skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since it's come up, let's talk about SSD failure modes.

Motive: Even absent deduplication, how do I know my three metadata writes didn't end up in the same ECC block and aren't going to fail simultaneously?

Open questions:

• In the real world, how common is a SSD unrecoverable read error?

• Are they confined to a single sector? Or a larger grouping?

The wikipedia article on TRIM claims that SSDs write in 4k pages. It's reasonable to assume that if I write 4 copies of a 1k block of metadata the SSD block remapping could drop them all into the same page. Is the ECC computed on sectors or pages? Will a failure take out all 4 copies? My Intel SSD 310 specification is mute on the matter.

Intel specifies a mean time between failure of 137 years for the drive and a "useful life" of 5 years. From that, I think we can assume Intel's reliability numbers are fiction meant to serve some other purpose than to inform, but since they are all we have we'll give it a go…

Intel says I can look forward to one unrecoverable read error at 1 sector/10^16 bits read. Which, if I read at maximum speed is 14 months. (But does reading fast really make it fail sooner? It they come from botched writes or degradation over time then specifying it in "bits read" is silly.)

Conclusion:

• There might be a danger.

• The spec sheets do not illuminate.

• Someone on HN may have had an SSD develop an unrecoverable read error and know what happens.
20k/month revenue or profit?
I took a security class in college that and we used some of these documents to secure some systems. They're a pretty helpful reference.
Not hard to imagine. 700M users at a $70B valuation = $100 per user. I guess that's why how the current valuation of LinkedIn comes about. And if you use this metric, and believes that LinkedIn's growth potential is significantly stronger than Facebook, you could even argue that LNKD is still way undervalued.

BTW I made a Tagxedo (word cloud) of this morning's LinkedIn News, and one prominently featured word explains all (the word starts with "F" and ends with "k" :D)

http://daily.tagxedo.com/may-20-linkedin-rockets-skyward-in-...
...Until someone hacks your system and manages to grab the password. The nice thing about keys is you don't have to reveal your secret, just prove you have it.
Are you thinking of this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/magazine/jonathan-lebed-s-...

Good read for sure.
> ...info-snacking...

Wow, this is going to be my favorite new piece of vocabulary for a while. It's perfect.
If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.
There is the EFF: https://w2.eff.org/patent/
Does Amazon's tablet also portend an Android smartphone?
I probably should and wonder whether the price of put options gets inflated due to all the people who want to short? I could also put stop limits but the volatility makes that worse than options.
I implemented asmack in an Android app and it works swimmingly. Communicates well with an openfire server, piggybacks java objects on the XMPP messages to communicate with a game server. No need to depend on first-party support, the protocol doesn't change much.
There's a different between "thou shalt not kill" and "I don't think that you should be reading that book there citizen."
1500 signups. Projects are beginning to come in. The confirmation mail is an issue that I am working on solving. So please be patient working in a car on my way to Berlin. Gotta love technology.
3.21 - Install the NSA Security Suite to ensure your computer's safety
"nearly one third of all US display advertising impressions coming from Facebook" - crazy
It's mostly a cruft/style issue. Some people prefer to have as much of their style-related code in pure css as possible. People having javascript off is not really a concern anymore as long as you're providing them with a baseline experience.

For more complicated animation, css can perform better than javascript because the browser is allowed to optimize css animation as it sees fit.

For example: a browser will stop trying to figure out the position of an element animated using css when you switch to a different tab. It will then "catch up" when you switch back. With javascript, it does not have that option an will continue to animate all elements even when you can't actually see the tab. This can eat into battery life.
Seconded, manuscript would be really useful.
What Is A Complexity Class?
Yes, although I read it in Michael Lewis' subsequent book "Next: The Future Just Happened." Amazon link (with ginormous affiliate revenue!):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004R96TSM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
> As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements.

I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using vegetarian subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine :

> I’m not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, creatine is usually gotten in one’s diet from meat), and the other studies are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren’t idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.
I'm partial to Python and Django, but in the end I think it comes down to preference, and what you feel most comfortable with. Honestly, if it were me I'd find and follow a tutorial for creating a small web app (like a blog) in a few different frameworks and see which one feels right for you.

There was a discussion a few years ago on HN about this very topic, although it was mostly focused on Django VS Ruby on Rails, but there is lots of good discussion in the thread all the same. Here's the link:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=195423

Welcome to the web dev community! Come visit us on the Django IRC channel (webchat.freenode.net, channel #django) if you have any questions about django.
While there are currently no fully-electric racecars in F1, some teams are attempting to innovate in the area of KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System). According to the current F1 sporting regulations, teams have the option of implementing KERS via electrical or mechanical means. http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/understanding_the_sport/87...
Huh? He's saying two things:

* The US sets an example for the world. If the US decides that it's a-ok to practice censorship, then we're implicitly giving the rest of the world permission.

* Censorship is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of that slope is China.
Overall I'm impressed by the translation, but by translating "Kamer" (Lower House) to "Court" in the abstract the meaning of the piece changes.
and assuming you can find shares to short, and are willing to pay the borrow cost.
Ask HN - Advice on switching from server side to applications
I would like to get some advice on what could be a major career decision.
I have about 6 years of experience working on a database in C/C++. I have good systems knowledge (I am not an expert, but definitely above average).
I recently got called by an acquaintance regarding an opportunity in a small company. The company is about 10 years old and has not done very well, but they are trying to turn things around and as part of that initiative they are setting up a crack team to work on their product. I personally know about 5 people on the team (the team is very small just about 100) and they are all very smart, but here is the catch the work is entirely in JAVA and in applications side. While I have no issues with JAVA as a language, I am wondering about a switch to applications. The offer is really good but does come with the catch that if the turnaround does not happen, we are back in the market. I am quite inclined to taking the risk, but would like get your take on the move.
>It is far less problematic to have the software available than deal with the potential fallout of problems of maintaining such a network and its access to installing software remotely.

The purpose of this document is to make the system as secure as possible. It's not meant to make deployment or maintenance easier.

Is it problematic to have things you might need somewhere else? Sure. Can keeping those processes running on the system make it less secure? Probably. The entire reason you keep the smallest subset of executables, scripts and processes running is so you avoid any potential holes.

The NSA is choosing security over convenience. For systems that actually contain information that needs to be secure(medical/financial records, governmental data, etc.), I definitely wouldn't choose the convenient choice over the secure one.
Oh, that's actually a really cool idea! I use kindle for iPhone/PC/Mac though. I googled around for a few pages and didn't seen anyone doing that, but some of my relatives have a kindle so I could try out theirs sometime.
'I know what the statistics say - but gosh darn, I have an anecdote to the contrary!'

OP spends a lot of time & space on Jaeggi 2008... and she quietly omits all of the other results and considerations: http://www.gwern.net/N-back%20FAQ#criticism
Has Google started to fail travel marketers and users?
I can't get over what a great name choice this is.

can we ask for other kinds of favours? I could use a copywriter with some design skills…
It depends. At least one plane has crashed because the pilot thought the plane was in "decent angle" mode instead of "vertical speed" mode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Inter_Flight_148

The key UI problem is that "-3.3" on the display can mean both "3.3 degree descent angle" and "3,300 feet per minute descent speed".

Good UI design is important even for trained professionals. If the computer is configured incorrectly, it may take too long to realize that there is a problem, and that's bad.
I suspect that this was originally intended as a bit of fun, not to be taken seriously. Alas, it's being reported as if it were serious and I feel like someone must point out the obvious, grievous flaws:

According to the article, the finding is based on an MRI of exactly one subject, Alex Brooks. Brooks seems to be exceptionally ardent and there's nothing to suggest he is at all representative of anyone but himself. It is never really safe to draw broad conclusions from studying one subject. But it is ridiculous to do so with someone you've specifically selected because they are exceptional.

Yet even if Brooks were representative, there's nothing within the article to suggest that the brain activity detected has anything specifically to do with religious thoughts or feelings. Yes, those areas light up when religious images are shown to religious people. But there are obvious alternate explanations that aren't addressed. Perhaps those areas of the brain light up when shown familiar visual stimuli. An Apple fan strongly recognizes an iMac. A Jesus fan strongly recognizes the crucifix. Or perhaps this brain activity is just caused by seeing something you like. You could control against these confounding factors, but they evidently have not.

Basically, unless the article has glossed over a lot, there is no finding here at all and this is the BBC pretending at science.
Compiling LevelDB for iOS (Instructions & Makefile)
thanks! i'll definitely check these out.
7 Simple Tips To Deal With Negative People
Really the only people making any money here are the underwriter and venture capitalists who took this company public - the guys who pumped up and are now dumping these shares. While they're high fiving eachother with a job well done it's setting up the exact same crash that happened last time.
Ask HN: Will a Hacker ever be electerd President?
Discuss and debate.
>there were market makers and other outlets offering CFD's and derivatives at just above the list price

do you have an references for that? were these offerings available to small retail investors?
General Butt Naked - 'the most evil man in the world'
Is there a tool I could run to check what's described in the document (or similar) automatically ?
Not even just disable, they recommend physically removing it.
How would they curate it?
The comment I was replying to originally had "almost $1k/user".
Fail Fast: How China boomed by trial & error
What amazes me more is that Netflix began in 1997 and had the foresight to name themselves Netflix and not Mail-flix, yet they didn't begin streaming until 11 years later.

I wonder how long they were working on streaming before it was released. A lot of planning must have gone into something that beat the company's traditional model in just two years.
I've always wondered: what if you just responded to a patent troll with "screw you" and refused to play their game? What if you just did the absolute minimum and didn't take their bait to reach settlement? What could you face? Could you go to jail?
US CDC on preparedness for a zombie apocalypse
How much of that goes to crystal trophies and high-fiving brokers that made the deal happen?
To me, it looks like all these frameworks provide the same functionality, but with different languages, databases, and web servers.

Basically, yeah.

Is there some kind of way to choose, or do you just pick one that youre familiar with?

To be honest? There are too many out there, to actually do a thorough analysis / review of each, on your own. It'd take you 10 years, and by the time you got done, it would all be obsolete. So, ultimately, you have to fall back to some kind of heuristic: recommendations from trusted friends / colleagues / etc., simple popularity, some "back of the envelope" calculations of some meaningful metric (availability of developers for that platform, for example), the aforementioned point of "go with what you know," size and activity level of the community around each one, ease of learning, etc., etc.

All of that said, I'm a big fan of Groovy on Grails, which I find has a lot going for it. But there are far more frameworks I haven't used, than ones I have, so I can't even begin to make a claim that Grails is objectively "the best" in any sense. In my case, I picked it because I already knew Java, was familiar with the JVM ecosystem, libraries, app servers, messaging systems, etc., and because Groovy is very easy to learn if you know Java. The pros I see for Grails:

1. Open source (most of them are these days, but still)

2. Easy to learn (this is relative, since I'm coming from Java)

3. Rapid development using convention of configuration (same as Rails, etc.)

4. allows me to leverage a lot of existing knowledge of using Java app servers, tools, and infrastructure.

5. Easy use of tons of useful java libraries that already exist. I can easily incorporate Tika, Lucene, Mahout, HttpClient, Commons Math, etc., etc., etc.

Cons to Grails:

1. There is some question as to the future of Groovy, since the creator of the language said something along the lines of "If I'd known about Scala when I created Groovy, I wouldn't have created Groovy." That said, the Groovy and Grails community seem to be very active, and I don't see any particular reason to think either will be dying off anytime soon.

2. Performance: Groovy has a reputation for being a little bit of a performance dog, compared to some of the other JVM based languages. But it has gotten a lot better with recent releases, and there's reason to think that the JDK7 changes (MethodHandles API, invokedynamic opcode) will make Groovy even faster.

So there ya go, a few thoughts and comments on Grails. I'd highly recommend at least giving it a look, especially if you know Java already.
"Announcement only; Anyone can read the archives. Anyone can join, but only managers can post messages." -- from the create-a-new-group page.
Isn't the Kindle's DRM is pretty easy to break? You shouldn't have to OCR Kindle books.
From your first paragraph, I thought you were about to turn this question toward something a bit different about the issue of transparency into institutions. For instance, why, after say a time period t (set by reasoning about the particular context, allowing for the maintenance of competitive advantages, etc.), shouldn't people outside of an institution be able to see internal records of how decisions (and thus perhaps very important mistakes or triumphs) were made? Surely the information has utility to the public, if only for historical reasons.

If an institution is unwilling to allow that, then hypocrisy threatens when they would deny individuals in other institutions (even if it is just a social discussion group) the same right to privacy about how internal affairs are conducted.
Or just use Kindle for PC, or Kindle's own 'notes' function...
And the unit economics of Kindle books are so much better than print books to boot. No warehousing, no shipping, (negligible) returns, etc.

Next up on the disruption bus: literary agents and book publishers.
Can someone explain why stock opened at $83 when it was offered for $45.
This is just a sales spike due to the new user period. When a user gets a ebook reader for the first time they will buy lots of books to fill the device, including books they already own. Once sales to new users drops off the sales rate will also flatten out. I believe digital will ultimately be the bigger platform in future due to convenience of buying a book and getting it instantly (rather than waiting for the post man).
a. you can't yet short linkedin.
b. how would you know? Its way to early to figure out what's going to happen there.

I don't like linkedin's current valuation - but I think shorting it in front of several very high profile tech IPOs would be foolhardy at this point.
True. But it would be unfeasible to access 16,000 machines even if there was no bootloader password. The best course of action is try to identify the management/admin server and take over that, which may have unrestricted access to every server on the VLAN (or as sometimes happens, every single server period).

(Also, what's your datacenter or machine profile that you can get 80 machines per rack and not hit overheading or overload your rack power circuits? We could only get 40 to be stable, but we were using commodity gear)
#140confnw
They get a chunk of the other 300m.
Paypal , wake up ,and don't hurt your potential customers
I just opened an account with Paypal for my business.First time user.Took me a while to figure out how to navigate their pages.
I provided all the info they needed.I was a day late in providing the bank account info.
I opened the account to pay for some supplies.Since they don't want to do business with me I will choose other company.
Note we are a legitimate business in US
Here is the email received.

Hello XXXXXX Inc,

For the safety and security of the PayPal network, we often review accounts
for potential risks. After reviewing your account, we have decided to close
it because of security issues.

We are making every effort to minimize any disruption to your business.

If your PayPal account balance is zero, and you have no unresolved buyer
complaints or chargebacks, your account will remain limited.
Disbursement optionsOption 1. If you owe refunds to any of your buyers, you
can use the money in your PayPal account to refund them.

To refund your buyers:
1. Log in to your PayPal account.
2. Click "Contact Us" at the bottom of any page.
3. Click "Contact Customer Service."
4. Under "Choose a Topic," select "Sending/Receiving Money."
5. Under "Choose a Subtopic," select "Refund/Cancel a Payment."
6. Click "Continue" and follow the instructions to refund payments.

Option 2. Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After 180
days, we'll email you information on how to receive your funds.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks,

PayPal

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you
will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account
and click the Help link in the top right corner of any PayPal page.

Thanks a lot Paypal.

Anybody has any ideas?
I have duct tape on my Macbook Pro's webcam ever for the last 3 years or so ..
Recruiters and third parties have already signed up. Everyone uses it. That's the point.
As flawed as the DMCA is, it does a pretty good job of protecting the service providers themselves. They need to implement a timely DMCA takedown process but that's about it. They can still be sued but, to my understanding, mostly through stretch interpretations of existing copyright law created by legal precedent rather codified into law per se ("inducing copyright infringement").

So, and I ask this question honestly, how could the law be more open short of abolishing copyright? (Once again, DMCA takedown abuses notwithstanding.)
Most of the critics don't have PR guys.
Blekko | /topspam
China's Great Firewall "father" pelted with egg, shoes
Mixergy Interview: Guest - Andrew Warner, Host - Jason Cohen
there's a lockup period, nobody is selling their pre-IPO shares now.
How many people have the ability to pump up a stock several hundred million dollars? These are most likely hedge funds investing.
Next up, the firmware will use rolling-window shingleprints to find non-aligned duplication, and a simple salt/serial-number won't be enough to ensure redundant storage. Then you'll have to encrypt your data to hide it from your own SSD drive's optimizations.
Both the LA Times story here and the Ars Technica story that anchors the conversation you linked to both repeatedly refer to reporting by the Guardian. I wish that their report was the one driving discussions!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/18/google-eric...
Reminds me of this quote from Simon Sinek:

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

He uses Apple quite a bit in his analogy here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...
Was deduplication ever used to conserve system memory (RAM)? If it's considered a bad idea there, I don't see how it's a good idea on SSDs, since the ideal is for storage and memory to eventually converge into one entity (at least as far as performance and physical infrastructure are concerned).
bought it!

still think it was totally worth it!

thanks and happy birthday!
The Greatist Health & Fitness Manifesto
Devil’s advocate on Twitter’s OAuth change
> English is not my native language

Don't worry. That headline isn't English!
If you google "google job interview", my nightmare story is #2 or #3 - read shmula.

I eventually received a job offer, but by that point, I wasn't interested.

Anyways, the details of my story are in that blog post.
I love the fact that Andrew shares how he thinks when interviewing guests and isn't judgmental. He understands that their are a bunch of different approaches to business and not just one correct method.
Is there an OSS package for automating checks for such practices? Ie, security lint checker?
I have an accounts with a number of these guys, but I specifically found LNKD at CMC and ICM last night
People don't treat monopoly money like real money. Stunning. Next the professor should see how risk adverse these students are with their own tuition dollars. Suddenly these kids aren't the big rollers they were with imaginary risk. Quit looking at numbers, follow the risk. Numbers are relative to risk. Consider the influence of monetary policy on risk. Does a cheaper dollar make a frugal investor? Hardly.
what do you think about this code generation tool?