the floor.”

“I’ll go clean them,” I said.

it reminds me of the Louis Kahn quote:

“And if you think of Brick, for instance,
and you say to Brick,
"What do you want Brick?"
And Brick says to you
"I like an Arch."
And if you say to Brick
"Look, arches are expensive,
and I can use a concrete lentil over you.
What do you think of that?"
"Brick?"
Brick says:
"... I like an Arch"

Kids (and bricks) have a way of getting you to do the right thing.
Tell HN: Job posting for a San Francisco startup
MyLikes, a San Francisco based startup attempting to shake things up in Internet advertising is looking to hire a couple of great engineers.

Who we are:

Founders are both ex-Googlers (former tech lead for the AdSense backend and GMail backend, and former product management head for a suite of Google Apps products who previously launched Google Base and AdWords Quality Based Bidding). Just hired another ex-Googler (Google's first ad sales executive who led the group which managed ad agency relationships) to lead sales. More details here: http://mylikes.com/about

We recently raised an angel round from a bunch of high-profile angel investors: Paul Buccheit (GMail and FriendFeed founder), Sanjeev Singh (first GMail eng and FriendFeed founder), Georges Harik (early Google employee who was a Distinguished Engineer and PM director), Deep Nishar (ex Google Ads PM director, VP products at LinkedIn), Keval Desai (ex Google Ads PM Director, VP Products at Digg), Aydin Senkut (investor in Mint, Aardvark, AppJet, PowerSet etc) among others.

Both founders write code and currently form the engineering team. We want to build a product focussed company with lots of responsibility and equity for early engineers.

You can read more coverage about us here: http://mylikes.com/about/press

What we are looking for:

We are looking for good engineers who can work on whatever is necessary, with an immediate focus on someone who has a good sense of UI. Would like our initial engineers to be very entrepreneurial and if you have previously built a Facebook app/web project/iphone app with that would be a huge plus.

Please email arvind at mylikes.com if you are interested.
I read this a few years ago. Quite a few years ago, come to think of it. It makes you wistful for those time when such a small group of skilled engineers came together to make incredible, physical things.

What we all do with code doesn't even come close.
> Why didn't she use the web? Because she can't.

Please describe why she can't?

I shall now demonstrate why she can.
Here's an example in the states.

http://www.sitters.com/default.htm

That took me approximately 1 second to find (give or take some insignificant fraction of a second).

Or this.

http://www.expats.cz/prague/t-284477.html

Wow, incredible! You want another couple hundred sources? If I could speak Czech I could probably find the same.

There is absolutely nothing proposed with the SW that would have improved this. And in fact, an unranked, unattributed list of babysitters returned from some semantic datastore no matter how large (without attributable trust signals) will change that.

Your example, would have required her to enter her babysitting availability in the SW instead of on some web site. Doesn't really make a difference, if it's crawlable, it's already retrievable.

> Until someone makes a Czech babysitting database, she can't. Because no one would ever find it.

Here, http://www.bibo-hlidani-deti.cz/ wow, impossible.

Total retrieval time, in two languages, one of which I don't speak, 30 seconds. I can only imagine what I could find if I spoke Czech. Does Google not operate in your country?

Is there some reason that building, maintaining and populating a "Czech babysitting database" is fundamentally different from populating the SW?

>That's data. So why don't they put it on the web as text? Because no one would ever find it. Text doesn't work that way.

The SW isn't some magical self populating entity made out of wishes. It would take an effort worth the cost of buying France to build a semantic web of the size and information density of the current Web.

Furthermore, nobody has ever demonstrated why it would be better. Statement like "Whoever fixes this, changes it all. They take out Google. They take out Monster.com. They take out Match.com. They take out Facebook. Whoever can do this will change everything." are not only built on a completely incorrect premise -- searching large volumes of indexed text and providing a ranked relevant result set is impossible -- they aren't even built on the ability to point to a working, large scale semantic graph with the appropriate reasoning engines (which in an of themselves are barely in their most basic infancy)...not one presently exists, and the smaller scale examples haven't yielded much of anything valuable.

And in many obvious ways it would be worse. People can put effort into a web page to send signals about quality, other sites and sources can rank a page as trustworthy or not. A list of "babysitters in the Czech Republic" offers none of that. And reasoning out that information across an infinitely large graph could take hours.

I've worked with large semantic systems, with billions of entities and tens of billions of relationships, and almost universally they provide almost no additional value over traditional search, yet perform much more poorly.
> Who has the time and resources to port and tune every single software piece onto ARM instruction set.

The Debian project.
Nodes exist in a network and, in this context, can share information (status updates, social graph additions, etc. ) with other nodes. But these nodes would control what information they share the Facebook model.
> Death vs. Debt is straightforward when you're 30 or 40 and looking at $100k to cure a snakebite. It's an entirely different issue when you're 70 and looking at a $2m cancer treatment, the only problem is then you know that your debt will be payed for by the government.

That may be, but this entire discussion is around snakebites and anti-venom which is a lot different than a (possibly) terminal condition like cancer. You're completely changing the frame of reference when you compare 2 different types of health issue and two different age brackets at the same time...
If they took 3 months to write a tool that would let you suck all your data out of Facebook, that would be useful. But I'm guessing they're not going to start there, because it's not sexy.
You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right echo chambers, which is probably why my experience differs.
Hi there -- I work at the WMF on usability, but on a slightly different project.

The lead on WikiEditor (Trevor Parscal) just did a presentation at PARC. If you want to learn more about the tradeoffs you can watch that video.

http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open...

We know that it doesn't look that different, but there are several big reasons for that.

The grant for this project was time limited, and the low-hanging fruit about usability turned out to be a lot more about organization and cleaner design. A lot of people just couldn't even find the edit button.

In any case, despite looking more or less the same, there's a much, much better jQuery-based system under the hood now, and it's on a much better foundation for adding features. Years of cruft have been cleared out.

The User Experience team is now a permanent aspect of the WMF, so we can start thinking about longer term ideas. WYSIWYG might be one of them. Stay tuned. Or, check us out -- our process is very, very open, and anyone can voice their concerns.

http://usability.wikimedia.org/
That to any engineer worth his/her (but mostly his in that time) salt that must have been blindingly obvious.

After all, the 'rack and pinion' had been around for a while and the rack really is just a gear rolled out.
And I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurial minded folks here on HN are taking note of this as well. A million dollars gross in 7 days for a bundle of indie games. Who knew? Let the gold rush begin, eh?
There actually seems to be a trend in programming blogs where everyone seems to be falling all over themselves to be the one shouting the most loud and clear how "bad" of a programmer they are. At least in their tagline.

I guess it's protection so if someone finds a glaring mistake, or several, they can just say "I told you so!".
DNA Screening at Home: Coming to a Walgreens Near You
The story of a Russian spy for the CIA during the Cold War
I'm still not seeing how that would work. What does, "what information they share the Facebook model" mean?

Can a user belong to as many nodes as he or she wants? Can a user run as many nodes as he or she wants?

Is a node a real, physical thing or just a co-opted version of the networking term?

What would it mean for an end user to belong to two nodes versus ten nodes?
Yes.

The falling water causes a vacuum in the tube, which "pulls" the water up behind it (since water has almost no tensile strength).

And vacuum doesn't really pull, atmospheric pressure pushes.

But fluids that do have some tensile strength could flow without air pressure, so the siphon as a concept is all about gravity.
Verizon: We're making a tablet with Google
Interesting, given the date (July 2009). Is there a presumed connection with last week's 1000 point drop? A mis-order to sell at any price meets the HFT scam that rapidly, though temporarily, drops to the extreme price (in this case, $0.00 or $0.01).
Hehheh :)

I do think names are very important. There's a naturalness with which Normals say "do you have a Facebook?" that they don't seem likely (to me) to have with "Diaspora".

I think that an admirable trait of nerds/geeks/whatever is that many can easily separate symbols from their cultural meanings/connotations. We can treat "diaspora" independently, understanding its subtly ironic meaning (most of us don't think the Facebook diaspora is nearly as significant as other historical diasporas, but we don't take a site's usage of this name to diminish this history, either) but many would interpret such a 'flippant' use as mocking their cultural heritage and the struggles of their forebears.

One has to know one's customers. And ain't nothin' offensive about "Facebook".
I tend to imagine the large vat of materials becoming part of the corner convenience store/gas station. "Hi, I'd like $50 of gas, $38 of aluminum composite solid #3D2, and this bag of chips."

Alternatively, it could coincide with the one-hour photo lab: "plug in your USB drive to begin uploading model." prints out receipt
Once you get through basic algebra try Exeter's problem sets. I've just started going through them now and it seems pretty fun and well integrated. They even have discrete math!

http://www.exeter.edu/academics/84_9408.aspx
I agree wholeheartedly. If they can build a solid platform, though, that can set the stage for a genuine breakthrough.

I'd say the most important thing is to deal with the social flatland problem (which I explain here: http://interuserface.net/2010/02/buzz-facebook-and-social-fl...), and then pretty much follow every suggestion Joey Tyson makes in this post: http://theharmonyguy.com/2010/05/10/dont-simply-build-a-more... .

If that kind of advancement can be built into a well-engineered product with good UX, then we might really be looking at something that could start siphoning a bit of market share from Facebook.
However http://eprints.qut.edu.au/31098/ which was written by the physicist that submitted the correction to the OED claims, contrary to wikipedia, that the tensile strength of water is relevant.

Anyone have the ability to run a siphon and pull the middle up about 50 feet in the air? If atmospheric pressure is key, it should stop working at something like 30 feet high. If tensile strength is key, it should go several times that height.

Edit: I accidentally said that the tensile strength of water was said to be irrelevant, not relevant.
This seems kind of obvious, but OK. How do you know what a customer needs? How do you know whether your idea meets that need? You have to look at the world from their perspective begin to answer those questions.
My guess is he meant go and not go, the programming language, or go moku.
I would imagine a lot of it involves improving xcode by using the same code for compiler and IDE. GPL2 or GPL3 really doesn't make much of a difference in this regard.

Although the GPL3 question comes up with the non-inclusion of a newer version of Samba in OS X Server. This is making it hard / impossible to add Win 7 to a network with a OS X Server PDC.
Macruby 0.6, mocks, TDD, Xcode, Interface Builder
Wouldn't you say the nature of the benchmark is probably the most important detail, yet it is the one that is omitted from this blog post?
This is a great opportunity to make a killing (both financially and influentially) with a new trendy tech startup conference.

What do we need? A snazzy venue, a few internet-famous MCs, startups starved for attention, and attendees. A name and a date would help too.

Basic model: No charge for startups presenting. Charge a nominal amount for normal attendees, more for VCs (better seating/access), and a more substantial amount for corporate/VC event sponsors.

Format: 24 startups. 8 minutes each to present a heavily polished, rehearsed presentation (TED-level). Generic awards. Applause. Offers of funding.

Interested? Reply with more fleshing out of ideas. Maybe we'll make it happen.
speaking of which. I'm testing a big multithreaded jruby app I wrote as I type this, and it's running very solidly. anytime I need parallel I'm going straight to jruby.
Adam Smith showed that some regulations lead to smuggling (he spoke of gold and silver mainly).

Doesn't this antidote situation == instant black market, via internet-based mail-order from countries where it isn't banned?

Though it probably wouldn't be delivered fast enough for when you need it; and organizations that would sensibly keep a stock of it (hospitals, zoos) are not in a position to buy from a black market; and if you're going to pay thousands for something and inject it, you probably want more assurance than a dodgey website can give. Unless you're dying.
I was giving you the information I had that would help you if you you wanted to track down who invented it.