skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really do think ISPs should operate based on some sense of duty cycle. Part of the problem with the word "unlimited" is that it's still a holdover from the dial-up days.

For example... Guarantee me "unlimited" 5Mbps internet at a 20% duty cycle. That's 300GB a month. The cap is there by convention, but the internet is still "unlimited". Alternatively, give me 8640 "Bandwidth minutes" a month with the option to auto-throttle if I might go over, or disconnect for the month at 8640.

Unfortunately, most customers are in fact stupid, and a data cap is often the best way to say "We let you use our internet resources at up to NN% duty cycle per month"
I disagree.

I had 3 roommates at one point, and all 4 of us were subscribe to Netflix. It was VERY easy for us to hit the cap with everyone watching Netflix alone, let alone playing games or streaming music in the common areas.

After I moved out and got married, my wife and kid routinely have Netflix playing in the background as they sit at home during the day while I'm at work. When I go home, I usually have work to do at home as well, which only adds to the usage.

Using numbers found in the article, if you use Netflix on a daily basis for 3 hours a day watching HD content purely, it would park you at about 210GB of the 250GB cap according to Netflix themselves:

http://blog.netflix.com/2011/03/netflix-lowers-data-usage-by...

So yes, using Netflix and Pandora can easily put you over the cap.

EDIT (for clarity): This article talks about the quality settings in the account settings area, but if you adjust the settings to allow for highest resolution, it would still apply.
I also seem to remember that professional therapy in many psychological cases is not significantly more likely to help a person than self discovery/friends/environment change, etc.
New patent troll Kootol emerges
it seems like none of the things you mention are unique to "small development teams"
For the guy who had asked about motivation.

Motivation as a user to join is

1.you get to discover products that you may truly be interested in. And

2.you get free talk time on your phone, say something like 5minutes of free talk time for every sms ad we send to you
Woops. Disregard this submission, I missed the earlier one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2768036 . Lots more comments there. I'll try to delete mine.
One thing I don't get is how Google+ could be worse in supporting groups then Facebook? Maybe my Facebook usage is somehow fringe - but all Facebook Groups I belong to are dead - there is no conversation happening there - the interface kills it.
The 13 colonies fought a war against a common enemy (Britain) for a relatively short time and did not suffer greatly (compare with Ireland).

Europe countries have been at war with each other on and of (mostly on) at least for a thousand years and while Poland and Russia suffered far more, very few have forgotten what happened to Rotterdam, London and the occupied cities in France.

The horror of the first world war broke one of the most militarized countries in the world (laugh at France all you want, but it was Napoleon who fought Russia). France has never been the same since. It was only a few months ago that they allowed a (tiny) German military base in France.

My maternal grandparents where children during the occupation and was thrown out of their house by the Nazies. To this day they still hate them.

Don't forget the historial rivalries between the UK and France either, though they don't hate each other nearly as much as the French hates the Germans.

Europe is a cross section of old scars and grievances and relative recent wounds that haven't healed all that much; Even the old scars can easily be ripped open.

Europe will never go for what you suggest.
"(Recall that some NP-hard problems are not in NP; halting problem is one.)"

Actually, this quite clears it up for me, I was confusing being in NP with being NP hard.
The British are given too much credit for things they never did. As for doing good in India, even under the Mughal empire, India is estimated to have a share of 30% of world GDP until the 18th century.
When the British left in 1947, that share was less than 1%. The Brits de-industrialized India, used Indian raw materials and taxes to fuel their own industrial revolution and used India as a captive market to hawk their finished goods under an absolute monopoly.
I know, I know. You might point to the railways, English education, civil service etc. as the 'good ' they did.
The railways were first added in the mid 19th century, and the Brits expanded them only when rail saved their arses in the first war of independence of 1857.
The Education they imparted was a colonial project to wipe out and subjugate the local natives, and give them enough English to serve as clerks in running the Empire. Educational institutes of any lasting value were started by local Hindu & Muslim reformers and intellectuals.
So please save this orientalist reading of history for yourself. We Indians don't have anything to be thankful to the British. Good riddance to them. Hope we never see their sorry faces again.
Copyright in anti-Star Trek
Couple years ago I was looking at building highly available database (MySQL in particular), and looked into the multi-master setup. While sounds good on paper, its benefits don't warrant the high development and operation cost.

- The tables need to be changed and the application layer needs to be changed to support it, which is a big hassle and very fragile. It's easy to introduce update conflict. It's a nightmare when dealing with group of updates in a transaction. You can't really roll back a transaction at the replicated nodes.

- Whenever a node fails, the replication ring is broken and updates pile up at the previous node, while subsequent nodes' data become stale. It requires immediate human attention to fix it, which defeats the purpose of a HA cluster.

- Related to above. It's very difficult to add a new master node without stopping the cluster. The "catchup" process is very manual and fragile.

- Data in different node becomes stale under high replication load. Clients reading different masters would get stale data. They are supposed to be masters and got stale data?!

- Multi-master doesn't help write scalability as all; all nodes need to handle all writes. MySQL's single thread update in replication doesn't help. For read scalability, master-slave is better.

I abandoned the design after a while and chose a different approach. I ended up using a disk-based replication, like DRDB. A two-machine cluster forms the master cluster, one active and one standby. Writes are replicated to both machines at disk level synchronously. When the active node fails, the standby becomes active within seconds automatically with the complete data on disk.

The beauty of this approach is the simple design and setup. The data are always in sync, no stale data. Failover is immediate and automatic. The failed node can automatically catch up when back online. The database application doesn't need any change and all the SQL semantics are preserved. The cluster has one IP so the clients don't need special connection logic. They just need to retry when connection fails.

For disaster recovery, I built another two-machine cluster in another datacenter acting as the slave, which did async replication from the master cluster. When the two-machine master cluster completely failed (as in the datacenter got burnt down), the slave cluster can become master via a manual process within 30 minutes. The 30 minutes SLA is for someone got paged, look at the situation and decide to fail over. There are too many uncertainties across datacenters to fail over automatically.

Added bonus, slaves can still hang off the master cluster for read scalability. And it works with any disk-based databases, not just MySQL.
I didn't read it that way. I think he was speaking more to the systems that have evolved around us. He tried to fit a theory to the data of observations in behavioral differences in men and women. I don't think it's relevant to him if those differences are genetic.

It reminds me of the theme for 'The Wire.' Systems of culture and how they affect people in them. People can have power in some systems and none in others. The kaleidoscope of outcomes (just and unjust) that come from those systems stem from people in them that (mostly) make fairly rational, self-motivated decisions. Put differently: the systems aren't fair or unfair, right or wrong. They just are.
I agree, but you don't have to be backward-compatible forever - you can deprecate features gracefully.
It quite interesting to see how the author relates the computer processing power with human brain.
Also shows how far and how fast we have advanced in machine computation.
If you watch shows through their set top box it doesn't count towards any limit. So, kind of like standard cable going to a TV, where the TV channels are on a dedicated 'connection' to the provider and watching TV doesn't utilize the broadband connection.

I'd like to know if their set top box utilizes the same pipe and throughput going to your house, and if watching a show through their set top box would diminish throughput speeds for others on the line. If it does, then that's bogus. If their box utilizes a separate dedicated connection to Shaw, then that's fine and I say fair.

However, in practice, it's hard for average folks to understand why Shaw's box doesn't count towards a limit when the Apple TV, Netflix-enabled Blu-ray box or whatever DOES count towards the limit. But I'm not sure Shaw is in the wrong here if their box has a dedicated 'line' to them.
Kootol uses upcoming US patent against big companies and little app devs
Thanks.

I'm obviously pursuing you into a spot you can't go, and for that I apologize, but the relevant problem here was your quoting a commenter from a blog who claimed from the earnings discussion that the effects would be transitory. That's a little too much indirection and terseness for my tastes. I also lost track of pronoun antecedents. In particular, I read it as transitory in terms of partner performance, when I guess it was meant to be transitory in terms of Google earnings performance? Still a bit unclear there. It's not worth chasing down myself, and we've beat on it enough. I was more concerned about somewhat-famous-person-makes-blanket-pronouncement-which-goes-unquestioned stuff, which is trashy for the quality of the site. Appreciate the clarification and additional resources provided for anybody who cares about this more than I do.
My theory is that even the "ideal" ISPs will sell out to a behemoth if they offer enough money. It's the best way to make your question irrelevant and keep Behemoth's revenues and profits up.
1) make some courses on engineering for:
a) make your own little sweet bicycle business at home
b) do something with old cars/motorcycles

2) learn how to create quality furniture (so you can save money or earn if you sell things)

3) learn an instrument

all of this is possible within three months, but need more training afterwards to achieve perfection.

edit: to clarify and link to sucess: all of this wont bring you much more experience as developer but as a workout it is really really good and you can have your mind free but creative and maybe be more productive as coder which means more success.
Facebook has this policy backwards. Why should facebook enforce trademark issues at all? If someone registers a Coca Cola page Coca Cola should sue that person and the courts should force the person to give up the account, Facebook should not be involved at all.

If someone leases a building and starts a business and puts up a sign that says Coca Cola, Coca Cola wouldn't contact the landlord about the sign they would just sue the owner of the business.
#4 is baked into all their products. As an enterprise user of Google Apps (paid), we're lucky to get a response to our support issues in a timely manner, if at all. One of the big reasons 80% of our organisation uses Exchange, even though we hate it.
But this did not happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-GNP-per-capita-1869-191...
Update to my post, the latest Hillegass book does use XCode4.
Visual.ly: The Future of Data-Based Infographics
How easy is it to hate this guy?
Wired publishes the full Manning-Lamo chat logs - Greenwald
One of the problems in Western cultures is that being a CEO, a President, a rockstar, an astronaut, etc is more highly valued than say, being a mother. This is why many Western women feel that being a mother with young kids and staying at home is not fulfilling their lives - because the cultural messages tell them that being a stay-at-home mom is an unglamarous job.

You will find that not all cultures are like this - in many Asian cultures for example, being a mother is a very honorable and glamorous thing to do.

Women usually make up more than half of a society's population, something you agree with yourself. In that case, don't think it highly unlikely that societies in which women are miserable might not survive long? And yet the cultures in which you assume women are miserable have survived, endured, and even thrived, for millennia (I'm not talking about the 50s in America here).

Imagine the consequences if women were truly miserable in these societies: What would happen to the next generation? What would be the consequences of having a mother, grandmother, and aunts, who are utterly miserable? How would the next generation be raised in a setting like this? Every society has men and women, every family has men and women. It would tear families apart, husbands from wives, brothers from sisters. And it would tear societies apart. Any society who went down the path of making women miserable, or men miserable, has not survived because it cannot reproduce and pass on its culture successfully.
Gonna make a rare politic statement here:

Who's up for a sit-in protest at SFO?
No, it isn't. Whether they've modified their announced plans due to backlash remains to be seen, but the information came from Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette, who justified it by saying, "There should be some advantage to you being a customer."
The Road to a Production Quality HTML5 Game
wow, this really opened my eyes up to the real interesting stuff at Visual.ly. None of this was apparent to me at launch a few days ago, nor when I signed up recently.

"This is Disruptive Technology" ha, nice heading.
Mine is about $60 more, but some of that is for some static IPs. Also nice being able to call Friday night for Saturday tech appointments when modems die...
That's not a meme, that's life.
> I disagree.

With which point? I think you're trying to say that most consumers WILL hit the cap based on your experience - but how typical is your experience? You're an HN reader with 3 roommates, some of whom are probably HN readers too. And how many other people leave Netflix on all day, instead of just leaving the TV on a cable channel?

There will come a time - really fucking soon, too - when your story is representative of the average broadband user - but we're not there yet.
Do you have a link? I cant seem to find it on AppSumo
News Corp Scandal: Trustable does not Mean Trustworthy
That's an interesting observation.

I would say it fits, since the person at the top (guy running the company, decision maker, so on) sees the abstractions beneath him, and takes action accordingly. Being a layer of abstraction (as you discuss) keeps you focused in one area, but without much knowledge of what's outside or the companies overall objectives for a specific task. It's hard to find motivation and purpose when you see just code.

There was recent article about people getting bored, and it seems to stems from the same source, visibility and purpose. From experience, the view from the top is all about visibility and purpose. You know why things are happening, and you believe in the reason because you are often the source of the actions. You enjoy the work because you feel the connection.

So how do we create visibility without inviting the increased communications overhead discussed in the mythical-man month? Is it read only, or does there have to be a full feedback mechanism?
That's right. You might have better luck in places like http://www.techvibes.com/job/global or
http://nextmontreal.com/category/jobs/
When will we see consumer devices rated at above 1gigabit?
Coincidentally, I just finished a rails plugin that does something like this with rails and posted it a few days ago. In this case "back" is determined by a graph of your web app you feed to the plugin. Never managed to get any feedback on it though. However a similar concept has been running on a production site of mine for years with fairly good success; I just finished turning it into a plugin last weekend

http://kswope.com/2011/07/10/backstack-rails-plugin/
It's not bold or dumb in Canada. Expect to see similar plans from Rogers and Bell very soon. The Canadian telecom industry, backed by the CRTC, has operated as a public cartel for a very long time now. These are the same folks responsible for giving us the highest cell phone rates in the world, no such thing as nation-wide long distance plans, maximum data caps that dropped from 95GB to 80GB over the past 5 years (at least on Rogers), and basic cell phone plans don't even come with call display or voice mail (those are extra features).

Unless a government rolls in and breaks the ISP portions off into independent companies I don't see anything on the horizon stopping this syndicate.
I completely agree with your assessment.

The worst case outcome I can imagine is that the EU will dissolve, the Euro will be abandoned, and Europe will return to its previous state of decline in terms of competitiveness in the world economic stages. China and India will fill the gap and except for the self supporting economies the rest of Europe will slide into a long and deep depression.

That will be followed by a lot of externalized accusations of conspiracies and general hatred ultimately leading to an insurrection which results in the loss of soverignty for between 1/3 and 1/2 of the current nations.

One 'law' that I've never seen fail is 'Nature abhors a vacuum.' and when the EU collapses, it will create a very, very large vacuum.
Right, no-one was disagreeing that the British did many bad things in their colonies. But the point lionhearted is making is that they did more good, overall. Picking a specific example of bad doesn't counter that argument effectively.
You'll have to ask your friend, but if Amazon can sell something for $80, you can bet they'll sell it to whoever wants to buy it...regardless of whether or not it makes logistical sense to do so.
I love using HelloFax for signing and filling out documents. "Faxing" to email is free
I like the old cars/motorcycles idea. There might even be money to be made once OP achieves a certain skill level.
It isn't, it just has different incorrect behavior. As stated in the article, function declarations shouldn't be supported as statements at all -- but FireFox DOES support them, it just doesn't go as far as to hoist them. This seems like a bad compromise: because it half supports the feature but surprises you in that it works subtly differently. It probably wasn't a conscious decision but rather the result of fixing some random compatibility issue with a site that expected to be able to use functions declarations as statements but didn't rely on hoisting.
I wonder; is it not increasingly obvious that rating agencies are fraudulent by nature/rent-seekers writ large?
I've had a great experience with them so far. I'm on their smallest plan, $4.99 (50 pages sent/received months, I think?), and I get my own local number. Admittedly I don't send many faxes, but when I've needed to send or receive them the service has been great. The document editing tools are awesome, as well.
as much as i hate defending shaw, my isp, the news here is factually incorrect.

this is direct from their facebook page [1], specifically the last line:

Also, we wanted to clarify a couple of things:
Shaw Movie Club is intended to be watched through your set-top box. You can order your movies online through vod.shaw.ca and send it to your set-top box for viewing - watching movies on your set-top box won’t affect your included Internet data. However, you can also stream your Movie Club movies online to your computer – this WILL contribute to your Internet data.

[1]https://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=151441184886657&t...

it appears you were quoting this [2], but that quote seems to be taken out of context, linking it to the incorrect explanation directly above it.

[2]http://www.vancouversun.com/Shaw+challenging+Netflix+with+mo...
What is a y-combinator?
I signed up for this course and took it since I haven't done any iOS dev ever. I have a CompSci degree as well as have done Enterprise Java stuff, so I know my way around a compiler, build, etc. Haven't actively programmed in 5+ years (e.g. 4-8 hours/day is 'active' to me).

If you have any programming experience at all, this is not worth it. It does Hello World, then walks you through several examples that are a nice introduction to iOS development. It does as advertised though - you can develop iOS apps in 4 weeks - they don't do much though. The final app has a clown fish that moves on the screen and changes direction when tapped - I think.

Once you get over the Objective-C and Cocoa nuances/syntax, then it is just another programming language. Learning about all of the libraries is what you need to do if you want to produce an application. I searched the net for reviews of books and found an iPhone dev cookbook to be more helpful (Erica Sadun I think - don't have it with me). It is a little dated because XCode4 is now out, but the libraries it references are core to building any app that does something.

Setting aside time and having the right resources are key. I suggest a book or two. I breezed through the linked course content in a few nights.
Location, location, location.

It would probably make a lot more sense to compare Palo Alto to a rich neighborhood in NYC, or even to Manhattan proper, rather than to NYC as a whole.

Compared to NYC, Palo Alto is tiny, way less populated, and way less densely populated -- and there are still plenty of dirt cheap places to live in NYC (though you might not want to live in those places, for various reasons).

Living in Palo Alto would be more like living on the Upper East Side or in the Wall St district.
Even accepting the premise that drug companies are dependent on all the basic research, it's but a tiny fraction of what goes into making an actual drug. Just because you know the basic biological reasons for a disease doesn't mean squat to making a chemical entity that you can give to a human being. The whole process of designing something that has actual efficacy while at the same time not injuring the patient is extremely expensive and difficult science and it almost never is done in an academic setting.
If they do actually add E_DEPRECATED to mysql/ext they will probably have a really hard time every depreciating anything ever again.

mysql/ext is so popular that all default installations will start hiding E_DEPRECATED, which means that no one will ever again see depreciated warning even for things that are easy to fix.
Isn't it a bit early comment? The article takes G+ as it's initial version, and does not give it a chance to develop, whereas it took many years for facebook to become what it is...

Weird thing is many articles comparing these two social networking sites fall into same problem. These services are dynamic and with every feature they implement, they put a new value in the market, thus they change the balances.

I think it's great that finally facebook has an "alternative". I think it's great that a software giant is in this game now. This will fasten things up and increase overall quality (hence the comptetetion).

Long in short: too early to judge and compare g+ with fb. G+ has great potential.