skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without the scribd bullshit - http://athens.indymedia.org/local/webcast/uploads/frankfurt_...
The law of not revealing gender before birth has been there for a while, doesn't seem to work all the time and moreover the perception/acceptance towards girl child should change which is slowly happening due to people getting educated.
Hi, I fully agree there is no such thing as multi tasking.

My workflow is purely linear! I'm just saying that if, in general, you're not able to split big problems into smaller ones, which are manageable in 10 minutes spans, then you should probably rethink the problem again.
Mark Cuban: Shark Tank & Success & Motivation
Something I just realised (not sure if you took this into account in your calculations) is that the article we linked was published in 2009.

In all of their calculations they list 1.5tb Sata HDDs as costing $129. Those same disks can now be purchased for between $50 and $60. So at 45 disks in each of the servers that would be a saving of $3105 per server or ~$46,000 in total savings.
I don't see any connection between being "super-hero" and a mindset when you don't know how your code works inside.
The fundamental problem seems to be that of parents making choices that either benefit primarily them at the expense of their children or benefit their children only if they grow up to be exactly like their parents. This is somewhat unusual (one would assume that most parents would place their children before themselves), and it appears to be a trait common to many cultures in the third world (i.e., in addition to biased gender ratio, indoctrination of children into the tradition/religion/culture of their parents, child labor, arranged marriage, having lots more children than is sustainable to be "competitive" with other families and to ensure help from your offspring into the old age as a kind of "life/health insurance").

I wonder whether availability of medical care and better retirement plans is a strong predictor of how much "child exploitation" by whatever measure is taking place.

We don't have slavery anymore, and we have had emancipation of women in many places, yet most of the world has never had the emancipation of the future generation.
At $5k per unit (first froogle result) that's only $35k for a petabyte; less than 1/3 the price of assembling your own backblaze-type storage. Not bad.
Ask HN: Is there a good, zero-knowledge backup and synchronisation program?
Hi HN,
like everyone else, I need a good program that will backup and synchronise my files across computers. I don't trust Dropbox with all my data, so I came across SpiderOak and paid for a yearly account.

However, SpiderOak takes up 100% of my CPU for minutes on end, regularly freezes in some states, and a few days ago it stopped working altogether (it refuses to synchronise, it just sits there taking up all my CPU and even my attempts to reinstall it have been thwarted as it freezes on "Downloading data").

Is there a reliable, zero-knowledge program that will backup and synchronise data across computers? It's something indispensable but I'm disappointed with how buggy SpiderOak is, and all the alternatives I've seen are either backup-only or not zero-knowledge...

I'd appreciate any help!
Likewise. I just set up a staging server based on the Linode tutorials. In another month I would have been hosed.
You are right about email not being the correct medium for instant response, and the 10 minutes SLA I mention in the blog post is provocative. But as much as I respect other people's time, I've had enough of people pretending to be doing something so clever / urgent / important that they can't allocate a few minutes here and then to read their emails.
If you don't want to be accountable for answering correspondance you're being sent, then don't communicate your email address.
China also has excess men. And India and China already have a territorial conflict. If there is a third world war, it's probably going to be there.
The iphone has been a viable platform for much longer. For any given company their Android offering will most likely be more immature
TIOBE language popularity absurdity
Nick Coghlan suggests reader macros for Python
Best techniques for Nurturing kids creativity,communication skills
Fellow hackers, My son is about to start schooling. Am thinking of putting him to Monetssori school. Please suggest tips/pointers/Links to go about in nurturing his communication skills, creativity and instill confidence. What you feel are the most important aspects in your life which made you top hackers/entrepreneurs??
> The tactics of the American and French revolutions were likely classifed as "despicable" as well by the out of touch and complacent, but history would be much different without these tactics. Many see Sony's abuse of power as "despicable". Sony is free to withdraw their aggression at any time.

To compare the state we're in to those periods in time is very misleading. We have one of the highest qualities of life and some of the strongest freedoms than at any other point in time. Let's not lose perspective.

We should "fight" for what we believe in and try to effect positive change, but we are extremely far away from the extreme times that warranted extreme revolutionary measures.

> Pretty much anyone I talk to, regardless of their political persuasion, doesn't feel the system is working.

That's a great sign that it is.

Reminds me of the quote: "You know it's a great deal when both sides feel screwed."
How long to you need to store it all for?

For the ~$50k per month you're spending on S3, it doesn't take too long to justify your own big robot tape library. I'd be keeping my eyes open for somebody decommissioning one (if you're in Sydney, Australia, I've heard rumors about a certain bank who acquired another bank who're building a new data center to combine the two banks - I suspect there'll be a lot of decommissioned gear on the 2nd hand market shortly)
For all the people saying X search engine is better, here's a tool to compare Google and Bing (and Yahoo) results without bias. It simply shows you three columns of results, you click on the one with the best results, and it reveals which ones came from which search engines.

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/

Note: I am not affiliated with this site in any way.
There's nothing transitional about it. This is what cloud storage looks like at its finest.

Any model where you don't keep your files in local storage and sync is going to be slow, error-prone and annoying, just like all the solutions we've had before. There's certainly a case for more OS integration, and more powerful syncing, but this is the right model.

I don't expect Apple to make such a big dent. They'll be in their Apple-only tunnel vision and would not be able to compete with a solution that can sync across Windows, Linux, Android, etc.
I think they are a great tool, they will find their niche and be used sometimes, others not. Too often the media seems to think something new has to be either the next big, giant thing or they are a failure.
The results are pretty much what you'd expect, really. English proficiency is largely a cultural given. Movie dubbing and such definitely plays a big part of this, as language is largely assimilated by listening to it. If you're taught English by a French person and you never hear anyone else speak English, well, you're going to be a lot worse at English than someone with a comparable education who has more access to spoken English.

It's a shame that the study only shows results per country, and not per language region in countries. For instance in Belgium there are three language regions -- Dutch, French and German -- and I'm willing to bet that the results in each region are much closer to those of Holland/France/Germany than this meaningless average.

The reason why English is rather hard for speakers of Asian languages should be pretty obvious: there is such a big difference in sounds. The sounds used in English are much closer to those used in Spanish than Japanese, even though English and Spanish are already miles apart..
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Please note that the theory that Uralic languages such as Finnish or Hungarian and Altaic languages such as Turkic or Mongolese are somehow related is highly controversial and not supported by the large majority of the linguicists today. Japanese is not even considered to be an Altaic language.
Given how often I get synchronization conflicts on regular files with Dropbox, I would be quite wary to use it to put and synchronize repositories there. The problem is (obviously) that Dropbox is really a local synchronized folder, so a Git push will only be reflected on Dropbox if there is an opportunity to sync. So, if you have mobile coworkers, it's easy to mess up things.

Given that there are many companies who offer repository hosting for just a few dollars per month (also for teams), I cannot see why one would go this route.
Perhaps a rehash of the theft of the Sabines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women
>I don't think 9 downvotes over 4 comments qualify for such harsh punishment

Personally I'd say that depends. If you have a positive comment history then no you sholdn't be banned for a small run of comments that the community finds unhelpful to the conversation.

If all of your first comments are downvoted then I suggest you make a new account and wait until you have something positive to say.

Note that positive doesn't mean affirming groupthink, or karma whoring (which is hard here but looks possible) but adding to the conversation. An opposing opinion well expressed often won't win a lot of upvotes but it usually gets more ups than downs.
Disappointed.

I've got nothing against YC, but I've seemed to go into "success is the best revenge" mode ha.

To be honest it's a good wake up call, I need to stop treating my start up as a lifestyle business.

Dropping out of university at the end of this term and i'm pushing forward with it.

Decisions been made.
To me, the most jaw-dropping post was about WiFi notifications. Android is perfectly capable of doing what he wants, it just seems whatever phone he was looking at didn't have that feature enabled at that time. That "gripe" is pure troll.

It would be like me complaining that an iPhone kept annoying me by showing me nearby WiFi networks everywhere I went. You can flip the switch on that, too (and with the exact same level of effort). Complaining is just being willfully obtuse and insisting the rest of the world should set their defaults the way you want them.
There's many options for hosting, you could run a virtual machine running a web server, you could use Amazon web services (they have a free instance for 1 year, enough for testing) ... If you really want to host yourself, the virtual machine might be an interesting option. You can download a ready made instance (eg. Bitnami instances) and use VMware player to run it) ... If that's too complicated you can find much easier solutions where everything is readily configured but mostly they cost you money.
My chief tech/gadget metric of recommendation is 'Would I purchase this $expensive_electronic again?' I'm a big shopper at Amazon, but I don't care about the exact breakdown of stars a certain product gets. My usual method is to look at the total number of reviews (as a metric of popularity/community etc), and then to read the 5 star and 1 star reviews (and any that get voted up as most helpful).

I would love to see Amazon go to a binary recommendation system (thumbs up/thumbs down) with a free text review.
This has some good links - http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-blogs-about-data
I'd use off the shelf consumer hardware. High density Supermicro chassis with SAS uplinks back to a single server. 2+TB consumer low-power disks. Software raid (eg. ZFS) to manage it all. And finally, host it a site office or low-grade colocation facility.
Really great point. Slightly off topic, the standard for rating systems seems to be 5 stars, but I prefer 4 star systems because they force you to make a +/- choice with no cop out ambivalence choice. I'd be curious to see the same distance work applied to a four star system.
Just to add a couple ideas to your post:

> I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet

Microsoft doesn't either. I have no doubt Google's search will be superseded by an even more competent product. I just doubt Microsoft is able to deliver such thing. To go against Google you either need infinitely deep pockets or a technology so disruptive that it effectively neutralizes the size advantage Google has or turns into a disadvantage. Microsoft will go head-on with Google until it acknowledges failure, rename the product and try again. Much like the Black Knight on Monty Python's Holy Grail, they just won't quit. And, when they do, they'll claim victory.

> Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort

I remember it happening once - they went against Netscape. They could outspend Netscape 100 to one and bundle/force bundle their competitor with their OS and that's why they could crush Netscape. They can't outspend Google two to one.

Note: I remember how they took the air out of Netware with Windows for Workgroups. They recognized there was a market below the one Novell had nearly monopolized and took it before Novell could launch a competitor (something hard because it came - again - bundled with the client) and provided a smooth upgrade path to Windows NT. But that's not the same as with IE vs. NS - they had Lan Manager for eons before they realized they had a niche they could expand. And, like with IE, they could rely on bundling with their OS. I doubt Microsoft can put Google in that position.
This is probably a question of phonemes; Swedish has most of other language's strange sounds. :-)

(A phoneme Swedish lacks is the "th" of "think", that was a problem to learn.)
They could be good, but I think the user experience isn't quite there. I know on Android you have to download a barcode scanner app, which is easy enough, but until this starts being a standard feature, perhaps part of the camera application, or at the very least a pre-installed application, your average joe just won't get it.
But according to a comment on the post, "Chuck Norris can parse HTML with regex" (emphasis in original).

More seriously, when SO was newer, I remember the feeling that these things came in waves. For a few months, there was someone who responded to nearly every offending Ruby question (or answer) by pointing out that exceptions shouldn't be used for flow control. See these two by another poster for more on HTML and regexes[1][2].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/701166/can-you-provide-so...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/773340/can-you-provide-an...
How big is your company? If you have hundreds of employees with desktop computers, you could put extra Tb disks in them and work out a redundant distributed filesystem.

Still going to cost a lot for disks and a lot of do-it-yourself setup, but piggy backs on existing network and power infrastructure, no need for expensive datacenter kit or new machines/tape drives/libraries/etc. and you could build into your existing desktop maintenance and renewal procedures.

Do you want a hacky build-it-yourself solution?
Prehistoric Human Brain Found Pickled in Bog
Novell patent deal was modified, closing seems imminent now
Most of my experience has been with Ultrium TBH. But you can pick up Ultrium 1.5TB tapes for less than the cost of a equivalent sized hard drive, here in the UK at least.
Meta quibble...

Is it just me who starts reading articles like this, only to crash into sentences like this one:

"A Likert scale is a unidimensional scale on which the respondent expresses the level of agreement to a statement - typically in a 1 to 5 scale in which 1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly disagree."

And think snarky comments like "I should keep reading this article. Do I 1) strongly disagree or 5) strongly disagree?" (Then flick back to the site that linked to it to post that Snarky comment).
Side by side comparison of three popular feedback and survey management software
I think the main advantage here is the designer doesn't need to learn git, they just work away on a Dropbox folder without knowing it's a git repository. Additionally, the main git repository doesn't need to be in dropbox, just the designers remote.
You might look at Egnyte or Jungle Disk. We've used Egnyte for a few of our clients and had mixed results with reliability. Luckily they give you a 30 day trial, so you can try it out. Their pricing is also pretty decent.
Novel OS Work
Strangely, Western response to famine or war in impoverished countries has tended to exacerbate (or even create) the crises at hand. Doing something may be seen as a sensible thing, but perhaps Africa would have been better off if the West did nothing to help. Even though it involves the least effort, doing nothing is categorically the toughest thing.
I wish it was that cheap .. throw in the cost of the tapes and the price doubles.
BBC's Beauty of Maps available in its entirety
Because setting up a TCP connection is costly in terms of roundtrips/latency. With SSL inside even more.

Also when you have only 1 connection you might better utilize the bandwidth you have because of TCP's slow-start algo.
Also: the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population, which means there are more chances to come across untranslated sources of any kind, not only movies.

I'd say it's a generic trait of niche populations, that they gain better knowledge of languages in which information sources are available.

For example, I've consistently noticed programmers speak a better english than architects, and people who use some $RANDOM_NICHE_PLATFORM speak a better english than people who use $REALLY_POPULAR_PLATFORM, due to being forced to use english references.
It's silly to expect to be able to understand text in a foreign language. If you want to read APL, learn APL; It's a great language.
Insects with Rickettsia infection produce twice as many offspring
Looks like Localist.com
> So, Aussies... is it working for you that child sexual abuse is being lumped together with "gratuitous (by whose standards?) ... or offensive (to whom?) sexual fetishes?

For the most part I have few problems with our classification scheme. If you're genuinely interested in what goes in to a rating, the guidelines are quite easily available. (1)

It's interesting the attitude I find many foreigners, in particular North Americans have of a repulsion to any kind of censorship whilst simultaniously being ignorant of what our classification scheme actually does. The previous sentence was directed at your idea that the prohibition against the promotion of violence or illegal drugs would cause a hollywood film to be banned from Australian cinemas. It doesn't because context is a mitigating factor. Ignoring the issue of no 18+ rating for video games, the only thing that comes to mind that I wish hadn't been refused classification is 2002's Ken Park.

Forgive me if my attitude comes off as hostile, but I am increasingly annoyed at foreigners decrying our classification scheme as uniformly bad. I guess it's just different people having different values.

(1) http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/F2008C00126
Having people report to one person usually empowers them more than having them report to a committee. It also ensures 'vision control' in a much better way. So yes, and no, they're not at all different or incompatible.
My point was that it would be better than flying cars. E-ink screens will liberate us hackers from the confines of our offices and allow us to go and work outside in the sunshine. Can you imagine how much of a difference that will make?

It has just started to get warm here in the UK and I'm actually starting to feel twitches of envy for my friends who haven't managed to find proper jobs since graduating, or who haven't graduated yet. They're all having BBQs today.

Living in a country where sunshine is a scarce resource does odd things to your priorities.
Jetbrains producsts has a good reputation. It does not apply here.
The old nuclear plant was hit with both an earthquake and a tsunami over the design limits. It seems to have gone well, considering...

Disclaimer first: I'm absolutely no expert, by very far, on Japan or Japanese culture. I am writing this mostly to get answers from those who know better.

>>Don't you think the whole "lose face" part of the japanese culture is a run down model?

I don't know if I believe the face thing is the bad part.

I admire the hard work and dedication of the Japanese worker.

I'd guess (see disclaimer!) that the present problems rest with the higher levels of organisation in their society. A lack of accountability, from top to bottom.

Japan has, simplified, had a recession for close to two decades. I really don't want to know how a Western society would look in similar circumstances.
Do yourself a favor and get a real git repository. Using dropbox is indeed super easy but has two major caveats:

1. Git is agnostic to updates to the repo, as dropbox is not a supported transport method (as opposed to SSH for example). So, for example, git hooks won't work.

2. Dropbox is extremely susceptible to repo corruption in case of simultaneous updates. Restoring a corrupt repo is not a pleasant task.

For your sanity - don't do it.
As long as there's no 3G or other (affordable) wireless internet access on the London Underground or anywhere else where I would need my files, I'm simply not interested in purchasing a product that doesn't have local storage. I mean, imagine an iPhone that would stream everything, I couldn't even listen to music during my daily commute.
Very interesting.
Evaluating the English skills based on tests is like evaluating programmers based on how well they do on programming contests (i.e ICPC). For example, if this test was given to high school students about to graduate, I would expect China to be in top.
Rich men may find it difficult (socially) to chose a bride below their social class/caste and traditionally the daughter's parents have to pay the hefty dowry. But either way, it's generally the choice of the parents and not the bride or groom.
As you have already discovered, storing that data on S3 is rather expensive. S3 is priced in a way that makes sense for hot, important, accessible data; not for idle permanent archives.

I attacked a problem like this a few years ago, and found that the best solution at the time was to build servers with lots of big cheap hard drives and as little else as possible; similar to the BackBlaze idea but less impressive. I wrote it up here:

http://kylecordes.com/2008/big-raid

...but since hardware changes so fast, all of the details there are probably obsolete.

Extra servers with backup copies of data can be much more economically deployed in an office closet instead of a colo. There will be more downtime (power and bandwidth reliability), but if it's an idle backup, that won't matter.

Servers full of hard drives (20 TB worth or whatever) for long-term, un-accessed archives can be turned off (no power or heat), but opinions vary as to whether the on/off cycles for occasional access will reduce the total service life.
Thank you, both of those look good. Your comment reminded me of AeroFS, a synchronisation program that's peer to peer. I should give that a shot too, as it doesn't need to be zero-knowledge if nobody other than my computers see my data...
Of course I assume that I eventually notice the theft of a USB stick on which I put enough information for Dropbox to sync my entire tree. Does the article say that I can't revoke a machine's access via the web interface once the config.db for that machine has been copied?
Poll: If you have the ability, do you abstain from down voting?