skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
traditionally durability isn't considered a sliding scale, it's a goal/priority which requires you to implement multiple features and fallbacks to handle everything from invalid writes, crash during write, to the data center catching on fire.

thinking about durability this way may work great for MongoDB but it isn't how durability is framed in the rest of the database world.
Claims are pointless without backing benchmarks. Being written in C is no guarantor of performance.
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people can't actually read and understand a simple article.
The current about page (http://duckduckgo.com/about.html) is dedicated to answering that question. Are you saying you think I should add a summary sentence on the homepage? I just haven't because I don't want to introduce clutter.
"Getting over" my fear of heights. An off-and-on project I've been working on for my entire life.

Roadblocks: Being willing to put myself in feared situations long enough to acclimate to them. I know exposure works for me but it's still very hard as the next goal always seems to be the impossible one. I've been having some success in combining mindfulness techniques with the exposure practice.
That is a misinterpretation of the sentence on your part... "a well-placed little birdie told me over the weekend that they sold a grand total of 503 Kins before they pulled the plug".

The "over the weekend" phrase is marking when he was told, not when the sales took place. This interpretation is further supported by the "that" which immediately follows it, so as to separate the part of the sentence about the act of telling from the part of the sentence about that which was told. And further supported still by the use of the term "grand total" in the phrasing "grand total of #X before time_Y".

That pedantic enough to prove the point?

Accounting for registrations by unsold units is a more likely source for the difference in numbers.
It seems like disrupting the user is the exact opposite of what Apple was trying to achieve with background support.

The right way to do backgrounding:

- Consume the least amount of CPU possible. Optimize, optimize, optimize! If you're implementing a network app and there are no events coming in over the network, your process should be doing nothing, blocked in the kernel.

- Drop as much RAM as possible before you go under. There's only so much RAM on the device. Apple's frameworks try to drop as much as they can, but if you're holding onto a cache or anything that can reasonably be reconstructed, now is the time to drop it. This increases the likelihood of you surviving in the background after your process has been put to sleep, too.

- Work seamlessly. If iOS terminates your app due to low resources, re-start exactly where you were before. Don't show an annoying dialog like this one when you switch to the background. Don't show a ridiculous "splash" screen that wastes user's time. Just work.

If done right, you can maintain a very small footprint, and then you don't need to annoy the user by asking every time: "is this OK?".
I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood.

I've come to classify attitudes about science now into three broad categories. Hostilty: "I don't care what science says, Homeopathy worked for me." Religious: "Peer review is never wrong, and therefore the consensus is also always correct in every particular and those who disagree are heretics of science!" Realistic: "Science is the best way we have to find truth, but it isn't perfect either. The history of science should be learned and carefully examined, and it should not be forgotten that everything we see in the past is still around today, the only question is where." Rather a lot of people fit into that second one, and think it is the best understanding of science there is, and tend to label people with the third level of understanding as heretics on par with homeopaths, too. Trying to prod people out of religion-of-science into realistic-understanding-of-science is a noble goal, worthy of a blog post.

Science has been wrong before, for decades at a time in every discipline I've ever studied enough to learn about its history (in addition to the current consensus), and the question is not whether there are disciplines every bit as wrong right now, but which ones they are. If you don't understand that or haven't internalized it, you don't understand the process of science, even if you can recite its tenants at will. When we say that science is a process, not an end-result, that isn't just words, it is the reality, and what it means in practice is that the consensus is very frequently wrong. There's nothing to "correct" in consensus if it's presumed always correct. The religious idea of science makes no sense; consensus must be wrong at some points in time, it is a necessary step.

(This is all discipline-neutral, by the way. I do have my opinions about which disciplines are most likely to be wrong right now, but I freely acknowledge those are opinions. Certainly in the past entire disciplines have made glaringly-obvious-in-hindsight-and-common-sense mistakes before and it is no great insight to think that there might still be such errors around. But again, I freely admit that only time will really tell, and there are certainly other wrong-consensus-views I agree with.)
10 Fascinating Facts You Didn't Know About Apple
Not that I agree with his work, but does the climate being at a nominal temperature means ocean acidification is okay?

CO2 pollution is about more than just temperature.
No, that does not strike me as unusual. In a small company, people are forced to wear many hats. Matters like this can usually be "resolved" through a few emails or a phone call. If the CTO were to call his outside counsel and direct her to write the nastygram, outside counsel would charge $300+/hr. to do so.
Confessions of a Web Analytics Junkie
Art in Your Pocket 2 :  Media Art for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad
It does not seem like WePay will compete against Paypal. Why aren't there more paypal competitors? What are the barriers to entry?
Where would accessibility fit into all of this? Ideally we should all be designing sites in a way that doesn't rely on hover, to make our sites accessible to the blind and disabled.

Edit: Isn't the problem with touchscreens ultimately "focus", and not "hover"? There's no way to select an element without activating it at the same time.
It's such an easy metric to game, though ("The first line is 'import library_that_does_everything'") - It's a proxy for succinctness, at best.

That said, "[something non-trivial] in only 250-500 LOC" is often more interesting than "...in only 5 LOC", because generally anything that small is just gluing together libraries. There are exceptions, of course - I've seen impressive stuff in just a few lines of J/K/APL.
Time to get a real OS, it sounds like.
So you increase the probability that your father gets three months off after you're born, but you also increase the probability that your father is a long-term unemployed bozo living in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris.

Employers wouldn't hire more than they need anyway. Even if that was the case, the flip side would be job insecurity. You can theorize all you want about these tradeoffs, but the experience shows that these measures do work in Europe, and more so in Scandinavian countries. Never have I seen so many child carts as in Iceland, and despite the crash their unemployment is 8% and going down.
Play more hockey.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=dahl-node

Shows node to outperform nginx for serving a static 1 MB buffer.
This is too difficult for users to discover.
This depends on many factors. 1) What country the lawsuit takes place in. Unfortch I only know US law. Here in the US, the factfinder (a lawyer word for either the judge or the jury) can order legal costs to the winning party under certain circumstances, but those are rare. I have heard anecdotally that in Britain legal fees are always paid by the losing side.
Youtube pushes new mobile site over apps
I'd usually agree with you. But, since this is about building filesystems, something I thought was reserved for kernel hackers and truckload of C, I think the LOC title is appropriate. I would have still clicked, but would have expected something way over my head.
"There's Springsteen on stage in Jersey belting out "Born to Run." There's Obama on election night in Hyde Park. There's Joe Montana with less than a minute left and a championship on the line. There's Moses looking back as the Red Sea collapses on Pharaoh's army. And there's you in your undershorts, fists pumping in the air, awash in the glory of the coming of the traffic."

Guy likes traffic...
Seeking an accomplice
Solar Aircraft Is Ready For A Flight
WTF is HTML5 and Why We Should All Care
Agreed. Don't remind the user that your app is going to use an OS feature that's meant to be pretty transparent. Especially if yours is the only app that nags them about it; it'll just confuse non-geeks and make them think you're doing something weird.
Ask HN: Is switching careers from IT to legal crazy enough to be worth it?
After 20 or so years in IT (operations mostly) and routinely observing the embarrassing state of legal affairs around anything IT-related, "a friend of mine" has been visited by a thought to switch gears to legal field to apply some technical expertise to the world of yellow notepads. Ignoring the problem of at least 4 years of education required to qualify for a legal clerk job, do you think this is something that can make this world a better place or merely a fancy attempt to cope with mid-life crisis? In a more constructive mode, how do you think the hacker approach can improve the existing legal system?
Flattr, and Why It's Not:

http://www.websnark.com/archives/2010/02/by-the-way-the.html
Those telescopic eyes look kind of awesome. But it does sound like the technology still has a long way to go. Only two thirds of people saw "notable" improvement. Meaning one third saw no improvement (or possibly even deterioration) after months of rehabilitation, and among those who saw improvement I imagine a lot of it would fall under the category of minor. Which seems like a pretty big risk considering that the operation does not look reversible. But then again, if you can't see already...
Microsoft and Apple cross license so I doubt this will ever be an issue.
I presume you're asking about goals not dreams? Here's the stuff I've been working on lately:

1. Fixing my motivation problem. No, not that kind :-) After a lot of self-analysis I discovered I'm motivated by my desire to be "the best", and this isn't a good thing because I tend to become a little better than the #2 guy and then stop, contented. Mozart or Microsoft didn't become what they are by trying to beat the #2 guy! So I'm fixing myself to always move forward even when there's no one ahead of me.

2. Becoming a better classical-style singer. The major roadblock is that my health is very poor, and my throat always seems to be sore for some reason or other. I rectify this by taking as many lessons as I can when I'm feeling well or even moderately unwell.

3. Becoming better with women. The major roadblock right now is that I don't know how to "raise the temperature" in a casual date setting. In nightclubs where the "temperature" is high, I've taught myself to pick up women pretty consistently, but this doesn't seem to be enough.

4. Releasing a neat piece of software that I've been developing in the last couple months. It's already pretty good and will probably make a bigger splash than my last "fun" project (http://openphotovr.org) did, but the finishing bits just take so much time. Don't worry HN, I'll keep you posted.

5. Solving math problems in and around "computational game theory". My previous "neat" results were about quining cooperation (http://lesswrong.com/lw/do/reformalizing_pd/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/13y/freaky_fairness/), and recently I've been trying to solve a similar problem in a more abstract setting. Not getting much results yet; so far it looks like a blank wall and I keep trying different directions of attack.
2 things I can suggest.

1.) Try setting a goal with someone else, it doesn't have to be the same goal between you, you both basically have to spot eachother and make sure one another do what they require themselves to do. That said you could do both goals together doubling your experiences.

2.) I have a fear of heights too. However, the way I've tackled it was with indoor rock climbing, which transfered to outdoor freeclimbing, and once I lose the weight, skydiving next year.
Hasn't MusicBrainz.org being doing this in the Open Source for a long time? At least longer than I personally remember knowing about Shazam at all. All of their code is some variant of GPL.
Never dress for the ride, dress for the crash.
I'd likely delete an app that tried to pull that, the whole point of background processing is not to bug the user.
In my personal experience, peer review follows fashion, and fashion is generational. Couch your results in the fashion of the day, cross your t's, dot your i's, and you're all set. Publish frequently, in innocuous little bites. Wait for the old guard to retire before publishing the synthesis that brings your prior publications together into a new and coherent whole.

Now you're the old guard. Repeat.
I'd be very interested in seeing a blog post detailing that. That would be very useful for hosting client projects. I'm working on a project that aims to be similar to Heroku but runnable on a handful of virtual servers from any VPS service.
A reddit founder posting on Hacker News? Controversial.
The reason for that is that people who have capabilities of doing that know that its not a good thing.
The data can be used for re identification attacks against user privacy.
I used the title so people would know that the article refers to the recent Muir Russel report that was in the (Hacker) News over the last few days, since the article itself does not provide extensive background information. I can't control the cultural lexicon, I can only attempt to communicate as clearly as possible.
good luck with the extra pepper !
You can do it by hitting keys really fast 16 hours a day for several weeks, apparently. It wasn't a figure of speech. You're underestimating how hard the top players train.

I said "hands" above but maybe it was only his keyboard (left) hand.
Great article. I particularly liked the discussion about how they took their business through the YC process and to market.

It seems like WePay is a service that has a lot of potential. It also seems like it might have some potential for fraud and money laundering, so I hope that doesn't happen to the service.
What does that have to do with performance under multiple processors / cores?
Zferral's customized referral program wants to make you more money
Diamond Bullet Could Achieve Nuclear Fusion
C and many other languages. ^ is very nearly a universal code-XOR, at least where single-characters are concerned.
Wow, I feel like a total asshat. I did this years ago and called it GroupBuy.

The idea came to me when I was gathering money for a batch of shrooms my friends and I were buying.

Its good for buying large quantities of drugs with friends.

Idea #2 for me that I slept on.

Fuck me.
Jonah Lehrer: The curse of soda
In the context of the article that perception can be explained by the fact that they were missing out on more of the childless life goodies. Also, being able to afford more childcare doesn't imply having more time to spend with their children.
Anyone care to describe how this can be used to gain root? I'm running Lucid...it'd be interesting to try the hack on myself before updating...
Ask HN: Business formation and crazy local government
I'm thinking about starting a new business and just found out my local government has all kinds of crazy taxes and requirements for home businesses, including a business property tax on everything from my desk and chair to my computer and all software running on it.

I would have to submit a list of all these items including when I bought them and for how much so they can decide what to charge me. Every year. It's insane and makes me really angry. Income is one thing, but now I have to list the contents of my home office and even my computer and pay for them every year? Why don't they just install a camera in my house?

Then there are other crazy forms and requirements besides that. The taxes are small but the intrusion is large.

Has anybody here had this problem and have you figured out a legal way around it? One option could be to rent commercial space someplace else, but that is really expensive in my area.

There are mailbox or virtual office services which are cheaper but I don't think that would solve the problem.

Am I sh*t outta luck?
Fair enough.

And yeah, it was awesome. Despite my eyeroll it was worth my time and I upvoted it.
I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and make the process of reading papers much easier. One of the most difficult parts of reading a paper is trying to decide for yourself if the methods or conclusions of the paper are flawed. The referee reports are a valuable counterpoint from people who probably know more about a topic than you do!
Man, I thought twitter was bad.
Oh, laying around, relaxing, getting good sleep, are all healthy things to do. What will mess you up is contorting your body while you type, which includes laying down, propping your feet up on the desk, or just generally not sitting comfortably.

Typing is already pretty weird and unnatural for the body, so you just want to reduce the stress on it as much as possible while you work. Same goes for playing guitar, sewing, drawing, writing, anything that involves lots of tiny motions and focus. It's these activities that tend to turn off your awareness of your body and make it so you don't notice you're hurting it.

Also, definitely take some yoga and focus on meditation. It'll help you a lot, more than you know.

Finally, very few people on here are rock stars. Don't let their blowhard attitude make you think they're so damn awesome because the truth is, human aptitude is a power curve, not a normal curve, and 99% of people doing anything suck because of it.

Myself included.

Edit: And you're welcome. :-)
main func(int x, char y) int

Is an interesting idea... I don't think I've seen it in use anywhere (though I've mostly dealt with C-like). Add in the curly-braces for the definition, and you've just made functions into variables with blocks. And are they really any different anyway? The code-in-memory doesn't get duplicated when you make another instance, just the scope, so it's equivalent to a variable in a singleton.

Just pondering out loud :)
Codeforces is run by this dude [http://petr-mitrichev.blogspot.com/] who is the #1 ranked algorithms programmer on TC. Pretty cool!
Yes but my anecdotal evidence suggests average people really don't care at all. It seems like only technically oriented people concern themselves with privacy issues.
I read "The Search for God and Guinness", fun read even if you aren't religious ( I am not ):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20861910/The-Search-for-God-and-Gu...

Just saw this, I haven't given it a listen yer, but I do intend to. Looks fun:

http://www.thedigitalhubelevate.com/memoirs_of_guinness

Also Guinness makes their employment archives available to descendents of past workers, which is pretty neat:

http://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/somehistory.aspx
That was my initial reaction, too. But for an app like Trapster it might not be a bad idea. (I haven't used it, but I guess it's an app for tracking speed traps)

Most apps do nothing in the background. Others, like music or GPS apps, it should be obvious to the user that these apps are doing stuff in the background. For an app like Trapster, however, it would be easy for the user to forget or not understand that it's working in the background. I, as a user, might appreciate this kind of warning from an app that I normally would not want running in the background.

By default, I would have it not do anything in the background (which is how it obviously works on OS 3). I would have a setting that enables it to run in the background, as well as a setting that enables the warning. It sounds like that's exactly what they're doing, although I don't know what their default behavior is.
I think the fact that only big players (Amazon, Google) have had any success at all in this area is illustrative. Regulatory barriers plus ability to deal with fraud at scale sets a very high hurdle. Not the kind of thing you can easily bootstrap.
Apple Making New Push Into China - Opens New Store in Shanghai
I've always been wondering if people who can't stand using parenthesis highlighting are also opposed to using an IDE when writing Java.
In this case, the tool that he built (RouteFS) is actually a really clever abstraction above two other popular libraries (Routes and FUSE).

I agree it would be neat if he talked more about RouteFS itself, but it is a neat idea, and only about 200 lines.
China's Frustration-Venting Store
Maybe something really simple that might attract the curious? "A better search engine, learn why"
Facebook "I like" a way to advertize your tastes and values
I'm attending again. Enjoyed it last time and I want some more. Also the Truman's runner ale is amazing, and is totally not the reason I'm turning up again :-p
Not sure what you can do other than respond nicely at the source of the posted complaint and just keep maintaining a good project. Ranters will rant.
I can tell you this - I have no memories from the first four months after the birth of my first child. It's just one big blur. Good thing we made lots of photos. The need to feed baby every 3 hours is going to have the profoundest effect on your lifestyle. A bit of the downtime is in fact going to be a bit, and not when you want it, but whenever you can. The regular exercise - I wouldn't be counting on it, not in first 4 months.

In short, the only thing you can be sure of is that "your life, as you know it, is gone. Never to return."
In case you live in London .. come see the Science Museum (South Kensington), they have an incredibly cool deep-sea fish exhibit going on, including bioluminescent ones.
Make it stop.
Thanks for the information.

BTW I have always hand tweaked the font, DPI, and all appearance based settings on a fresh install of any GNOME based distro. I am not enraged on the padding issue, but it would be still nice to see optimal configuration out of box.