skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* Most hard disks are actually multiple hard disk platters packaged together. Even with today's systems, the filesystem can multiplex data across the platters so that the platters mirror each other. Even on a single-platter drive, the file system could just mirror the data on the same platter.

* People want increasingly-higher-capacity, smaller, cheaper, thinner, lighter, and cooler laptops. Adding a second magnetic hard drive into a laptop runs counter to all those goals, as does the kind of mirroring described above. The consumer market demands higher capacity over safety.

* Solid state hard drives seem to be the future, at least for laptops. It might be practical to install dual SSDs into a laptop since they are smaller and lighter. It might even be practical to have a rotating set of three as a backup system. Eject hard disk #1, then insert hard disk #3. Hard disk #1 becomes the backup. Hard disk #3 gets synced with hard disk #2 until they mirror each other. Then, relabel the disks 1->2, 2->3, 3->1.

* People are being encouraged to save (or at least back up) their data on the network if it is really important.
Are we assuming the avian variety of bird? It makes a whole lot more sense if we don't.
I might be getting prematurely old and cranky at 25, but I am so tired of real smugness from Obama supporters that I can't laugh at faux-smugness.
But it didn't happen. No private organization ever produced something on the scale of the gulag or the Nazi concentration camps, even in places where government was very weak.
A good example of great customer service.
If you ever wonder how a good company should treat its customers, you should definitely take a look at StartupSchwag.

StartupSchwag, for those who do not know, sends you a monthly bag that includes geeky shirts (Disqus, FriendFeed, Pownce....) and other schwags.

Dealing with logistics when selling goods is a nightmare. In the last 12 months I have moved from city to city (Atlanta, Scottsdale, Honolulu....) and this company always manages to deliver the bag. When my bags were returned (which happened a few times at my new location) they sent me a few emails and try to figure what happened. They made sure all the bags returned were saved and they sent them again to the proper address.

When you email the company, you receive your answer within a few minutes or hours tops and you can tell this guys are friendly and like what they do.

If we are quick to denounce a bad customer service we should be quicker to report an excellent customer service as well.

StartupSchwag rocks.
Drobo is along the lines of what I am looking for. (I use a D-Link DNS 323)

Instead though, I want it to have a SATA interface so the problem would be solved in hardware. Time Capsule fails if the disk fails (and backups aren't stored elsewhere).
> 2. Lots of universities with excellent tech programs - Stanford, UC-B. Anything else? No

UCSB has a leading Computer Science program, with a really great talent pool for Computer Security in particular. UCSD has a fairly good department.

> 4. Very favorable laws? No. California has some of the worst labor laws and tax laws in the country. You only start companies here because you need the talent. There's no other reason to be in CA

It's favorable from the point of a tech worker. Which is why we like to stay here. For example, check out when a tech worker gets exempt status in California.

> 5. Capital gains taxes in CA are insane. Entrepreneurs beware.

Compared to New York's?
To clarify, GeoEye launched a mapping satellite to use for government and commercial use, and reported Google has an exclusive license whereby no other company can publish the publically imagery in a Google-Maps-style application.
I don't have any hard data, but my BS meter is going off.
> Actually, I used to work for a VC firm (and I wrote the article), so trust me, I more than "vaguely understand" how companies get funding, and they're not through these events. The companies that get funded would have gotten funding anyway and no one with a great product ever lacked for funding just because they couldn't get in front of a VC. We never went to these types of events looking for things to invest in.

I've worked at a company that secured funding because of connections made at one of these types of events. So yeah. I guess we're at an impasse, because your statement is exactly as unsupportable as mine.

> BTW... If your bottom line income (i.e. NY local taxes) is what you optimize for, you're probably not going to want to work for a startup anyway. Try a bank. I hear they have some nice cubes there.

I've made much more money in startups than I would have staying at a big company. And believe me, I know. I left a few people at Lockheed Martin (check out those 3% yearly raises!) and I've rejoined a few people who went to MS, and I've consistently been better paid, had at least equivalent benefits (better than LMCO, acceptably comparable to Microsoft) for a majority of the time.

Good luck with your startup, dawg.
> So, usually without changing any of your code, as 4, 8, 16 core CPUs come out, your Erlang script should theoretically run 4x, 8x, and 16x faster, respectively.

You might want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

The program would have to be 100% CPU-bound and the problem would have to be inherently parallelizable to see Nx speedup with N times as much CPU resource.

The kind of code that benefits most from more cores is the kind of code you probably should not write in Erlang actually.
My God, there's a "43folders"? Are there any blogs not following the awkward-two-digit-number-plus-a-noun naming convention nowadays?

86monocles.com is available, if anyone is interested.
I've dreamt Guitar Hero. And I dream in code sometimes, mostly when I've been working on language design. I only recall vague refactoring and syntax design alterations, but I probably have them all the time without my consciousness remembering.
"The consumer market demands higher capacity over safety."

My contention is that this is beginning to change. Short of video (and at the risk of being wrong in 5 years) there is nothing to do with a 500GB drive.

I think given the trade-off, consumers would choose safety.
Water Bears Can Survive Unprotected In Space
I agree with you 100%. I found myself asking after reading this article "isn't it possible for these two entities to collaborate and work with each other?" I don't think I've read anywhere on the Internet about Google trying to beat anyone. They made a browser, and instantly they're distancing themselves from Mozilla?
actually get rid of one. I did mean the div you're talking about, but I didn't understand its function in your site fully. now I see that this is really a one-page app, and that that div is critical, and that you can't show ads on secondary pages. that's a tough problem, dunno what to say; I still think the problems I mentioned (music player should go up higher, ads shouldn't appear on first impression) are still problems, and if you can figure out a solution, it'd be grea. what about making the music player smaller to help fit it in with another design element?
43folders is a name that actually makes sense. The one item
of productivity pr0n that is t unique to GTD is the tickler file.
An arrangement which consists of 43 folders.
If I remember correctly, Joel mentioned in one of the podcasts that he likes to just tell stories in his blog posts now and let audiences draw their own conclusions. When he tried to make arguments before he was often misinterpreted (e.g. his stance on exceptions) and now he feels he has to pre-respond to the multitude of ways people might respond to his argument, and that doesn't make for fun reading. As he's gotten older and more experienced he also said the world has become less black-and-white so he doesn't like to make absolute statements as much anymore.

The podcast is linked off from here:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

He also writes a column in Inc, which isn't bad:
http://www.google.com/search?q=joel+spolsky+site%3Ainc.com
Look really interesting. I don't like the design though. The banner at the top is too big.

Where are you getting the data from? There is even data for Luxembourg in it, which I think is only published on the websites where artists are going to play?
That's what he's reacting to. He's found that after a certain point tinkering with your productivity system is in itself a form of disguised procrastination (as is reading the Internet, PS).

Also, once his "productivity" blog became so popular, others who smelled easy money started their own blogs that seem to capitalize on keeping people caught up in maya* to draw traffic rather than actually helping them solve their own problems, productivity or otherwise.

* See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29#Concepts_an...
Actually, a few years ago, after I started implementing a couple of tips I found on Lifehacker and 43 Folders, like Merlin's great "Inbox Zero" talk, I did become a lot more productive. I no longer spent several hours a day on email. I never had to spend time wondering what it was that I had to do "now," because I had a list of ongoing projects in one central location listed by priority.

The only problem is that the marginal returns on such implementations diminish very quickly, so after you've got the big ones down--like breaking down big, intimidating tasks into smaller, doable ones and realizing that you don't need email to auto-update every 5 minutes at every hour of the day--there's not much to gain from reading productivity blogs.

The big problem is that is it easy to get caught up in the huge initial improvements and fail to realize that the time you gain from implementing these marginal improvements is less than the time you already spent on implementing the improvement itself. It's especially bad if you're the typical geek like me and enjoy fiddling with programs and plugins and constantly trying to solve "third order" problems, even when they don't actually do anything in practice. However, exploiting this weakness is exactly what most productivity blogs do to keep their traffic up, so I now have a lot more respect for Merlin, who's actually trying to do something about this problem.
I understand this but its purely theoretical. Of course you won't see those kind of increases, but you would see increases.

Why wouldn't you want to write something that benefits from more cores in Erlang? Erlang is written for concurrent processes and in the face of more cores (with SMP enabled) it will spread them across the cores for you.
Samsung BlackJack II 
It’s time for samsung to introducing the Samsung BlackJack II with Windows Mobile 6.1. And it’s the turn of those using the Samsung BlackJack II windows mobile on AT&T to get their fill of enhancements.
http://www.google.com/search?q=leafless+bookshelf

You're number 1!
While Webkit probably is superior to Gecko, I don't think HTML rendering drove this strategic decision. I'm sure a host of factors went into the decision, but I believe that chief among them were two humble Firefox addons: Adblock Plus and CustomizeGoogle.
Just for clarification, it's a rotating file with 31 folders for calendar days and 12 for months, 31 + 12 -> 43.

I'm pretty sure it also preceded the great majority of those domains.
In a Parachute-Effectiveness Trial, Who Gets the Placebo?
As theoretically awesome as ZFS is, the math behind the human factors are more important than the math behind the computer failure rates, and this is something I don't believe we can fix with our current development methodologies.

It looks like Joyent was able to rebuild most (all?) of their data in their ZFS data loss situation, but it could have played out drastically differently.

http://discuss.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=19430
Those are some odd looking little things.

It's not hard to imagine that some creatures would be able to withstand the conditions in outer space given the extreme conditions under which some animals live on earth (see extremophile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile)

I also found this interesting:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.h...

apparently humans can survive for a very short time in outer space unprotected. No explosions or boiling blood as portrayed in movies and such.
No abandonment here. If the Google Gears, fast Javascript, super secure browser of the future is Firefox and IE8 is dragged halfway along to that, then Google will have won!
I'd say:

Mint
Powerset (though only because of permanent beta)
TripIt (awesome!)
Flock (for some, not me)
Xobni

And with a decent effort, any of them would have been just as successful without TC40. (Though TC40 could very well have helped them quite a bit.)
Mitsubishi 65-inch LaserVue Rear Projection 1080p TV
I wonder how long it will take the price to come down to more reasonable levels.
Perhaps even more intriguing to some, Google has theorized about powering these ocean data centers with energy gained just from water splashing against the side of the barges.

This would probably just exactly generate enough power to run a few fans - in high wind that is.
Hint: Find the jazz arrangement of it with the lead trumpet performance by Maynard Ferguson

Not my scene. It's too much easy listening. Certainly, it's a tight performance by a great bunch of musicians...but, really, I hope he has better tracks.

And, I don't share your opinion of the tune being great. The intro is nice, as an intro, but past that the song is saccharine, repetitive, and predictable. We agree on the lyrics, of course.
It's hard to win a case against a cop in this country. Radley Balko has chronicled the plight of many citizens who were victims of paramilitary SWAT raids for the suspicion of committing non-violent offenses. In most cases no action is taken against the cops, even if an innocent person or a non-violent offender is killed in the raid.

This can get you started:
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/

Even more disturbing have been cases of people being severely beat by police officers in jails. Rather than helping bring the culprits to justice, police departments rally around their own and it is rare that any charges are filed against officers. Here's one case:

http://www.theagitator.com/2006/08/02/jesse-lee-williams-jr/

(NSFW, a picture of the victim in the hospital after the beating)

If police can get away with murder in this country, then I doubt that a little pepper spray will be noticed. Government is a monopoly of power. They have it, you don't. There is no justice if your assailant has a badge.
I never realized things had gotten to the point where people can't even put together a sentence fragment without gross grammatical errors. How do these morons even make it out of middle school? It's a sad state of affairs when so many people lack the most basic written communication skills.
Oh thank God. This needed to be said so badly. "GTD," "life-hacking" and everything in between are just things to make feel like they're getting stuff done without working. Plan, work, and learn, especially from your mistakes. That is the "life hack."
Well, CPU-intensive code is likely to do some sort of number crunching. Erlang was not designed with such tasks in mind and it has no supporting libraries. C++ or Fortran would be a better fit, or even Python with Numpy.

Erlang (and by this I mean the whole runtime, not just the language) was designed for fault-tolerance; that's where all the features such as ease of distribution, shared-nothing architecture, built-in lightweight concurrency etc stem from.

Right tool for the right job and all that...
No, it doesn't. It shows that Obama's staff / volunteers are more tech savvy than McCain's. Anyone surprised?

The candidate's aren't sitting around picking web servers and figuring out 404 pages. Nobody that was that obsessive of a micromanager could have gotten as far as they have.
Morc: Mock Arc Programming Language as Scheme Extension
>The real solution is moving power to smaller bodies...states, then municipalities....

It's great that our Constitution is written that way. It's sad that Wickard v. Filburn effectively threw out our Constitution.
DIY: Add USB Ports To Your Alarm Clock
That's what I found too: install 1-2 of those lif-hacks and you are way better off. Fiddle around with more and you just wasted your time. Thanks, though, for the (not very deep but stil profound) analysis.
The article cited in the NY Times: http://tinyurl.com/6ol8fk
Is a bit absurd. While I agree that in some instances it is beneficial to test drugs without a placebo group, the placebo effect has been demonstrated repeatedly.

I can't seem to find a link to the article, but I recall reading one recently in which people were given the same painkiller but told that it the price anywhere from $0.10/pill to $10/pill (or something along those lines). People taking the "expensive" painkillers rated their level of relief much higher than those taking the "cheaper" pill.

Sure, in some situations (Cancer, AIDS, etc) we may want to do away with a placebo group, but they are still very useful in many situations.
And it is impossible to run an economy as prosperous as ours without "abstract institutions". By rejecting such institutions, left-wing anarchists are really rejecting modernism. Some of them understand this, but not all of them.

Personally, I favor political systems which contribute to the further advancement of the human species. That's why I'm a right-wing anarchist. I have no nostalgia for tribalism.
>>more bullshit than a limo full of lifestreamers

Love it!
My alarm clock already has USB ports!

(I own a chumby[.com])
And one would have thought the commentators would actually do a better job than the O(1) work put in by the tech pundits.

Do people NOT get the fact that Chrome is open-source JUST LIKE firefox, and to the extent that Adblock Plus is NOT A DEFAULT EXTENSION on firefox, the same will carry forward for Chrome, no matter what the distribution mechanism?
It isn't just basic speech. It is whatever is required to convince the examiner that the subject is a human. You could ask the subject for some creative input on a particular topic. That is allowed under the Turing test.

I think that creativity in solving a task is actually quite amenable to automation for a Turing-passing program. Generate a whole bunch of 'ideas' by combining existing concepts in different ways and then test them for usefulness. (Now imagine doing this with a million different Turing processes on your desktop computer - I think there would be some pretty creative ideas generated.) If the program can't tell if an idea is good or at least OK then it is never going to pass the Turing test.

If you are talking about creative in the sense of 'amuses humans' like music or art then the computer is of course at a huge, unfair and pointless disadvantage.

If a program can complete the Turing test then it is likely it will already be a lot smarter than the examiner.
I refer to this effect as "The Filter of Time" (or just "the filter" in conversation). It applies to music most obviously, but it can be applied to any work with an artistic component, I think. Oldies stations play a higher ratio of good to bad music than modern pop or rock stations, because the filter has been at work on their playlist.

It's probably worth thinking about the filter when doing anything online, since there are so many places one can get sucked in without actually gaining anything, learning anything, or improving the world in any way. Your example of articles about Chrome is an excellent choice...do we learn anything from the second through the fiftieth article about Chrome? Probably not. So, skip it. If you're writing another "me too", skip it. If you're reading something and can't imagine it applying immediately to your life or being useful for the rest of your life, maybe you should skip it.

Of course, since I'm just agreeing with you in a somewhat verbose manner, maybe I should have skipped it.
The thing I take from this is that productivity (in how these modes define it) isn't a end in itself.

A useful hack is one that takes you from one mode of operating to were you want to be.
This is true, its not a processing powerhouse but for concurrent applications, Erlang is a clear choice. You don't have to do anything special to gain multiple core support.

Even with cpu-intensive number crunching, I would rather write an erlang linked-in driver in C and use Erlang's concurrency model to run the code rather than write multi-core enabled map/reduce type things in C. (ewwww)
It seems to me that TC and DEMO are a special kind of launch events. They are not really about launching products but about launching the companies as a "product".
I was going to write something very similar.

If your marketing strategy does not involve every high visibility low effort opportunity you can get your hands on, you have already failed.

How much work does it take to get in the TC50? How much visibility does it provide?
You forgot the cost of hiring of mercenaries to protect your nukes from pirates.
I somewhat agree with you - but the question is, why did the Google Engineers sit down to make the Browser of Future? - especially when they already have well-forged relationships with Mozilla and Opera?

Clearly they wanted to do something else - they wanted a new tool for the job - something they felt they couldn't or didn't want to do with Mozilla. Page refers to some reasons (which you may or may not agree with).

I think that's what the article is trying to get at.
I don't think the analogue with movies was a good one. The time investment of several hours involved in going to see a movie is more than the actual money cost for most people. There are many movies that wouldn't be worth seeing if they paid you. Music has this as less of a factor because the time investment is so much less. Usually when you are going to buy a song you have already heard it.
Legacy Path Handler: 301 Redirection for Radiant CMS
Can we please stop using Firefox addons as central factor when predicting Google's business strategy?

Not many people out side of the tech community use ad-blockers and those that do probably aren't the ones clicking on ads anyway.
Corporations are government-defined entities. You can't have them without governments.

Not trying to argue, but it's a non-sequitur.

The industrial revolution had corporations over-taxing the body politic. It was the natural result of taking rural agricultural ethics and putting them in a mechanistic world. It led to labor reforms. trust-busting, and labor unions. Sucked a lot, and lots of folks probably died early, but it was hardly the stuff of the holocaust. You have to remember that everybody was just figuring all this stuff out as it was happening. Once it became clear where we were headed (and that we didn't want to go there) then the government, which defines corporations, defined what they could and couldn't do in a different way. Badda bing, badda boom, your democratic republic at work.
Some more footage: http://www.youtube.com/v/VXJZVZFRFJc
ok guess I got hung up on something pointless. i'll keep guessing too. peace.
The project's home page: http://www.neilvandyke.org/morc/
But I too am amazed that old ladies in middle America on fixed income are pretty much 99% of the ad market.

That's not really true of adwords. The whole 'lower-middle wage housewife interested in sweepstakes' persona were the ones that clicked on banner ads, 10 years ago. Anyway, the way ppc adversising is structured these days, 'most clicks' & 'most advertising spending' are not the same thing.

There's an old saying that half of advertising is wasted, but you never know which half.

That's the point of adwords. You know which half. Roughly anyway.
I must say, much more interesting then most goldmines in this world. Couldn't imagine Yellow Pages doing this.
Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope | The Astronomy Blogger