skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"enterprise" disk is just that; it's just disk. I've not seen a disk with an onboard battery. You can put a raid controller in front of your disks, with or without battery backed cache. (most raid cards have an optional battery module.) But, even many gold plated 'corporate' systems I've seen omit the battery, as it's usually not cheap.

My personal opinion is that raid controllers are of little value without battery backed cache.

I just use MD in front of 'enterprise sata' drives, as without doubling my total cost for storage, I can't get a raid card, as far as I can tell, which is better than MD, and really, if I was to double my storage cost, simply buying twice as many spindles would get me better bang for my buck, I think, than a hardware raid card that cost that much.
That's a bit like saying "I bought a plane ticket, and if I want to cram multiple people, cargo, or whatever into the seat that's MY decision and the airline should not give a damn".

There's no underlying issue. You accepted their offer of a subsidized handset in exchange for entering into a contract to buy voice & data for that handset, or an equivalent, for a period of time. Your agreement pertains to that type of device only, clearly stated in the T&C's.

Now, if you want to argue that tethering charges to use your bandwidth is a dick move, or that mobile operators should NOT be able to discriminate, or charge more just because you own a certain device, then I completely agree. But neither of those are what you agreed to.
Ranges are 240V and 50 Amps; clothes dryers are 240 V and 30 Amps. Both have 3 prong plugs that are much larger than 120 V outlets, the dryer plug has an L-shaped prong so it can't be inserted into a range outlet. (The reason you don't want the dryer plugged into a range outlet, is the internal wiring is inadequate for 50 amp loads, and can burn out without tripping the 50 amp breaker on range circuits.)
I think there are sysadmins blocking it preemptively as we speak.
Who Is Recovering From The Google Farmer/Panda Update?
EMR is a mess too. The Amazon-blessed Pig is almost a year and 2 major releases behind, and the official EMR documentation seems to describe a version of EMR that doesn't even exist.

"Elastic" is AWS's claim to fame, but I am not seeing it.

Trying to resize an EMR cluster (which is half the point of having an EMR cluster instead of buying our own hardware) generates the cryptic error "Error: Cannot add instance groups to a master only job flow" that is not documented anywhere.

(Why would Amazon even implement a "master only job flow", which serves no purpose at all?)
No, but close. Ex, ex, ex.
Each point release typically bumps the version of Google's V8 engine thats included too. So its bugfixes + the occasional performance optimization from Google.
Please don't make me create a new login account. I am the proverbial "on the edge of the back button" user right now, and this login button is a hurdle preventing me from making a comment about an interesting article. The energy potential just isn't low enough for me to jump right now.

Edit: Facebook OAuth/OpenID/Google accounts are a great way to get users to login FAST.
Jumio's anti-cash video hoodwinks Huffington Post readers
I did a blog post on this sort of thing: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2010/10/25/those-who-wor...

Sadly, I think that there are too many people in power who want the current arrangement to persist. Allowing people to work more creatively is great for society, but it's bad for the people who currently hold power (who care more about their relative position in society than the health of society as a whole). I don't see a non-confrontational solution.

I'm half socialist. I actually think the best way out is to provide a substantial basic income. Emphasis on basic, not minimum, income. The difference is that MI means the government makes up the difference for low earners, whereas BI is an amount (of cash and services, such as healthcare and education) that everyone-- rich, poor, or middle-class-- gets. Then there's no "welfare valley" where a person becomes poorer by getting a job; one's income is a monotonically increasing function, as it should be, of what one earns. I think the BI should be about 50% of society's income, financed through flat taxation, a small wealth tax at the upper end, and very high (90+ at top) inheritance taxes. The other 50% is distributed by a free market. This actually makes most middle-class peoples' net tax (remember that they get the BI as well) lower. I would also, if you haven't guessed this, cut the military budget dramatically.

Once BI is in place, you don't need the patchwork of semi-authoritarian and conditional welfare programs that require bureaucracies to prevent abuse and fraud or determine who should get it and who not: everyone gets it. The rest of the wealth is allowed to flow on an essentially free market (so you have a capitalistic engine on top of the socialist infrastructure). It's freer than the one we have. For example, once everyone has basic income, you don't need a minimum wage (which is just a clumsy minimum-income program paid-for by low-end employers, who compensate by hiring less, creating unemployment).

No one has to work, so the least productive people probably use the option not to work, but the most productive people do a lot more: they're more creative, autonomous, and effective. Basic income wouldn't stop most people from working, but it would dramatically change how they work-- for the better. The net gain is positive. The worst thing about basic income is that it might create an underclass of entitled parasites at the bottom of society, but authoritarian corporate capitalism has a class of entitled parasites at the top of it, and that's a lot more unhealthy for society.

One partial fix might be to "fix" job searching, but internet career sites are nothing new and, while they might match talented people more efficiently with jobs, don't fix the underlying problems of corporate capitalism. Startups are great, for people privileged enough to do them and connected enough to have a shot, but in the "real world", bad people are on top and hold the cards.
Lack of civilization doesn't cause people to loot or to become bullies. Growing up in the lack of civilization does.
Monster Beats Dr Dre Earphones-Red
The carriers are not the sort of businesses who are well-known for thinking ahead.
Isn't EBS intended for stuff like Hadoop job temporary data used during processing?

This kind of complaint reminds me of people who buy a product that does A very well, but then they trash it in reviews for not doing B. It was never advertised as doing B, but you'd never know that from the complaining.
Nice!
I'm not really digging the design (I'm not a neon color person), but really cool info.

I didn't sign up though because I wanted to login with Twitter. I don't like creating a million accounts and connecting to twitter would allow you a social promotion bonus.
How little you know, and some useful commands.
Why would you bring those minerals back to earth? You mine minerals on the moon so you can manufacture things on the moon, so that you can build the machinery necessary to visit other stars outside of earth's gravity well, so that you can reduce the energy needed to launch an interplanetary expedition, so that you can solve your energy/propulsion problems.
Larry Summers Exit Interview [pdf]
Ryan Dahl Intro to Node.js Presentation from Feb 22[video]
Larry Page & Sergey Brin: Academy of Achievement Interview (2000)
Performance. If you have n objects with m methods, that creates n * m function objects. With "normal" prototypal inheritance where those methods are on the prototype, it only requires n objects + m functions.
I think what's neat about this guy's approach is he's morphed subreddits into a fully complemented, distributed algebra by letting you take intersections and unions of different "subcategories" of discussion.

I suppose one could could argue "isn't any interface with tagging basically doing this?" To be fair, del.icio.us and the like usually let you combine tags in some way, but none of them get out of your way enough or have sufficiently simple voting mechanisms to be a really nice way to grok news. None of them implement a nice comment system, either.

This is like having your cake and eating it too! If only I didn't have to register an account to comment...
Eric schmidt is there for the execution. He's a master of that.
Facebook removes the comment button and more
At the end Manton says:

>Get rid of exclusive distribution, and Apple can be more creative about charging developers who do want to participate in the App Store

I like Manton, but:

1) Exclusive distribution is the wall of the garden. As mobile ascends the garden is richer and more concentrated, drawing more varmints. For most people if their PC doesn't work it's annoying, if your phone doesn't work it's unacceptable.

2)As for Apple being more creative with charges...They certainly can't charge any developers more than 30%, but what about less. He himself points out, you have to be consistent in your fees or everyone will move to the cheapest option.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jennifer-boden/1/86/ba6

Unless Amazon has managers named Jen Boden, Jen Boden
is a Business and HR director, not IT director.
PyCon 2011: Panel – Python in Schools Talk
All YC founders
This thing, with the letters: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Tel...

(I'm not actually sure what the real name for it is.)
Pray for Japan Wallpaper Collection
One week after the twin disasters triggered Japan, media worldwide has still been shocking with what is happening in the aftermath period. According to CNN, more than 6.5k people has died and nearly 10k are missing. The 9.0 magnitude earthquake last week was horrible, then the tsunami was another shocked disaster as well but now, all people in Japan is facing a more dangerous disaster from atomic accident.
Stop the EBS hate and make sweet RAID6 love
Update: I added a project web site with a FAQ here:

http://mckoss.github.com/namespace/
Everything mentioned here is good. I also like RailsCasts - Ryan does a fantastic job with all his screen casts (http://railscasts.com/).
YC app feedback - readable format bookmarklet
Want to get feedback on your YC app? This bookmarklet turns your YC App into a readable format that you can easily copy-paste into an email.

javascript:(function(e,a,g,h,f,c,b,d){if(!(f=e.jQuery)||g>f.fn.jquery||h(f)){c=a.createElement("script");c.type="text/javascript";c.src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/"+g+"/jquery.min.js";c.onload=c.onreadystatechange=function(){if(!b&&(!(d=this.readyState)||d=="loaded"||d=="complete")){h((f=e.jQuery).noConflict(1),b=1);f(c).remove()}};a.documentElement.childNodes[0].appendChild(c)}})(window,document,"1.3.2",function($,L){var str = '';$('form table tr td').each(function(index){var isInput = 0;var iVal = '';if($(this).find('input').length > 0){isInput = 1;iVal = $(this).find('input').val();}if($(this).find('textarea').length > 0){isInput = 1;iVal = $(this).find('textarea').val();}if($(this).find('select').length > 0){isInput = 1;iVal = $(this).find('select option:selected').text();}if(isInput){str = str + '<div>'+iVal+'</div><br /><br />';} else {str = str + '<div><strong>'+$(this).text()+'</strong></div>';}});$('body').prepend('<div>'+str+'</div><br /<br />');});

This nicely complements the "YC Apply Auto-Save bookmarklet" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2334012
I got to "this app wants to see all of your browsing history" and thought to myself, "why the hell would they want that?" So I clicked cancel and didn't install it.
India is Undergoing Brain Decay Not Brain Drain
A software developers introduction to control theory
The implicit assumption he makes is that small businesses are incapable of positively affecting a lot of people's lives.

A (slightly tenuous) example: I derive significantly more value from Instapaper/VLC/Thunderbird than I do from Twitter or Facebook.

2 of those 3 are not even for-profit ventures and the other one is very much a 'small business'.
I will generally have an "imports" type line at the top of my module, and then use the abbreviated name in the code. This is similar to Python's "from module import name" pattern.

var library = namespace.com.foo.bar.baz;
...
var obj = new library.FooBar();

It's generally considered a best practice (in the Python community) to leave the external module name (like "library", above) so that someone reading your code can recognize which functions are external to your module, and which ones are local.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Just to put things in context, the GDP of France is 2 Trillion.
Yahoo to offload Delicious as early as next week
I think he means it. I have questions about whether he can actually accomplish it, but we'll see how they turn out...
Being very capable and industrious does not make a person invulnerable to the indescribable appeal of picking the most awesome phone number possible. In fact, that's probably the only reason I even tried Google Voice.
When a project has 200 engineers and 50 in "overhead" (designers, marketing etc.) behind it though, and you break it off - how is that a startup? It's still a 250-person company. I don't see how just cutting it off restores agility that a tiny team with a nascent project has. A large project has more stuff to break with more people that need more links to communicate, increasing the inertia of the whole thing and slowing it down.

What might be possible is some type of Skunk Works with independent leadership, which generates new ideas but leaves the fleshing out to the rest of the company. It wouldn't be associated with longterm management of one project though, more as an incubator and consultancy that spins off and checks in on projects they initiated.
anyone knows of a similar resource for physics?
As posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342058 four hours ago.
Looking at that SQL reminds me how much better Oracle & MS SQL Server are at doing queries like that (thanks to analytic functions). You could get that table access down to 1 single index scan, instead of 4+.

MySQL and Postgres are fine at OLTP but when you get into analytics and reporting, they really show their lack of features.
You should use bind variables instead of directly inserting php variables in your SQL. You're just opening yourself up for SQL injection.
>> WHERE poll_id != '$poll_id'
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing.
Adobe Flash 10.2 now available for Android smartphones and Motorola XOOM
If anybody's interested, here's my considerably less extravagant Zsh prompt[1]. It shows the current directory along with what top level directory you're in on the right prompt along with VCS info. The left side shows backgrounded jobs marked with pipes but otherwise is just a $ so command lines wrap less frequently. It uses the vcs_info functionality from zshkit[2].

[1] http://gr.ayre.st/s/screenshots/git/git_working.png
[2] https://github.com/mattfoster/zshkit

function prompt_grayrest_setup {
unset PS1 PS2 PS3 PS4 PROMPT RPROMPT
autoload colors zsh/terminfo
if [[ "$terminfo[colors]" -ge 8 ]]; then
colors
fi
# Colours accepted as arguments
local u_col=${1:-'green'}
local h_col=${2:-'blue'}
local d_col=${3:-'yellow'}
local d_col_pre='blue'
local job_color='yellow'
local n_tru=${4:-'blue'}
local n_fal=${5:-'yellow'}
# looks like: ee1mpf@eepc-tsar16 ~ $
ps1=(
# "%{$fg_bold[$u_col]%}%n@"
# "%{$fg_bold[$h_col]%}%m "
"%1(j.%{$fg_bold[$job_color]%}.)"
"%4(j.%{$reset_color$fg[$job_color]%}[%{$reset_color$fg_bold[$job_color]%}%j%{$reset_color$fg[$job_color]%}] .%3(j.||| .%2(j.|| .%1(j.| .))))"
"%{$reset_color%}"
"%{%(?.$fg[$n_tru].$fg[$n_fal])%}$ "
"%{$reset_color%}"
)
ps2=(
"%_ %{$fg[$d_col]%}-> "
"%{$reset_color%}"
)
rps1=(
'%{$fg[$b_col]%}${vcs_info_msg_0_}%{$reset_color%}'
" %{$fg[$d_col]%}%(4~.%{$fg[$d_col_pre]%}%-1~%{$fg[$d_col]%} %2~.%3~) %{$reset_color%}"
)
PS2="${(j::)ps2}"
PS1="${(j::)ps1}"
RPS1="${(j::)rps1}"
}
I'm not convinced that letting everyone do what they want/feel passionate about is a good thing for the economy, and I'm quite sure that it's not the way it is because of a conspiracy of the people in power. Many, many people feel most passionate about things with nearly 0 economic value, and if they all had jobs doing those things, the economies that followed this kind of thinking would probably not be doing so well.

There are many things that need to be done to keep something as complicated as a world economy of specialists running, and many of them are not fun or intellectually stimulating. Maybe when robots have replaced us in all those roles, and programmers can wield the labor of a thousand workers.
YC reading habits - comments more than articles
Greetings,

I noticed that I tend to read the comments, and refresh the comments page, a lot while reading the actual article they refer to less than 50% of the time. I can usually get the gist of the article from the comments, and find the comments more interesting.

Anyone else like this?
>200 engineers and 50 in 'overhead' (designers, marketing etc.)

Is this a deliberate attempt to troll or are designers nothing but overhead? Poor design, particularly poor interface design, is considered a major factor in many of Google's product failures (Wave, Google TV, Buzz, et al). User interface design and consistency are frequently cited as the largest remaining gap between the Android and iOS experiences.
As always, munificent is right on the money.

The "closure pattern" is one of the most serious JavaScript anti-patterns -- it doesn't make much of a difference in tiny scripts, but for any decent-size JavaScript application, it can hurt performance terribly, especially regarding memory use.

For example, benchmarking the creation of 1 million objects, each with 10 member functions, in both the prototypal style and the closure style (in Chrome):

1 million prototypal objects: Brief pause, 32.4 MB

1 million closure objects: Minutes wait, 368.1 MB

If you're doing object-oriented code in JS, please use the "prototype" property, like the language is designed to do.

For more info, here's Brendan Eich on the subject:

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20110216
If you're an idiot, so am I. It gets really tough.
If Apple is really losing money on the App Store, then maybe they ought to change the model.

Make the yearly developer license cheaper - $50 or $20 or whatever. Then charge another $20 or so every year for each app that you publish. Developers who put out a lot of apps will pay more than those who have the license but have not even released an app yet.

They could come up with a way to charge for every 'major revision' (ie, not a bug-fix update) you push out so that developers who are constantly putting up updates (and thus using more of the reviewer's time) end up paying more.
There are target funds that your friend can invest in. Basically you pick a retirement date, and the portfolio will auto adjust as your retirement approaches, e.g. it may invest more in stocks in the beginning and become more risk adverse over time. I'm not a financial advisor, just an engineer, but I do like Vangaurd funds because it's low cost.
Who is the best person to run a startup? The person with the most experience, passion, and #### to lose.
Terrible example by me, sure. But do you know of any Middle Eastern revolutions supported by AIM? Long form journalism ala @MayorEmanuel? Any academic studies examining mood on AIM and how it correlates to stock market performance?
I remember him saying that the photo on the cover was one he explicitly asked not to be used as it was just taken as a fun shot.
Disambiguation by business might be an idea - but then which TV1 gets priority? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV1
Slicehost: How A Goal-Setting Bootstrapper Launch & Sold His Business
> But questions like "Why is there so much materialism? Why is it so competitive?" strike me as absurd.

Agreed. That kind of question I think only comes from a place where one has not experienced things like having a child or spouse or parent needing $100k+ for a medical problem. (To give just one easy example.) Or at least, not having the foresight to consider such events.
"Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page’s suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another’s customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page’s instinctive brilliance."

A forum? Where users can answer each other's questions? What unconventional brilliance!

It's not like thousands of other companies have forums where users can answer each other's questions.

"Page reiterated his complaint, charging that it was taking at least 600 milliseconds to reload. Buchheit thought, “You can’t know that.” But when he got back to his office he checked the server logs. Six hundred milliseconds. “He nailed it,” Buchheit says."

What preternatural powers of observation Page must have had to guess that a page reload took half a second.

This article is such a fawning puff-piece.
Ctrl-X E didn't work for me. Anyone know what shell that's for? (I'm using bash.)
List of Free Article Directory Scripts
This reminds me of an interview with former NASA astronaut (and current director of the Veteran Administration's National Center for Patient Safety) who related that most people don't realize that the astronauts who died in the Challenger accident didn't die in the explosion:

> There are still many people that don't understand that the crew of the Challenger didn't die until they hit the water. They were all strapped into their seats in a basically intact crew module; their hearts were still beating when they hit the water. People think they were blown to smithereens, but that's not what happened.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/...
That was bash, Try Cntrl-X Cntrl-E instead.
I'm advocating basic income, not "everyone does what they feel passionate about". After this one very important socialist reform, we'd still have an essentially free market. In fact, we'd have a freer market because people would be free, not forced by poverty to work. A lot of people don't have much vision or passion and would prefer doing things for money over not doing anything and settling for a lower-middle-class lifestyle. So the toilets would still be scrubbed, because people would pay others to do it.

On the other hand, the people who follow their passions would be merely living on not-very-much, but not at risk of starvation, long-term underemployment, medical bankruptcy, et cetera.
Ignore the government - eat seaweed to protect against radiation
> $20M will run out pretty quick.

my Linode hosting bill and Ramen receipts would beg to differ with you on that point. ;)
The original Reddit blog post indicates there were latency problems initially. It's not clear what caused followon problems, but the latency may have triggered a bad condition for their replication.
Anne Hathaway in the news == no news of importance.

News of importance == bad news == shares in general go down.

...but really, if you have a good theory, don't jawbone on it; open a brokerage account and make your fortune.
his next startup? I'm calling it now: Dug.com
There is something touching in these stories. Not sure if it's something that these guys "did that no one knew about" or the "brotherhood" or ... but .. Something I think was brave.

I'm sure some people disagree, but I would have left a vodka glass on this guy's grave. For sure! Spasibo!
I'm completely serious. The economic benefits of automated cars are staggering. And I mean trillions in net present value, not trillions in profits per year.
It's not clear this was a single volume problem so much as an issue with one or more network switches in that availability zone (if you look at the AWS service health notes for that date).

Even in your own data centre, if
your FC fabric goes wonky, your whole SAN is hosed.