skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's actually a bit more profound than that. macruby objects are Cocoa objects, so all of the funny edge cases that we used to have problems with in RubyCocoa have just gone away. For example, in RubyCocoa, if you try to serialise a proxy object representing a Cocoa object using YAML, and then read that object back in, the proxy is no longer created, and if you try to pass the object to a Cocoa API, the program crashes, because Cocoa was expecting a Cocoa object... The same operation in macruby works just fine (well, apart from the fact that YAML is evil, but at any rate, I have a macruby app that uses it, and it works fine)
Noynoy Hacienda Luisita
Regarding Hacienda Luisita, a lot of people think that one reason CARP failed is because of the Stock Distribution Option (SDO). Also, it is seen that the SDO has been able to keep farmers out of their land. The main beneficiary, seem to be your very own family. And in the end, farmers still receive barely anything from what they have put into Hacienda Luisita.
For a moment there, I thought your company was funded by Google Ventures: http://gigaom.com/2010/05/03/what-entrepreneurs-should-know-...
Noynoy Luisita Massacre
November 16 marks the day when seven farmers of Tarlac were killed initially and scores injured by security forces that attacked protesting farmers pressing to open the gates of the Hacienda. It is therefore no surprise that the issue has surfaced in a broadsheet and will continue to be the subject of media reports to get your position on the matter.
Partitioning is only one part of CAP. Availability is sacrificed when site-specific power / network systems fail, or worse, when equipment is physically destroyed.
I know the creator. It's cool. Probably such a page will be there soon.
Yes, that sentence does seek to inform users that their new Page connections are public -- especially those you take the time to read the dialog.

However, in the last few days I've run across many Facebook users who chose to make these public connections when previously they had their interests and likes private. I suspect most of them clicked through the dialog without reading it or fully understanding the ramifications of their actions.

You could argue that the user's ignorance and lack of reading available explanation is their problem, but it just seems a little unethical (on the grounds of previously knowing average users will click through dialogs) overall.
Absolutely. Yes to all three.
That headline is terrible.

My take away: If there is an intelligent designer, they'd be an awful programmer.
60% is still huge.
>"If you had an infinitely scalable database, would you still want to put a caching layer in front of it?"

Yes because reading from memory is faster than file I/O?
Apple would probably not sure Time or ABC or any big-time news agency. But I'm guessing this is more because a big-time agency has the sense/legal advising to not buy stolen goods.
Same here. I've solved the problem by not using any of this alt-tab behaviour. I have a suboptimal usage pattern that's still more intuitive than alt-tab.

I've bound alt-tab and ctrl-tab to raise/lower window. While I do use four virtual desktops to group windows of similar interest, I generally just hide the frontmost window when I want to switch. This keeps the cycle static and I can do most things by using keyboard only. I rarely have more than 3-4 windows on a single desktop so I've kind of manually grouped the desired applications together already. If I want to break the cycle and switch directly to a specific window, I just point my mouse to it and use the keyboard to raise it front.
Right.

If you take away the whole bit about this being a 4G iPhone, the facts are something like this. Guy leaves cell phone at a bar. Cell phone is picked up by another patron. Instead of leaving the phone with the bartender, finder takes it home. Finder fires it up, logs onto FaceBook, discovers who the phone belongs to. Instead of contacting the phone's owner, finder sells it to Gawker for $5000.

Gawker makes halfhearted attempt to contact Apple. Gawker knows who phone belongs to, yet never makes an attempt to contact them directly and return it. Gawker (to our knowledge) never tells Apple "Hey, this is Gawker Media, we have one of your development phones". Gawker takes apart phone and runs a story. Gawker exposes phone's owner as the most unlucky engineer within Apple.

If it were my phone (even aside from the dev phone aspect), I'd be pissed. I'd probably press charges. If it were just a matter of losing my phone, okay, these things happen, I should've been more careful. If it were a matter of losing my phone, someone picking it up and not knowing how to contact me, okay, that's understandable. But if someone picks up my phone, knows exactly who I am, and then sells it instead of giving it back, how is this not theft?
As of the time of writing, Apple aren't suing anyone.

The only current legal activity is that of a criminal investigation into the circumstances that led to the iPhone being in Gizmodo's position.

Like Gruber and the above poster, I just don't buy the "left on a barstool" piece of this. A seasoned Apple engineer, in his late 20's, trusted to carry one of a handful of iPhone prototypes, somehow manages to leave it at a bar? If he'd been younger that could be put down to the foolishness of youth, but since he's not then he would have to be an idiot to do this. And Apple don't hire idiots.
I agree with the problem description, but the solution is terrible. It adds unpredictability to the interface, which is worse than simple badness. I'd suggest having new alternative to Alt-Tab that has static positions (reorderable for the power user.)
You'd have seen something like the image on this link: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_high_pressure...
Good point.

At one hand I would like to keep ads on my site to help me run my blog and i want to keep the current formatting of the blog, which though not very cluttered but can be distracting (as a voracious online reader I can empathize with other readers.)

On the other hand I want to give the readers the option to choose a simple view while reading. Print View is ok but it doesn't do a nice formatting (unless you customize it).

Since my ads are CPM based, it doesn't matter to me whether the reader reads them with readability or not, as long as the page is loaded once. I want to give them the option of having a simple, less painful to eyes, view.

If the reader is already a readability user, they would still be one click away from having a better view.
This is explained on your Profile settings page: "These settings only control the information people can see on your profile. This information, such as your Pages and list of friends, is still public, so it could appear elsewhere on the site and be accessed by applications you and your friends use."

Here's a more detailed explanation: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php
Gratuitous Infiniband porn: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/size_matters

3,456 ports.
Actually, there are tons of software related startups. Good electronics startups would be a little harder to find. I will look around and let you know.
Try the "Preview my Profile" link on http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=pe...
LLVM may be a bit immature at this stage, true. Then let's look at CLI/C#.

We don't know what patents are there kept in Microsoft's backyards. For one thing, Microsoft is not interested in supporting any technology or product other than theirs, and we know they will do everything to promote IE and kill competition at any cost. Just imagine for a moment Microsoft caring about how smoothly C# runs in Firefox on Linux. As French say, "impossible".

I don't trust them. And Mono is a Trojan Horse, thankfully not as popular and robust as it could (should?) be in principle.

Note that I don't mind the technology itself. C# is neat ("not my style" though), CLI is pretty fast, and they both play nicely with Windows. C# applications in general are smoother and faster than Java-based ones. Love the results. It's just that any port to other OSes will look worse than on Windows, with or without Microsoft's participation.
How would HP react if Mark Simon had paid for some information?

How would HP react if someone had left a briefcase in a bar, and it was sold, and it's content put online.

Not to mention the fact that Apple is incredibly secretive, and in this case, for good reason. The iPhone is a multi-billion dollar product, Apple only releases a new once a year, and it is a huge event.

This is not a new HP calculator.
> I'm not being a "drama queen" about it; I simply won't pay an exorbitant rate for the privilege of being treated as a criminal because I'd like to board an airplane.

So, you don't think your second clause there has event a hint of hyperbole?
Downvoted? Wasn't expecting that from hacker news! :)
Facebook thought like this too, but then realized they needed to make money to keep the site running.

You too will have this problem, unless you come up with a better solution than what Facebook has. Namely, slowly trickle enough data out to turn profitable, and then (likely) stop pushing the envelope.
I don't understand how it is unethical at all. It is very clearly mentioned, in less than two lines of text, with detailed explanations one click away. What do you suggest instead?
Ignorance and Hubris at the FTC
China May ‘Crash’ in Next 9 to 12 Months, Faber Says
I'm so tired of hearing "Gruber" in a context that comes closer and closer to meaning "the one and only way of looking at the law".

Yea, I enjoy his blogging, but his bias is surely towards whatever Steve Jobs whispers in his ear.

The fact of the matter is: This wouldn't be a big deal if it was _Nokia's_ 4th gen phone, or a CD of Windows 2012 a Microsoft Employee left laying around.

I'm no lawyer, but lets be honest, if this isn't innocent intent (a legal defense against Receiving Stolen Property: http://www.shouselaw.com/stolen-property.html) I don't know what is.

Hell, without Gizmodo, Apple would have never gotten the phone back!
What is important is that IE is no longer the de facto standard. 60% is much better than 90%. I remember 6-7 years ago when developers thought they were done when it worked in IE6. They didn't feel the need to support other browsers. Browsing in Linux was difficult because things never looked (or worked) right.

Now with so many options, developers need to target standards.
If anyone wants something like this in XP, there's Microsoft Powertoys Alt-Tab Replacement.
What if my choice was to ignore your so-called forced choices and I click the back button instead? What impact does this have on my privacy?
Software evolves. No piece of software can afford to support every option and be backward compatible forever.
Can someone explain to me what the purpose of the shield law is? Whether Chen is protected under it or not seems like a technicality to me. I'm more interested in how the law is supposed to benefit society.

Is the idea that journalists should be able to keep their sources confidential? Or that they should be be immune from retaliation for printing unflattering stories of the government and police? Is it to protect whistle blowers? Is it supposed to protect journalists who have broken the law?
Private Social Networking... we can call it PriSoN.

Ultimately I think learning how to lock down Facebook will be less work (especially if there are third-party apps to help) than switching to a different network.
Hmm, it seems to be built in to Office 2010.
The database has a transitionally consistent memory cache. On a 5 node system, you have ~150GB of effective cache. And you can always add more nodes.

When you put a cache in front of the database, you sign up to manage your own cache coherence and consistency.

Are my users reading stale data? That write went into the cache, did it make it to the database? I use interface X to speak to the cache but interface Y to speak to the database. Some requests are ok to cache, some must go direct...

Or I can just get more nodes and not have to worry about it.
Perhaps the funding isn't real. I don't believe it is.
"Gerstein said that this organization arises because software engineers tend to save money and time by building upon existing routines rather than starting systems from scratch."

Bull. There are two reasons why the shapes are different.

1. The bottom of the Linux graph is smaller because there are not very many primitive operations on a computer. Data is homogenous. There are 256 interchangeable values for a byte. By comparison, a bacterium has to use separate pieces of machinery to handle chemicals made up of the dozens of non-interchangeable elements that it works with. On a computer, you might use one single function for searching binary search trees all over the place in different systems, regardless of the data. In a bacterium, when code gets copied, the copy is modified. Every new application is a fork of some other application, welcome to a developer's nightmare (a good argument against ID... a designer would never duplicate so much code). Developers reuse code because they can, bacteria doesn't reuse code because it can't.

2. The top of the Linux graph is larger because computers have to do more. Computers get selected for features. Bacteria get selected for survival. The bacteria have to "just work", whereas people expect to be able to configure computers. I can plug 100 different network cards into my computer, but don't expect to plug a different flagellum into a bacterium. Maybe it's just a matter of level, if you picked a higher point in the call graph eventually you'd get to "main", no?
My (overly optimistic?) assumption is that anyone who would be drawn to such an alternative underdog would be willing to fork up a small membership fee if they're still happy with the service after six months. Another option is to make it so that one membership fee (say $15 annually) includes their own use as well as that of 5 friends of their choosing, which would make for an incentive to invite close family members to join.
This is proof: You can do anything if you put your mind to it.

I'm serious. Everyone is sneering at this startup and her idea but maybe it'll work out. I dunno. I've worked at shadier companies (probably) that somehow produced worthwhile software. It looks like "less sure" than the normal YC crowd, maybe it's some kind of a scam -- I Dunno -- but if she got funding then maybe so can I someday.
The OP was talking about an exceptional case in which a number of people had to enter a country without visas. Not surprisingly, they weren't allowed to wonder around at their leisure. That has nothing to do with airport security -- they were not being held in the airport.
Results of XKCD Color Survey
Greenplum.com
Pretty close to what we're seeing:

1. Internet Explorer 5,493,047 64.03%
2. Firefox 1,796,239 20.94%
3. Safari 742,371 8.65%
4. Chrome 489,051 5.70%
5. Opera 38,441 0.45%
6. Mozilla 6,603 0.08%
7. Mozilla Compatible 5,320 0.06%
8. Playstation 3 1,710 0.02%
9. Camino 1,142 0.01%
10. Opera Mini 890 0.01%

For mobile, Safari is 86.88% and IE: 1.02% :)
Just to be clear, when you say they are done like that, those operators are in the spec and that’s how they act; it’s not just a standard hack. So there is (for example) a ToInt32 function in the spec but not in the language. This surprised me. (I was playing with cryptography in JS and needed to do lots of bitwise operations on hand-made bigints. It was easier than I expected.)
I read the paper. Very nice architecture. I really like the no-special-nodes aspect.

> Clustrix is all about concurrency and parallelism. While we didn't specifically focus on OLAP, our model allows us to do very well for these types of workloads because we break the query apart and let individual nodes work on their portion of the query.

I ask my original question because, in general, scaling OLAP and OLTP tend to use very different methods that work against each other. For instance, MapReduce works well for OLAP workloads, but doesn't provide the responsiveness required for OLTP (Not that it couldn't, MongoDB sure is using it for that, but it isn't the best for that). It sounds like you're applying some OLAP techniques ("broadcast" querying and processing data at it's site) to the OLTP realm.

> If you had an infinitely scalable database, would you still want to put a caching layer in front of it? Most people would rather not deal with the added complexity.

So this system will scale to 10,000 nodes? It seems as if queries will get distributed to hundreds of nodes at this point if they are joining in several tables. I can imagine serious network contention at this point. Do you still recommend some kind of denormalization for efficiency, as it seems it would reduce the number of table slices required for a query?

> In a typical sharding scheme, one would choose a partition key (typically some primary key, e.g. user id) and use that as a distribution strategy. At such granularity, hot spots are a common problem. In Clustrix, we have independent distribution/partitioning for each table/index, down to the row level. To get hot spots is if you contend on a single row -- but that's really an indication of something going terribly wrong in the data model.

Really? What about data that is very popular? To use worn out examples, the "real name" field for Ashton Kutcher's Twitter feed? This is a single row of data that could quite realistically be accessed tens or hundreds of thousands of times per second at peak. I know I am picking ridiculous examples, but that's what scaling is all about :)

I suppose I ask about caching because, in general, caching layers only hit one box with a simple key request that have been proven to work at volumes of hundreds of thousands of queries per second (memcached at Facebook). How does this database system that hits a single node (or two, considering replica) that has to do fundamentally more work to fetch the data perform anywhere near as efficiently as a caching system?

> ACID (transactional properties) and KV (data model) are orthogonal concepts. Our systems scales exceptionally well and supports a wide range of data models

Agreed. I apologize that I wasn't clear enough here. By KV I meant Dynamo-style loosely consistent DHTs.
Does Privacy on Facebook, Google, and Twitter Even Matter?
Results of the XKCD Color Survey
One does not have to be an idiot to be forgetful, or perhaps tipsy.
The opportunity may not be exactly what you'd think, because privacy is basically a fallacy for the kinds of information and images that are currently published. What has to change is the nature of the data that is public; specifically, data itself must become much less valuable, and this tends to require new protocols.

For instance, you shouldn't have to "give" anything precious to a web site you barely know; there ought to be a way to hand them a proxy that becomes useless under certain conditions (e.g. after 24 hours have passed, after transferring to some other web site, or similar criteria). This reduces the security problem to one of probability: the time horizon is so small, and the data so fragile, that it is unlikely anyone will see a reason to steal it, or accidentally share it.

Some solutions are available already. For example, people can create throw-away E-mail accounts to limit their exposure, and perhaps they just need to be encouraged to do so.

Having said this, it's difficult to imagine ever securing some kinds of data. This is an age with nearly-ubiquitous mobile surveillance devices and Internet connectivity, so how can a web site even claim to safeguard images, for example? You can't know everyone who has seen you in public; you can't know about every cell phone picture that may have been taken of you, much less posted somewhere, with a "tag" showing your name. The best thing a web site can do is be honest about this reality, and flat out tell users that there is no way to perfectly-secure images of them.
Let's talk about "standards" clear (working drafts) throat...

I seriously doubt one can innovate on the web, without using cross-browser hacks to only support the non-IE crowd. Even "standards" as simple as the DOM would have you jumping through hoops, but don't believe me... http://ejohn.org/blog/the-dom-is-a-mess/.

Or something as simple as .nodeName from the HTML 5 spec? http://ejohn.org/blog/nodename-case-sensitivity/

How about something as "simple" as border-radius? That's right, I can easily make a mess of every browser.

Google Mail, as a browser front-end, is only amazing by virtue of innovations made by Microsoft and very little to do with anything since. Little to do with "standards" of today. Faster than Outlook? No; how? Better? Sure, but only because it is more accessible to me. Nothing to do with ActiveX, or shall I pontificate how GMail sucks because Firefox is a hungry beast and crashes under its own weight? No, that would make zero sense.

I am looking to create good and fun websites and not sitting around to complain about how my job isn't made easy, because every browser has different levels of support. And believe me, I've been waiting a long time -- longer than you seem to grok -- for the W3C to "standardize" vector animation. Still waiting. Can't wait for the web to be free of these working groups and zealots.
Fascinating and useful in a practical manner. (I process color words a lot better than I do either hex values or 2D/3D color pickers. Control-F, evergreen. Yay.)
I'm surprised that men and women appear to largely have the same range of name for colors - certainly not what society has led me to believe.

However, I would have liked to see the percentage of each gender who participated in the survey.
“The fact of the matter is: This wouldn't be a big deal if it was _Nokia's_ 4th gen phone, or a CD of Windows 2012 a Microsoft Employee left laying around.”

Really? You might believe that but calling it a “fact” seems a bit too much to me.
IIRC someone proposed a tongue-in-cheek corollary along the lines of:

"Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced!"