skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Distributed storage system (Dynamo like) for educational purpose?
I am a masters student and for my master's thesis. I was always interested in distributed computing, especially, when I learned about Dynamo, Bigtable etc. I decided to jump into it.

When I started, I found there are many research papers, production level apps (Voldemort, Cassandra etc) but the initial learning curve was very steep.

So, I decided to write yet another Dynamo like clone but, with simpler design, more pluggable architecture (to try out various modules, this way, it won't be restricted to Dynamo features but other algos/features can be plugged in), based on Java.

What do you think about this? Your comments are welcome. Any improvements, additions, changes you suggest?
In my opinion this hypothetical God that judges actions based on their consequences simply allows you to derive a consequentialist position in a deontological framework.

In consequentialism, you adopt some set of moral axioms, and say "this is how I'm going to define what worlds are good and bad, and I'm going to judge actions according to the worlds they are likely to create". This deontological version is instead saying, "I'm going to imagine there's a god, who reasons morally as follows...", and then saying the god reasons consequentially.

I think this derivation path does get you away from the "moral relativism" that's at the bedrock of a consequentialist position --- you've got to adopt some axioms. But it only does this by imagineering this "god" that behaves in an arbitrary way. All this is doing is pretending that the axiom you desire is a property of the universe you inhabit, rather than a property of you.
"Judge not, that ye be not judged"

God, that is an ironic choice in phrase on your part.
It is quite common view of halogen lights wiring here (Bulgaria). I have the same in my bathroom. First photo is standard transformer and second photo is a job done by some electrician not doing his job well. I do not see anything suspicious. And yes, we are EU and NATO members. Most USA citizens visiting here happily spend they time and really enjoying the visit. Without more information what was the case with Dancho Danchev (Данчо Данчев) it is nothing more then paranoia.
Request HN: Can We have a Private Messaging Feature in HN?
I was wondering why we don't have it already. It's very difficult to contact other HN members directly. We could have a karma limit to avoid spamming.
Really hard fifth grade math problem
People who fault themselves for their own failures annoy you? Gee.
To adjust the model for this effect one needs to scale the axis of the multivariate Gaussian noise differently.

But does the variation in the two different axis result from "how the dart travels", i.e. the physics ? To me it seems to be a matter of relative consistency of the angles with which one throws the dart. I remember reading an article that analyzed trajectories of basket ball free throws. They found for a given player their velocity of projection remained surprisingly consistent. Maybe that is true for throwing darts as well.
....multiple times.

Overwriting it once prevents software reconstruction of the data, but magnetic analysis of the underlying disk itself can reveal (depending on the voltage returned by the resulting 0 or 1) whether the previous value was (within a degree of certainty) a 0 or 1.
Microsoft rocks again with Security Essentials 2.0 - A pretty thorough review
Ah good point +1. Did not think about that. Maybe a single pass from

/dev/urandom

will suffice. But its going to be slow.
Wait - how automated is magnetic analysis? How much would it cost to recover a gigabyte disk, for example? What about non-spinning disks, are they cheaper or more expensive?
The slides in text form:

1. Relying on willpower for long-term change

- Imagine willpower doesn't exist.

2. Attempting big leaps instead of baby steps

- Seek tiny successes, one after another

3. Ignoring how environment shapes behaviors

- Change your life and change your context

4. Trying to stop old behaviors instead of creating new ones

- Focus on action, not avoidance

5. Blaming failures of lack of motivation

- Make the behavior easier to do

6. Underestimating the power of triggers

- No behavior happens without a trigger

7. Believing information leads to action

- We humans aren't so rational

8. Focusing on abstract goals more than concrete behaviors

- Abstract: Get in shape. Concrete: Walk 15 min. today

9. Seeking to changea behavior forever, not for a short time

- A fixed period works better than "forever"

10. Assuming that behavior change is difficult.

- Behavior change is not so hard when you have the right process

Can anyone expand on what they mean by 3 and 6?
agree +1
Do you have any sources for this? I've heard about this before but I've never seen any details about how it works.
You can get a better education than at any University in the world through self-instruction. But not everyone has such skills, nor does that make it any easier to prove to others that you hold such knowledge.
I would prefer to wear glasses rather than blink at that rate.
It's expensive as hell :)

The companies that do it charge several thousand an hour, IIRC. (this was back in the 90s?)

Depending on the non-spinning disk type in question, it can be either more or less secure than the usual magnetic HDD. You've got "flash" but that's just a nice word for any number of highly-differing technologies such as MLC and SLC on the inside. And you have NAND vs NOR techs to consider as well.

Perhaps the security in non-magnetic-HDDs comes from the fact that they're so new to the table, not many specialize in restoring data from them.
I always dissemble my old hard drives, it's therapeutic somehow.

I am not sure how they broke that disc into so many pieces though, in my experience they are incredibly strong and rigid.

The discs make great wind chimes too.

Harbor Freight has a $3 security bit set if you have drives with special screws.
".....looking like a freak!"

wow! as if you don't look like a freak when your eyes blink like a dragonfly wings!!
You may find this interesting: http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html

It's a counter argument to the urban legend that says data should be wiped multiple times to be truly deleted.

It's worth noting that with today's disks' PRML channels, the signal is barely there already. It's merely "guessed" at (ML in PRML stands for maximum likelyhood). It's seems crazy that anyone could recover something after it's been overwritten. Maybe in the past, but not any more.
Branches are usable only when a merge is not unnecessarily painful. SVN's lack of ability to track renames is a big pain especially in languages like Java where the filename corresponds to code itself. SVN is capable of leaving the codebase broken after a merge.

Here's an example scenario I described in my blog an year back. http://tuxychandru.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-git-shines-above...
I sleep at night knowing that the teams of highly effective government data recovery personnel that Hollywood portrays will never exist.
Microsoft BPOS -- I can come up with a few ways to expand that.
The value of encapsulation is in defining an interface. I mean a contract along the line of "These two blobs of code should be able to talk with each other using i, j, k, and l; if they really aren't, let's do more thinking." This is a good thing, it suggests you to think in terms of independent modules instead of spaghetti code.

However, when it comes to encapsulation by enforcing information hiding it sounds awfully lot like trying to protect random dumbfools from themselves. It certainly ought to be sufficient to define the public interface in the documentation or headers, and expect people to adhere to that.

A smart programmer really can find his way through into what was in the first place encapsulated if he really, really has to. Conversely, in the case where a dumbfool would ignore the documentation and poke around with private code he would simply do equally stupid but alternative things if he was prevented from touching any private parts (Hehe). That is, if one can't do the job he can't do the job no matter how severely his options are limited.
Liquid nitrogen?
I looked it up on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_a_ross/1482849745/

and from the caption it sounds like it actually did that to itself which seems impossible unless maybe the platter was made defectively in the first place ... ? (note it was an "old" 40gb drive - also looks like 2.5 inch)
It's a "normal" submission time for DMOZ, but you shouldn't worry about it anyway: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-a-link-from-dmoz-isnt-wor...

(the article is from 2006)
It's explained by Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier in Practical Cryptography in section 22.10.2, "Magnetic Storage".

Overwriting does not completely destroy old data. You can think of it as repainting a wall with a single coat of paint. You can still vaguely see the old coat of paint under it. The magnetic domains can also migrate away from the read/write head either to the side of the track or deeper down into the magnetic material, where they can linger for a longer time. Overwritten data is typically not recoverable with the normal read/write head, but an attacker who takes apart a disk drive and uses specialized equipment might be able to retrieve some or all of the old data.

They also advocate multiple, random overwrites using fresh data as a best practice at this time.
Sometimes YC gets it wrong Paul Biggar (NewsTilt)
What happens if you only overwrite a bit if the bit that was there before writing is different? This way your not overwriting every bit, so guessing at the previous bit can lead you astray. Or is that impossible?
Awesome.

I love Tries, I implemented one last year for a bog standard auto-complete suggestion box. While they may not be the fastest or most efficient data structures in the world, they're simple to write and have very reasonable performance.
I have noticed most people have their email addresses publicly displayed (in some human readable form), or have web pages with ways to contact them. In that note, I have been contacted via HN before and have met some people as well. Considering the ultimate purpose of a Private Messaging feature is to allow communication between two willing parties - the existing infrastructure is already there.

Moreover, more influential people who very strictly value their time and privacy (Matt Cutts for instance) might not be comfortable having an open avenue by which anyone can contact them.

More importantly, if you have someone's full name, there's a reasonably high chance you can find a proper way to contact them - provided you are determined enough to do it.
So this is a bad decision because one technology you like is already entrenched so there's no point fighting it, and also a bad decision because another technology you don't like is so entrenched that it'll be around for years because Google won't fight it (in one very particular way, which happens to benefit Apple most).

Many of your arguments are valid against WebM (basically lack of maturity, support) but the exact same arguments can be made about HTML5 video with any codec (not supported by the majority of bowsers, it's not a standard yet, where is the DRM, hardware acceleration is patchy, captioning support is still sketchy, easy switching between streams etc.)

The set of those who oppose Flash as a closed web technology yet don't believe in royalty-free web standards is much larger than I thought it would be. But it seems to be mostly the cultier end of the Mac fanbase. It's a bit of a shame that they can't just come out and say "this affects me because Apple supports neither the current defacto standard H.264 via Flash, nor the coming de jure standard WebM via HTML5 on my portable iOS devices". (Note that the more normal Apple users were already annoyed, at Apple, for the first half of that lack of support on their iPads.)

Flash is in no-way teetering on the brink, and this decision by Google has minimal impact compared with the fact that 99% of web video is served via Flash. The only thing likely to make a dent in that number is changes at Youtube. So if you really hate Flash that much, I'd stay on their good side.
My 2 cents:

3. Habits are often formed because of/to adapt the environment. (evolution?) Hang out with smoker friends all the time, higher chance of becoming a smoker. Or if you have a door that doesn't shut/lock properly. It could lead you to form a habit of double checking the door every time you close it. Fixing the door would probably cause you to lose that habit.

6. A lot of behaviors are set off by certain triggers. It could be different for everyone. Smoker trying to quit should probably avoid being at places where everyone is smoking. AA member probably should avoid going to bars. Recognizing triggers allow you to avoid things that lead to undesired compulsive behaviors. At the same time they can be used to create desirable ones. Perhaps listening to motivational music or phrases will trigger someone to study and seek self improvement.
Its weird, I read this post over and over again to remind me of -i-dont-know-exactly-what-

I guess it reminds me of:
1) Dont be arrogant
2) People that believe in you could be wrong too
3) You dont know it all
4) Apologies need to be sincere
5) Man up!

Im sure it reminds me of other things; but I cant think of it right now.
IMO, build system for daily work has two very important properties: correctness and speed. Scons seems to get correctness right, but fails to be fast enough (see e.g. http://gamesfromwithin.com/bad-news-for-scons-fans)

Now, there is a third important property, which is clarity. But clarity for a new-comer is less important than a clarity for a person that uses build system daily.

I investigated several alternatives to make for our C++ game framework and settled to Waf. It's quite complex and side-effect of that has caused that we haven't integrated many of our tools to build system, just because doing so requires deep understanding of Waf model. Which I haven't acquired, well, mainly because of laziness.

Thus, clarity can affect both correctness and speed in practical situations of lazy people like myself.

What I like about redo is the simplicity. Based on my initial experiences, it seems that aside multiple output files problem, it doesn't get in to your way.
I have a script that mounts a tiny ramdisk, fetches a statically compiled shred binary I've compiled, and proceeds to shred each disk attached to the system up to 25 times. I generally use this when decommissioning servers not under my direct control.
I am on channels dedicated to projects i am using:
#Node.js @ irc.freenode.org
#gentoo @ irc.freenode.org (also #gentoo-ru)
#perl @ irc.perl.org
#ru.pm @ irc.perl.org (russian perl community)
#anime @ irc.freenode.org (just old love :3)
Yeah, I don't think hard drives work like that. You can modally read or write at each head, not simultaneously, and the granularity has to be larger than a bit (maybe a byte?)
They are already unreasonable, hence the fact that they can't be mandated in a W3C standard, many governments have laws saying their communications shouldn't use such a codec, Mozilla can't ship it etc.
Gold has gone from $725 USD/ounce in the 2008 US economic crash to nearly $1400 USD/ounce today. This is likely more due to the fact that the USD is falling out of favour worldwide than hype, though.
Agreed, I was saying $30 is low for fulltime workers. For a freelancer, given that they can only bill so many hours as you say besides other expenses and risk that employees do not have it is simply reckless.
Symbian gave access to the active cell only.

I heard a story that back then this was required by operators, because with good access to neighbouring cells and their signal strengths, people could easily build tools to compare networks in different areas and "prove" that one operator is better than the other. I don't know if the story is true.

You can do very accurate locationing with neighbouring cells and cloud-based database and some simple Bayesian modelling. Google does something similar with their non-GPS locationing.
Aerial view of the Brisbane floods
Let's not forget that, at least in my opinion, part of what makes HN great is it follows the old Unix tradition: it does one thing well.

I have always liked HN because it is simple, no-frills, totally focused on one thing.
That's pretty darn close - amazing that I'd never heard of it before. I'll send some feedback - it Doesn't let me upvote on comments, and the UP and Down arrows are still pretty close to each other - but it's worlds better than trying to do it through news.ycombinator.com. Very nicely done.
So now any browser on any system that doesn't have Flash installed is non-standard?
ARobots - a robot programming game in 8086 assembly
I was just curious on what this man had to say about Twitter and I found this

Twitter is the New CB radio

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2351932,00.asp
This old forgotten programming game stole my Friday afternoon!
I'd be happy to run a tournament if anyone's interested :-)
It's a legitimate concern given the potential, but perhaps not a realistic concern.

Consider though, the data is digital, and error corrected, but it is written onto a fundamentally analog medium. By reading the medium you can easily determine the last written data which then lets you determine to a rather high precision the signal that was used to write that data (because it's all digital). That then allows you to subtract that signal from your analysis without leaving a ton of residual noise. Now perhaps there isn't much left after that, but what is left will be designed to be read even in the midst of noise, because it employs error correction. Who knows what the theoretical limit of such detection is with state of the art technology.

The evidence does tend to argue against any similar techniques of data recovery being used in practice anywhere today. Does that mean you should feel safe?

Much of Feenberg's argument here rests on technology. STM, MFM scanning. Image storage and processing. Tens of terabytes of data would need to be captured and processed, etc. Technology is not static though. What is the likelihood that there will be significant advances in STM/MFM scanning in the near future? In image storage and processing? In storage capacities in the ten terabyte range? For all of these it's a near certainty that we will continue to see exponential advances for the foreseeable future.

So perhaps abandoning your hard-drive that has been "wiped" once to the vagaries of the world is a safe bet today. But what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all of those technologies have advanced remarkably and it is not only possible but perhaps even trivial to recover data on such drives? That is the conundrum.

Generally speaking, if you think your drives have contained material which you do very much wish to remain confidential in perpetuity, it probably makes sense to destroy old hard-drives rather than re-sell them. Though the cost/benefit trade-off may be a bit different if you are a business with a lot of data.
Maaaaan I had this idea over 2 years ago... except my ideas revolved more around robotics. I wish I was a bit older so I had the resources (money) and time to work on these kinds of ideas that I have. Previously, all my time was consumed by school/internship/band (I was a signed, professional touring musician). And now all my time is consumed by getting my startup going... in the hopes that it will eventually be somewhat self-sustaining enough to cover my living costs while giving me time to pursue these other more interesting ideas. Sigh... sorry for the rant that I'm sure no one cares to read.
I use patch queue[1] to manage these short lived branch, and it works for my purpose. You just pop the patches and delete them all when you want to prunge the branch. It also make it easy for others to review your code.

If these short-lived branch will be merged back shortly. Bookmark is another alternatives.

[1] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MqExtension
[2] http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/BookmarksExtension
> If you are the only person in the world and refuse to collaborate with anyone, then it doesn't really matter what language you use.

Yup! And FWIW, I wrote an HTTP parser. And webserver. And DNS server. Amongst other bits and pieces I needed for Mibbit.

Programming isn't rocket science, I think more people should write everything themselves rather than rely on 3rd party libraries personally.

Yes, it's an investment to write your own libraries, but you end up knowing more, being able to maintain/fix bugs far easier, and often ending up with a far better solution.
Use Hackernewsers.com. It's what I've been using to contact other HNers (who doesn't list their contact email in the profile) to request for their permission to publish their comments in Hacker Monthly.
Any idea what's the difference between wipe and shred?
There is a guy who has about a dozen of apps in the store that (ab)use the headphone jack to power and control external hardware.

Among them is a laser pointer [1], a controller for RC power outlets [2] and countless others.

[1] http://hmb-tec.de/iPhoneApps/LaserPointer.html
[2] http://www.hmb-tec.de/HMB-TEC/Funksteckdose.html
(Links are in German)
Guide On Making Quick Money Using Fiverr
Some drives have glass platters AFAIK. This would explain how this one was broken.
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No one cares about H.264 via HTML5, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow.

Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month (they also support H.264 and legacy VP6 via Flash). The hardware churn rate in mobile will solve this problem rapidly and the gaps can be filled quite easily by software wherever there is a will.
> you have to extend this globally if you are planning to expand your market globally.

Not necessarily. Quite to the contrary: welcome to the world of those living in soft colonies. Sure, we pay the same premium price for a service that is only a fraction of the kind of service you get in the US[A]. You pay more.

World economy and its supporting legal framework is built to naturally shore-up the financial power of western, chiefly USA economies (mostly through petrodollars and entertainment industry, namely AAPL).

And the funny thing is, people like it, just like junk TV (this is just for those wishing to downvote this) -- this is how soft dictatures work (sometimes it is not so soft, see "rogue" states).

But imagine the rest of the world, were the premium price is mandatory for basic goods, not just "shiny cool" stuff.
It's impossible, because of the way data is encoded before hitting the platters : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run_Length_Limited
Is the current lack of support in WebM for mobile devices really an issue? I know the carriers would love you to burn through your monthly data allowance as fast as possible but my understanding is that generally (with the exception of South Korea and Japan) there was little interest in viewing video on mobile devices. I tihnk that is likely to change but it will not be hampered by the poor support in current generation hardware.
Could you give the name of one of these companies?
Ask HN: What Python IDE do you use?
Hi everyone,

Since the last thread on this topic was almost 3 years old, I thought I should probably start a new one since the Python IDE landscape probably have changed a lot.

Please list the Python IDEs you use, the platform you develop on / to, and the pros and cons.
Agreed.

I got the hell away from Digg because of its push towards being "social." While messaging isn't that big of a feature I feel that if people here want to find/contact each other they will.

We're all pretty smart individuals if we want to contact/find someone we will be able to if they want to be contacted/found.