skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A truly private fire service might have been able to strike some rapid deal for an amount somewhere between their costs-to-respond and the expected remaining-value-to-be-saved.

But, it was a city fire service, unmotivated by profit, risk-averse, and bound by inflexible bureaucratic rules.

In either case, negotiating a reasonable price balancing all the factors after the fire has started is so much more difficult to do in an equitable manner that I can understand why either municipal or purely-private fire companies might avoid doing so, on principle.

Also, given the rural setting, it's probable there were no water mains/hydrants nearby and some limited-number of tank trucks were covering a large area. Using any would mean less service for prepaid subscribers; for example any gallon deployed to save Cranick's house wouldn't be available to prevent the flames from spreading to the subscribing neighbor's yard.

With such difficult tradeoffs, and sitting at my keyboard thousands of miles away with a mixture of incomplete summary reports and perfect hindsight, I prefer to assume that the local responders were neither idiots nor heartless but did the best within the constraints they knew.
How to Hack the Power Grid for Fun and Profit
Steve Jobs learned from his experience with Adobe and the licensed version of Display Postscript. (see footnote 1 http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus )
The only person who ever questioned that word for me was a wiccan teenage girl who sees fairies.
That's not a IE6 effect, that's a Win 95 to Win XP effect.
Ask HN: Help Get Underscore.js Added to Remy Sharp's JSBin
JS Bin[1] is an open source collaborative JavaScript debugging tool built by Remy Sharp.

Underscore.js[2] is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support.

Up vote my github feature request[3] to get two great tastes in one; please and thanks.

-----

[1]: http://jsbin.com/

[2]: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/

[3]: http://github.com/remy/jsbin/issues#issue/32
Yes - something that keeps data organized my shard key is being planned.
Microsoft already has a problem with runtime fragmentation - their software and dev platforms are split between native and COM-based stuff (Windows, Office, most of their consumer apps), .NET/CLR based stuff (.NET, Silverlight, XNA, most of their enterprise apps) and increasingly JavaScript/web based stuff (IE, most of their web properties). The last thing they need is to add a fourth runtime to those.
Note that Microsoft and Apple want to obliterate flash just as much as anybody does... IE9 shows that even Microsoft realizes that "HTML5" is a far deadlier weapon than Silverlight.
Well Foursquare's Scala/Lift front-end sure has been holding up nicely despite all the FUD about Lift's stateful architecture. Funny that Mongo DB, which gets all the scalability hype, is the first thing to have trouble scaling.
Developers aren't server administrators (usually). It's not the best use of their time.

I wish I had thought of this when we ran into issues with Windows people and Ruby. Too much of their time was spent fussing with stuff and crying about it. :)
It's far from just noise. Any company betting its business on a ccTLD needs to have a sane and level-headed understanding of the risks involved. And .ly is one of the riskiest, because it's run by an anti-western, anti-US dictatorship. You may think that because the regime currently supports the continued existence of a particular web business today that they will forever, but the history of such regimes argues that there is a lot of risk in that assumption. The regime may change its mind based on arbitrary criteria. It may decide that bit.ly is no longer in its favors. It may decide to nationalize bit.ly, redirecting the domain to a Libyan owned copy of bit.ly, prepopulated with existing shortened urls gathered from searches. Or, the country may undergo a change of regime. What happens when (not if) Gaddaffi dies (he is already nearly 70)? What happens if the country undergoes another coup? What happens if the country renames itself and gets rid of the old TLD?

This use/misuse of ccTLDs for commercial purposes (e.g. .tv, .ly, .it, .co, .to, etc.) is a relatively recent practice, there hasn't been enough time to decide if it's a safe practice or not. It'll likely take only one "disaster" to wake people up to the idea that there is indeed risk to basing your business on the cooperation of a country chosen solely because it has a catchy TLD abbreviation.
Those English explanations are just the comments from the original JavaScript version, put in their own column. If anything, this avoids breaking the flow of the code itself.
I think what I don't like about the "simulation of reality" proposition is it implies that death does not have its normal negative consequences and thus causes values to be not the same as they normally would be under not "simulation of reality" circumstances.
I do not believe retail investors are like a "herd of stupid sheep"; please do not put words into my mouth.

I believe some retail investors attempted to "protect their positions at a reasonable level" by using the wrong tool, namely, a "stop loss" order (which provides a sale at any price) rather than, say, a "stop limit" order (which provides a sale with a price floor.) This was a bad decision on their part, which in the case of the "flash crash" led to them offering their stocks at bargain prices (like Accenture for a penny.) Simply using the right tool would have protected these investors from taking such severe portfolio hits.
In other words, if you feel like congratulating yourself on your minimalism, you can pretty much justify anything as minimalist.

Personally I'd say that the minimalist wristwatch option is none at all. I don't think I'd be happier with no wristwatches, though. While my wristwatches bring me only a minimal amount of pleasure, congratulating myself on my lack of wristwatches wouldn't bring me much pleasure either.

I prefer "vaguely appropriate scale"-ism to minimalism. No wristwatches is too few, ten is too many. Pick something in between and stop fretting.
Also, don't discount your work for equity. Very not worth it. Learned this lesson twice now.

Biggest reason - if a company is coming to you to build their whole product under a contract, they're making a major blunder out the gate. Any seasoned startup junkie will tell you that outsourcing early product development is a surefire pathway to failure. Don't be fooled by thinking your involvement will help turn them around, the motivations you have as a consultant differ greatly from the objectives of a startup.

What ends up happening is you're working with a client who you're putting in way more effort and hours for - on a discount - which is, by the nature of the fact you're working on it, destined to fail.

Get your normal fees on the project, define the boundaries between you and the company, and don't let yourself get sucked into their hype. No matter how high-profile or connected or wealthy the client is. Its not worth it.
The one I wrote, for Bash, uses SIGALRM (via the Time::HiRes perl module) to time out after half a second: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/git-situational-awareness
Is it acceptable/preferred to store your entire db in RAM? I have little idea about large systems but feel like this may be hard to scale if your db grows to hundreds of TB. I'm intrigued to learn more! Anyone know how fb organizes its massive db storage?
Sorry for not answering last night, I overlooked your question. The patents are not for an API, they're for things like sandboxing, preprocessors etc. You can see them all here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/38768100/Oracle-v-Google-Complaint

Should such things be patentable, maybe not but the fact is that they are at present. In the US, if I patent something and you come up with your own invention which does the same thing, I can say you're infringing. It doesn't matter whether you were even aware of my invention (except for the purpose of awarding damages); the patent is granted for the purpose which is fulfilled rather more than the mechanism used. On the upside, patents last 20 years and after than anyone can clone your idea (sooner in some cases).

Claims about the API etc are copyright claims, which here include source code, but also specifications and documentation and so on. The basic argument from Oracle's side is that Sun owned Java, but granted people the freedom to do whatever they liked with it up to a point. Go past that point, and you've broken the agreement and the grant of rights is revoked.

But there was no agreement, you might say - however, there usually is. You have to acknowledge one to download the JDK, and you're agreeing to the terms therein. The reason Google is making such strenuous effort to point out that Dalvik != Java is because Java is not actually so open that they could just port it. Building their own compiler and VM gets them off a particular contractual hook in the licensing terms, but the problem is that going to such lengths to comply with a single provision in the license creates an implicit acceptance of the license as a whole, and (like most contracts) said license also includes a provision that if one part fails when its legality challenged, all the other parts still remain in force.
I do most of my work in python/django so virtualenv essentially solves much of these problems.

The problem I am running into now is that our production environment is starting to get complicated enough(mysql, redis, 2 different django projects) that testing all the components working together gets more and more difficult all the time.
dup http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769761
3 Nifty Time Saving Tools (Free Too...)
MySQL has trouble scaling if you don't understand how to use it or monitor it. Not sure I agree with the last part of your comment at all.
Did you document your tinkering? Would you care to publish it?
Dave McClure Adds 500 Mentors to 500 Startups
It's okay to have hundreds of terrabytes of data but you need to keep your "working set" hot. Even if you have 10TB of data, 1TB of it might actually be hot.

Monitoring your working set is tough.
Call me cynical but a very similar play happened with Kraft and their launch of a new Vegemite+cheese spread.

They named it "iSnack 2.0", were met with strong derision, opened up a naming contest, and finally settled with the consumer-selected "Cheesybite". This whole rigmarole earned them quite a bit of publicity. People were even buying-up the iSnack-labeled jars before the renaming thinking they'd become collector's items.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegemite#Vegemite_Cheesybite:_n...

"iSnack 2.0" and the new Gap logo are too terrible to happen innocently.
I agree that Underscore's functions are simple/short enough that the commentary doesn't add much. However, do you still think that literate-style documentation isn't helpful for more complicated modules like this one?

http://sstephenson.github.com/strscan-js

Or, to take an extreme example -- this one:

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...

... where the code is very detail-oriented, and you need the commentary to convey the "what", and the "why" -- while the code explains the "how".
I like the way MongoDB describes the flaws in their own system, but places the blame (four) squarely on the customer, where it belongs.

It wasn't a random failure or a sudden spike that caused the crash -- it was completely predictable growth. Foursquare had already experienced the problem once, and they had solved it. All they needed to do was monitor their growth and iterate that solution.

Sure, Foursquare could have had a better sharding algorithm, but that would only have put off the crash a bit longer. This is a very basic failure -- not monitoring a system that you know is steadily growing.
Actually, the ultimate judge of the actions would be a court not the firefighters. The insurance company would have a good case that the firefighter was hurt trying to protect a non-client and isn't responsible to pay-out insurance on the firefighter's injuries.

As you say, if lives where at risk (not in this situation) and the charter and insurance policies noted the exception, then the insurance company would be on the hook for injury payments. This case didn't involve a person in danger and would probably give the insurance company a very good case for not paying.
I recommend 'The Non-Designer's Design Book' by Robin Williams http://amzn.to/aMd1kR
The described problem - imbalance in shard allocation - is not one that's specific to MongoDB.

In fact one of the huge choices one has to make when deploying say, Cassandra, is the partitioning algorithm. Sequential partitioning (saying say, users a-l go on Partition 1 and m-z go on #2) gives you certain capabilities for range queries but also risks you overloading if one particular user is significantly larger than others.

Cassandra recommends random partitioning as a way of better balancing your data across shards.

You're going to run into the same problem on just about any sharded setup (With any software) - how do you make sure that you are distributing new chunks/documents/rows in a way that doesn't overload any given server.
Thanks - So your tipping me over to the drools side. One more question: When you used Drools did you use Governor as well. Any thoughts?
I've been staring at this deal all day.

I can't figure out how they got a $85 as the regular price for a website and logo design. If you look on 99Designs site they charge $295 minimum for just a logo design.

Am I missing something? About 3-4 weeks ago I wanted to use 99 Designs for a IPhone App Icon. But went there to find that they raised their minimum price for everything.
Ask HN: When have you coded yourself out of a real-life problem? 
What are some of the ways that you coded yourself out of a real-life problem?

For me, I wanted to go to Momofuku Ko, except they have an annoying .NET reservation system for their coveted 12 seats and 2 seatings, which you can only book 6 days in advance for 24 seats. You have seconds to enter your credit card number to confirm.

But it is a good restaurant, and reservations disappear fast; all are gone by 10:00 AM ET. So like any self-respecting hacker, I got TextMate and Ruby out, performed some sudo gem install mechanize magic, did some serious Regex/XQuery work, wrote a function to perform exponential smoothing on calculating the time difference from my clock to the Momofuku clock, and slept soundly at 7 AM Arizona time, knowing that my reservation would be booked (it's unfair I have to get up at 6:55 AM to check if my resy went through, just because I live in a state like Arizona where food is bad except for Pizzeria Bianco and some others!)

Hope to hear some great things from you guys!

Cheers,
Jason

Post scriptum: Frank Bruni, former NYT food editor, hates the resy system:
NYT, Frank Bruni, "Going Ko-Ko," http://goo.gl/NYfj; NYT, Frank Bruni, "More Fun with Ko," http://goo.gl/gKGZ; NYT, Frank Bruni, "Ko-da," http://goo.gl/6rNc; Departures, "Eating Small in NY," http://departures.com/articles/eating-small-in-new-york
And let's not forget, they don't try to sell you a bunch of products you don't care. I just want the domain!! Lol
Gen Y: Emotion will Dominate Your Brand. We Will Sell For You.
Thanks! Yeah we had a small learning curve with the DSL as well. We are housing he rules in a csv file for now. When you used Drools did you use Governor as well. We will eventually need to have an interface for the business folks. Any thoughts?
It's probably a technical debt thing. FourSquare is immensely popular, and the team probably meant to have those checks and balances in place but got 'too busy' to implement them.

That doesn't excuse anything, but these oversights can happen even when you've got primo talent on board.
Bettina Hein & Kirk Arnold: Why You NEED be Part of 2010 Boston unConference
I really wish I could have gone to this, but I will be at school in upstate New York. =(
Yes. The distance between madness and genius is measured in success.

Okay, that's a quote from a Bond movie, but still.
Is it just me or everyone likes filling whole page with this thing? I always loved doing so.
Text-based vintage games on Kindle
Of course it will become either unavailable or inconsistent (or both) during a network partition. That's the essence of the CAP theorem.

But what does it mean to tolerate a partition? As if the system has a choice?

Any CA system is claiming to be consistent and available as long as the network doesn't partition. That's the strongest statement you can make under the CAP theorem, and Paxos certainly falls in that camp.

My problem with the original article was that it claimed that any individual network or node failure was a partition affecting the consistency or availability of the system. Paxos is a clear counterexample to that, as it tolerates a lot more than that without sacrificing consistency or availability.

Once the network actually partitions (or half the nodes become unreachable), then you are correct. The CAP theorem comes into play again and we must sacrifice either C or A, and Paxos chooses A.
Check out http://www.modernizr.com, for example, which abstracts feature detection for many advanced "HTML5" features. You (sorta) don't have to worry about browser version, you just have to worry about feature support.

Feature detection is a far easier strategy for development than user agent sniffing, in my opinion at least. Granted it's less helpful for CSS-related issues, which more have to do with inconsistent implementation than with whether a feature is or is not supported.
he too has his weaknesses. For instance the fact that every character has the diction of a Harvard English professor and the wit of George Bernard Shaw.

Is that really a weakness? Strict realism in dialogue generally makes for pretty poor drama. Shakespeare's characters talk like nobody has ever talked, but his plays would not be improved by sticking in a bunch of "umm"s and "ahh"s and repetition and "y'know" and repetition and, uhh, stuff like that, y'know?
The main thing I took from this incident is how much being open and honest about issues improves a company's image. Foursquare and 10gen could have very easily played the blame game, or kept their cards close to their chests, and both would have come off poorly. Instead, they described the problem, owned up to their role in it, and laid out a framework for how to avoid the problem in the future. After reading about the issue, I come away with respect for both groups. Sure, mistakes were made, but they treated their users like adults and took responsibility for what they did wrong.

Good job, guys. If only the likes of Apple followed this example.
To me, a page of Python is supremely readable. It's concise and perfectly understandable.

A page of javascript looks like someone dropped a box of scrabble tiles.

This is just me, a bad programmer who hasn't gone to college yet, who only knows one language well enough to make anything useful, and who has resisted learning javascript all this time. I knew someone would do something like this eventually, and now they have. And now I shall make something truly beautiful.
Yea, but that doesn't look like what they're describing here. They seem to be describing having the entire dataset in memory.
A Look Inside the NSA's Code-Breaking Museum
Net impact analysis of outage: A bunch of socially awkward technophiles couldn't tell their friends that they were eating lunch.
Depends on what you are doing. If you have high volume and care about latency, you pretty much have to put everything in RAM.

If your disk is spinning at 6000 rpm, a given sector spins past 100 times per second, which makes lookup time anywhere from 0 to 1/100th of a second, or 1/200th of a second on average. Disks only let you look for a limited number of things at once, so you can do less than 1000 disk seeks per second. Period.

If data is living on disk and you have high query volume, it is really, really easy to blow past that limit. The solution is to shard data on multiple machines in RAM. This gives a fixed cost per unit of RAM. As long as you don't exceed available RAM, it works well. Luckily it isn't hard to monitor available RAM and respond in advance. (They didn't do that in this case.)

If you don't care about latency, or have a lower query volume, then you can live with data on disk, and frequently accessed data in RAM. A few well-designed caching layers in front can give you even more headroom. This is much cheaper. But has more complicated failure modes, and they can be tricky to monitor properly.
Trying to understand why an algorithm made a trade at a certain price is practically impossible. Assuming that these algorithms are profit seeking (and not utility seeking, as in trying to transfer risk), the short answer is: because they thought they had a statistical edge they could profit from in the future. Of course, this is a statistical edge. No algo is always right, or even near always right. The algos don't know who they're trading with. They see liquidity and they're willing to take it if they think it's a good price.

Now, you might ask, what is the higher purpose of all this trading, if all of it is profit seeking? That's pretty simple also. These trades help to determine the fair market price of a contract. The algos that consistently make the "right" trade survive ("right" defined as predicting future market price), and the ones that don't eventually get shut down. So even when the trading is non-utilitarian, there still is a greater purpose. That purpose is price discovery.
Am I missing something here? The same answer for how you communicate with anyone not local: phone, email, and IM. I've landed numerous projects and long-term contract gigs without ever meeting the client.
Yeah, and people invest dozens or hundreds of sales hours to land a million dollar contract. It's all about the ratio of risk to reward. For many/most designers, the ability to say, "I designed the Gap logo" is a big enough reward to justify the risk. And, unlike the lottery (but more like my sales example), it's at least somewhat based on merit and effort.
In Chrome on OS X at least the cursor sometimes doesn't appear immediately when you leave the screen. Now that caused a little oh-shit moment. How did it get out of the box?
It is easy to turn swap off. There are many reasons why it can be good to turn swap off in servers. (But only if you've got sufficient monitoring to hear about it before you run out of RAM.)
As long as the appsumo guys are in this thread, quick observations from a new user:

1) The "refer friends, get $10 link" in header doesn't seem to work (it prompts me to login or register, and no further info re: referring friends is provided.)

2) The logout link in header doesn't seem to work either (it triggers snapabug, but won't let me logout.)

Cool deal, though, I will undoubtedly purchase anyway. Thx for offering.
One thing that I admire about Foursquare is that they don't only use the technology (MongoDB, Lift Framework, etc..) but also invest in it. If it wasn't for them I think that Lift wouldn't be such an advanced framework as it is now.
I just figured it out. The 99 Designs deal isn't for an actual contest. It's just for a Free Power Pack Upgrade.