skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Well, if the table is in InnoDB format it will result in one disk-seek, because the data is stored next to the primary key and can be deleted in one operation. If the table is MyISAM it will result in at least two seeks, because indexes and data are stored in different files. A hard drive can only do one seek at a time, so this detail can make the difference between 1X or 2X transactions per second.

Nonsense.

Innodb has clustered primary keys, which means that the row data is attached to the leaf nodes of the primary key index as the author correctly states. However, the leaf nodes and the non-leaf index nodes are actually stored in different segments of the table space! While in the same (giant) file, it is unlikely that they would ever be in contiguous space on disk enough to be read in a single random IO operation.

But it's more complicated than that: if any of the index pages or data pages have been read recently they will probably still be in the buffer pool, which means that they will require no disk operations.

But that's just the seek operation to find the row. The write operation is a different story yet.

What innodb will do is modify the row by marking it with the transaction id in which it was deleted. It will keep the row in place so readers with an older transaction id will still see it until all those transactions are complete. The change in the row and the row page will be written to the copies of the affected pages in memory only. Eventually the data pages and any affected index pages will be flushed to disk, potentially grouped with other changes to the same pages. IO operations occur on the level of reading and overwriting whole pages only, if not more.

Concurrently it will record in the log buffer every change it makes to the pages in memory. This won't get written to disk right away either, it will flush the log buffer to disk once per second in the default configuration.

So there are many more potential disk operations required of innodb than myisam. Generally innodb is preferably because it is vastly more reliable, and because it can handle concurrent read/writes to the same data -- MyISAM basically can't. MyISAM will in fact generally be FASTER for any single operation than InnoDB, because it simply does less.
http://www.google.com/hotpot is getting very positive ux /design reviews
alchemyapi does some basic categorization, but it can be expensive with a high volume.
App Engine is great if you design your app within its limitation. It's just a different architecture to work with.

I haven't found the cold start or 30-second limit a problem yet. I have a cron job running periodically hitting the app to schedule tasks, that seems to always keep an instance running. The tasks were designed to do small things and finished in a short time. That actually helps to spread the tasks to more machines.

It does seem App Engine is running faster in the last week or so; it was kind of slow before. The new Play Back feature in my app http://www.previouslook.com actually works without much hiccup now.
The issue of course is that at the moment, cookies are cookies. There's already the ability to disallow 3rd party cookies but you would still lose functionality.

My solution to this would be different cookie silos. There is already a "private browsing" feature in modern browsers - why not having multiple personas?

I use this silo when I'm working, this one when I'm shopping, this one when I'm looking up midget porn etc.

As well as "open in new tab" links would have "open with new persona" so that if you were on your facebook page and you wanted to go look at a site about testicular cancer you could do so with privacy.

You should then be able to reload the current page using a different persona so that you can decide how to engage with the page you're currently looking at.
IPad, schmipad, give me a MacBook Air on the road
Yes, I have seen talkorigins before and I use this all the time when people ask "how do you prove macroevolution"?

Certainly I can prove that macroevolution has taken place, if by that you mean that natural selection and mutation take place, and that the change is gradual, and topologically continuous.

"A unique, historical phylogenic tree" -- this pretty much expresses that idea.

But where in that paper does it talk about actual testable predictions of the hypothesis: "all speciation came about as a result of mutation and natural selection with no other factors or forces"?

Each section has a "predictions" section. But notice that even if all these predictions come true 100% of the time, this does not rule out the possibility that new species of sexually reproducing organisms are created specially by God, much like new cars are created by humans, despite there being an observably continuous change through time.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section5.html#specia...

Look at this. We are almost there, to what I am looking for. Are these "speciation events" fitting the "mating preference" criteria or "cannot produce fertile offspring" criteria? If the latter, I am satisfied!
This sounds nice, but it responds by:

Error 403: --- begin server output ---
You do not have permission to download this app version.

even though I am the only developer. I wonder if this applies to downloading apps uploaded by this version.
Goldman Sachs Is Now Bullish on America
Agreed, mostly. But without SOME secrecy, a government can't function.

Imagine if the US became 100% transparent. You could listen to the president's phone calls, watch military strategy in real time, etc. Unless the government's enemies (its proper ones - criminals, opposing armies, etc) were likewise transparent, which they wouldn't be, Uncle Sam would basically be doomed to be beaten by them. Like if only one poker player had to show his cards in a game - he'd lose.

Just saying there are limits to the good that transparency can do.
Try Boutiques.com. It's a pretty slick Google property. Feedburner's interface is also really nice, but it was there when Goog bought them.
Why do you consider it certain? It could have just died off being much less efficient than us.
There really isn't a way around that (as far as I can tell) beyond caching them on your server.
Actually the application has offline support, it makes use of the standard Android sync API. See Settings > Accounts & Sync > Sync Google Reader. I've just tested it in the Airplane Mode and it works like a charm.
DNS Nameserver Spoofability Test
Your relaxed attitude to privacy is enough to make me never use that site, sorry.

The fact that it is a 'pain' to make the effort to protect someones identity means you're probably in the wrong business.
What part of the Tos? The app is explicitly asking you for permission to post things to your wall.
Well, no. To know that we'd have to find it to act as proof. What this finding does is expand the bounds of the environments in which searching for life is viable. In other words, we can now consider other temperature ranges and chemical soups and compare them against a new baseline for viability.
Couple of thoughts:

1) precipitating arsenic salts directly might be easier and a whole hell of a lot easier to provably run to completion.

2) to filter out bacteria, you'd have to grow bacteria. In addition to arsenic, you'd also have to add sugar and protein. Last I checked, Islam take a pretty hard line on beer.
The pricing power this reveals Google to have is fascinating. On Heroku, which runs on top of EC2, 3 dynos running all the time cost $72 a month. Google is charging $9 for what seems to be the same thing. Is Heroku really charging 8 times as much, or are their dynos not directly comparable to Google's app instances?

http://heroku.com/pricing#3-0
Well again I go back to the point I raised in my first post on this thread which is you have to consider intent.

The whole point of a post like this is to try to re-frame the topic in the minds of people who don't yet agree with you. So while it might be clear to you and it might be clear to the author it's obviously not clear to everyone or there would be no reason for this piece to be written.

So if the author's intent was to alter the perspective of people who don't agree with him he shouldn't write under the assumption that it's a clear cut issue (if that's in fact what he was doing)
A similar experience occurred for me.

My GF and I went to Vegas for halloween (we both used to live there, so we have many friends and family there) and on the day we were leaving we decided to have a Vietnamese lunch with her parents. I got "the call" from my co-founder that there was a bug and it was affecting many of the systems on both customer and employee facing functionality.

So I told my GF, "I'm going to have to fix this before we begin our four hour drive back to SD." She said, "Okay honey."

I sat there for two hours, programming furiously through lunch with her and her parents till I had it fixed to a point where I could leave it for the next 6 hours. Thank god my Nexus One has tethering support and my girlfriend was supportive. Her parents seemed indifferent but other patrons were looking at us strangely as my GF sat there playing with her phone while I went apeshit on my laptop.

Kudos to the author for being an awesome mate; and I second the advice of becoming "involved".
This is like waking up and finding the bike you asked santa for next to the christmas tree.

Awesome!

* Now please let us use naked domains, I badly need it for my startup, I hate www to death.
"Seems Google is joining that particular use of version numbers as marketing."
I disagree. Sure they have higher numbers, but they're also not making a big deal about it.
"Seems Google is joining that particular use of version numbers as marketing."

Perhaps. But, if this is really their strategy, they're doing a terrible job of it. If they really are thinking this way, wouldn't they be much louder about it?

I suspect that products for which major releases are trumpeted loudly by marketing organizations (think IE9) elicit two kinds of reactions: (1) "Wow, I have to download that NOW!" and (2) "New things are scary, so I will avoid upgrading."

Reaction #2 is what has caused IE6 to die such an agonizingly slow death. Grandmas probably thought it scary to upgrade, and IT managers certainly have been burned in the past by "major" software upgrades.

The web browser experience improves only when developers believe the lowest common denominator browser feature set of their user base has shifted upward and they can therefore drop support for older stuff. It doesn't matter so much now quickly IE9 is adopted compared to how quickly IE6 (and 7, etc.) go away. Perhaps by positioning newer versions of Chrome as just a normal course of change (much like Microsoft security patches), Google hopes to help the laggards hurry up.
To continue along the same analogy: the entrepreneur doesn't need to know about water, they just need to know what a good beanstalk looks like.

That's my problem with "I'm the magic water" software developers. I can work out how to pay them, but I can't work out how to make them understand users well enough to make good business decisions about a consumer-focused company.

(Note: I'm actually a developer. And I see that you understand the counterpoint as well, as shown by your last line.)
Speaking Of… Jeff Bridges & Olivia Wilde in TRON Legacy, Part 3 & 4 (TCTV)
Be careful and smart about that 3 strike policy. Remember the ability to "warn" back on AIM? It got really annoying. How are you going to keep people from abusing this 3 strike system?

Also, identification of a Facebook profile does not necessarily prevent predatorial behavior. It doesn't promote it, sure, but anyone can make a believable fake profile.

More potential than chatroulette is a bold claim considering they came first. Despite that, your app does have potential, and personally, I would use it, at least the concept of it. Right now it's not very usable. It rotates through like 5 people and they're not necessarily 'there'.
10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques - Smashing Magazine
It shouldn't be too much of a pain to do. I do something like this on http://thingist.com (Not caching facebook photos, caching the randomly generated 3x3 pictures that it gives you if you don't connect with facebook [the script to generate the pictures is expensive])

The python to do it would look something like this:

def cache_fb_photo(fb_uid,cache_name):

import urllib
import time

request = urllib.urlopen("https://graph.facebook.com/%s/picture" % (fb_uid))

photo = request.read()

photo_location = "/path/to/photo/cache/cache_name"
cached_photo = open(photo_location, "w")
cached_photo.write(photo)
cached_photo.close()

This may or may not violate facebook's ToS. Obviously it would take more than this to actually put it into production, but this would kindof work.
How to Build Links Fast: 101 Tips & Strategies | SEO Book.com
Logging global PHP objects and saving memory using a lazy loading proxy
Quite often when you are working with legacy code you will come across a mess of globals. Every single method will make use of the same global instance of the database class for example. So where do you begin to work with this massive impediment?
Both links work fine for me though the server seems pretty slow at the moment.
Noctis
In the case of Hipmunk, I'm not sure why it's being touted as such an inspiring story of usability. I may be biased because I work at one of the big online travel companies, but I think hipmunk usability is terrible.

Their simple search wizard is great but it ends there IMO.
It's interesting that the part of the system that works cost $0 and the part of the system that failed costs billions.
Getting the lead in turns LHC into a mini Big Bang machine
It also has too few (one, right?) major, international airports.

AFAIK, Seatac is the next nearest, over 100 miles away, and another singleton airport.
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Will Netflix Kill the Internet?
Flagged, given it posts on your wall without permission and is misleading about anonymity, I think this post should be removed to stop other HNers using it until those issues are fixed.
This whole story of COICA, domain seizures, and ad-hoc alternatives springing up sounds like the beginning of a cyberpunk novel. Is the US government actually bringing about the dystopian technological future envisioned in so many short stories?
The quotes around 'just' might indicate sarcasm here, in which case the comment is a criticism of a forced dichotomy between engineer- and design-driven.
I have a scooba and it works well for cleaning floors but seems kind of overkill unless you have a lot of floor to clean. Also I have gone through two sets of batteries as they tend to wear out if not used regularly and stored in the robot. There are some recommended procedures to extend the battery life though so ymmv.
In theory you can use a sample contract and found without a notary, in practice I have never seen it done and people I know used to recommend against it, but I haven't checked in a while.
In such an earl stage in a starup with extremely limited funding, it would be hard to consider our non existent product a for profit venture. I think there is a balance where both the intern and us could benefit. They get the experience, and a chance to prove themselves. If they proof themselves and the venture is successful they could later become full time. Does this sound feasible?
A Helpful Tool for Quickly Testing PHP Snippets
Bad submit timing by me again. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960425
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1960422
It took me a second to realize this is probably an OCR error:

http://apollo13.spacelog.org/02:09:38:58/#show-selection
"I likened it to buying a screwdriver and then looking for something to fix."
Holding a press conference for this pretty sweet discovery was completely justified. The language in the press release made it clear ahead of time that Nasa didn’t make any discovery related to life on other worlds, only a few overly eager bloggers spun crazy theories like that.

Whoever is disappointed by this and claims that Nasa hyped too much doesn’t have her or his head screwed on right.
That's cool, didn't even think of that.
Good... keep thinking that.
They calculated that there's definitely not enough P in the bacterium to sustain all the processes it's running with regular DNA.
Question: you will do all the configuration by yourself helped by some scripts or everything will be fully automated?
The only reason I purchased a PS3 was for this game. It was the same story with the PS2...I only got that for the GT4.

I'm not really a fan of console gaming, but GT series has that perfect mix of simulation and arcade not found in any other series. Pure simulation kinda sucks, since you get black flagged for doing anything..,and arcade is just boring since it's just plain unrealistic...you might as well get a game racing spaceships. .
How big is the Austin startup community? Austin seems like a hell of a lot nicer place to live than the Bay Area, but I'm afraid I'd miss the incredible magnitude of the support available to startups here.
I don't think the shading effect is really intentional; it is just an artifact of all labels being anti-aliased. A small font will be lighter than a large font in order to indicate/approximate a smaller stroke-width.
The author had to put a considerable effort into preparing the post, and got to some interesting conclusions. I can wholeheartedly upvote such a well researched article. The animated images really show the difference and his alternative variants of Yahoo and Bing demonstrate the point.
I have quite a few people I know who are on the "business side" of the entrepreneurial merry go round that quite often call me with their latest idea.

The remarkable thing is that no matter how many times I get back to them with a time estimate of 6 months - or a cost investment of $50k - $100k to get it live etc. the first sentence they always speak is "it's just a simple site that ... "

In fact it's not really limited to these guys. Everyone who calls me to get something done starts off by telling me how simple it is. "It's just this simple thing that ... " as if that's somehow going to make me realise that it IS simple and I can actually do in a weekend what I had thought would take months!!

If it's that simple, DO IT YOURSELF!
Reading this makes me really curious how Netflix's Instant Watching service is architected. Anyone have any details?
I hope they provision some kind of non-TLD system as well.
People may not, but the information is relevant to sites/companies that send out stylized emails.
Here's the actual audio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vZa7g14F-Y

It's right in the beginning, and they definitely say "we've had a problem."
Time-Varying Graphs and Dynamic Networks
It's fine now (5:31pm East Coast USA), but here's the status page...

TODAY – MAJOR INTERRUPTION OCCURRED

01:54 PM PST
Heartbeat misfired and took the database offline. We're
investigating to make sure it doesn't happen again.

01:47 PM PST
Site is unavailable. We're researching the issue.
Dear Apple, for Christmas I would like a Macbook Air with 3G. Can you make this happen?

Thanks,
Andre.
In the big picture, are the drives that expensive? Your monthly bandwidth bill is going to come close.

Measuring latency (vs seek time) is definitely a better metric. But is a 5 second (the horror!) delay to watch a 40 minute video that bad for user experience?

A better example may have been streaming music, where we already know last.fm got a big win from using SSDs.
This account was registered two hours ago and has never made a submission or a comment other than this one.

Charles (person that submitted this), if you want people to check out your app, fine, awesome. They're doing that right now. I think people are offering constructive criticism about it.

Blatantly registering puppet accounts to try and get your site onto the front-page is just bad form.
Thanks. I think I might wait a year or two, though. He's turning 10 next week. There aren't a lot of games that are appropriate for 10 year olds on the PS3--it seems to be heavily skewed toward teens. He's pretty into the Mario and Sonic games on the Wii still. However, I spied a Pinball game that looks fun to me...
Exactly right. Especially with larger apps, the "first" user often sees some latency while the app is loaded into memory, static data structures are re-created, etc. The always on feature should keep this from happening.
You must learn JavaScript
RedLaser: How a Company That Nearly Died Sold to eBay
Ah, that makes sense:)

Thank you.
Homeless kid goes from dumpster living to online business entrepreneur
Your second point is spot on... almost. It's still too complex. The key part is "Build a better bathroom". The problems with North American bathrooms, as they are used today, is that they are multi-purpose rooms. You got a bath, a sink, a toilet, a cabinet, our toothbrushes and toothpaste hanging out, towels hanging out, make-up, hair products, etc. etc. etc. What a mess!

Look at Japan where a bathroom is just that: A bath in a room. There's a wash area outside the bath. The floors are tiled and the whole room is self contained for the express purpose of washing yourself and soaking in a relaxing hot bath. Then you have a sink room that often doubles as a change room and may contain the clothes washing machine. This is where you have your personal care products. Finally you will have a toilet in a closet. A completely separate and small room with a toilet. The top of the toilet, where the water fills the tank, has a spout where you can wash your hands before that water goes into the tank. Three separated areas each with a designed purpose. Another benefit? You can be making a real stink on the toilet while the wife is taking a relaxing bath none the wiser. Cleaning such a bathroom is easy. Just hose it down and there are automatic products that can do that. Cleaning the sink area/change room is also easy and a robot would be fine for this application (and Japan loves robots!). Cleaning the toilet area could also be handled by a robot but it would have to be small enough to get in behind the toilet. And that is where a better design for a toilet would be valuable. Maybe better to build a "back of toilet" cover that is nearly as tall as the toilet bowl rim and comes out 1/2 the way from the wall... you know, like they are on airplanes.
Is this a joke? I can't tell.
What I meant was a scientific approach to design rather than just designing what looks good.
But than again every good interface designer should take that approach.
You could even build in a wastebasket paper toss game :)

Great simple app.
Mount the Bot on a dual axis cable system similar to a Skycam.

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

Feed high pressure water and cleaners from overhead.

Allow the bot to move vertically.

Hot air blower for drying.
Penki light painting for iOS
The kernel readahead is actually irrelevant. Your app issues 1MB reads one at a time and the kernel will fetch that all at once.
Acquisitions have doubled up this year as compared to last
See Who Is On Your Flight And At Your Airport With Planely
> If the people that founded this country

People who founded the US risked their necks and property fighting the most powerful empire on Earth, they probably wouldn't be very impressed by those few terrorist here and there.