skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is similar problem in Postgres as well.

Not nearly as bad in magnitude, and with some shared responsibility with Linux and file system code (since PG relies of filesystem's caching). Greg Smith talked about it in some detail during PGWest 2010. One of his customers had long stalls in production and Greg worked out how to reproduce and explain them.

He had some patches he was planning for Postgres 9.1, not sure if they went in.
Some quick feedback:

* It's not clear what the web app does.

* The design is confusing; it does not lead the user well.

* To add value to the world, you either have to solve a hard problem or create significant delight (entertainment). The idea of creating new words is amusing, but I doubt there is any market for it. One of the most important things about entrepreneurship is choosing your markets well. It's much easier if (1) you choose an existing market instead of creating a new one and (2) the market is hungry.

* I do not have a facebook account.
The paper is about FileVault, not user accounts.
>Also, I could swear that Bing Maps is actually faster than Google in terms of loading tiles, scrolling around, and all of that

I have to say that bing maps is pretty unusable for me. Maybe it's different for USA, but here in parts of Europe that I'm interested in it's useless. Slow and more or less unzoomable, for example this is my town: http://i.imgur.com/pGaeB.png

EDIT: maybe it's a browser(javascript?) problem, I'm not sure
basically don't do projection/unprojection/coordinate transformations on your own, if you really want to write the code use the specs directly (good luck!) or use a lib if you can.

Best thing: stick to WGS84+webmercator as much as you can (some people can't help it: continents drifts, legacy compatibility etc.)
Geography geekness is fun for geographs and pisses everybody else in the world (and I'm doing GIS stuff for a living).
Find Redditors around you #4sqhackathon (soon HN users too)
It's a fake. http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/blo...
The samples I got ("Your suggestions for a dental clinic for vampires" and a bunch of others, some of those not fit for reprinting here) do not match well with your goal of changing the world in aesthetically beautiful way.

If those are user generated suggestions then maybe you should add an approval process.
Such a misleading title. I think this means the chances of any individual person getting hit is 1 in 21,680,754,240,000?
Considering they have explicit multiaccount support[1], I find that hard to believe.

[1]: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-multiple-sig...
Reverting the pw assumes you knew it in the first place, and thus didn't need to change/reset it.
Tl;dr: the principal way to realize gains is by focusing on students who underachieve on current metrics without assuming that increased quantities of mass methods will work.

Bravo. Education: welcome to how everything else on Earth has been shown to work. Simple lessons: power laws work, diminishing returns work.
TechCrunch Disrupt participant Verious is doing something similar. Would agree with @drewcrawford that the market potential seems limited.
Deretina.py - never worry about Retina graphics again (iOS)
You can also just boot your Mac in single-user mode (Command-S), then mount the main filesystem and type "passwd bob". Much easier and produces the same effect.
Try http://www.hashsum.com

It's a Silverlight application I wrote years ago (as a warmup) and it does MD5, SHA1, SHA256, etc. and it is much faster than any Javascript or Flash implementation I've ever seen, including this one.

Apology for the very poor Google adsense placement and UI. Yeah it is embarrassing. It was my first introduction to web programming, Google Adsense, and UI, and I've moved on from it long ago. Needless to say I have learned a lot since then.

Hashsum can handle much bigger files than 10MB. In fact, for a file that small, you won't even notice that it did anything. Try something bigger, like a DVD-sized ISO (4.7GB) which will take about 1 or 2 minutes. All computation is done on the client side.

Anyone who claims Javascript is "as fast as C/C++" should at least try to beat Hashsum, which is only C# based.

Sadly, Microsoft is putting an end to this amazing technology, but that's another story.
> But Linux on the desktop just goes to prove time and again just how bad a user experience it is to give true "freedom". I don't want to figure out what the best way of playing video or audio files is and choosing between N (where N is typically a fairly large number) options.

Actually, the flip side of this is one of my favorite things about Linux on the desktop. If I'm looking for some new software to do some new-to-me task X, as long as they're properly packaged in the repositories, it's usually very low-cost to just give them a quick 2-minute test. Partly because no one is monetarily gaining from tricking me, I don't even have to worry about being tricked! On Windows, I have to do quite a lot of digging before I'm even willing to install a free trial, because the culture of producing free trials that are really malware is so prevalant.

I love the Linux desktop because it makes the necessary choices (e.g. which low-res pixel-art image-editing software should I use?) so much less draining.
It's already common-place:

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

Surgical robots are still controlled by a human behind the scene but the human doesn't need to be physically present.
Is your database extremely write heavy? You don't usually see this problem in a more balanced read/write workload. Postgres has in the past suffered from stalls and lockups that can happen at checkpoint intervals, but it appears they mostly happen for seconds rather than minutes.
Salaries ... everything else is (usually) tiny by comparison. Conferences can get expensive if you're going to a lot with flying/hotels.
It's also common here in Portugal :)
This is pretty FUDdy. Think about what you are saying. That somehow, just because Google built the OS level software to support this, that they will necessarily put hooks into it to collect the record of transactions.
I agree to this. Arch has been out there for long enough; but it has been lean. To exemplify: it does not provide packaged Broadcom wireless drivers. You have to compile them yourselves.
Non-technical founders from zero to profit?
Are you or do you know of any non-technical founders who have gone from a concept to company?

Put differently, how do you start from zero (connections, employees, funding)?
What kind of people does pg draw in?

Its mainly naive young programmers (socially stunted nerds) who believe they are smarter than everyone and have everything figured out.

I believe nerd hubris comes from a fundamental lack of empathy; an inability to put themselves in the shoes of people who are different.

People who lack perspective are easy pickings for silver tongued writers who make emotionally-potent audience-felating oversimplifications.
That's what I thought too. There are a lot of weird problems that can happen due to NUMA architecture issues. Reading the numactl for me really drives home just how much I don't understand it.

http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man8/numactl.8.php
The first part of this is key: geocentric vs geographic. There are actually several corrections needed if you try to combine the two in celestial navigation.
It gives you better performance provided:

* You're not talking to a SAN or a virtual disk device.

* You use a filesystem that allows concurrent updates to O_DIRECT opened files, like XFS.
The file includes all password hashes, including root. So crack that, then you have superuser.
Some indication of what it is.
> His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. ...they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices.

This rung a bell for me because I've noticed it's often easier to enforce a rule on myself if it's A) an actual rule and B) pre-decided (by me). It's not that I'm handing over the decision-making to anyone else. It's that I've set myself a rule (like, "no Facebook at work", a personal choice, not imposed by my job), so I'm not deciding right now "do I have time to check FB? Will it suck me in too far?" and so on. Looking back over my various self-improvement "diets" (usually more technological than food-related) I can see that the most successful ones were those for which I could set a hard-and-fast rule and for which I could convince myself that "the rule is set, can't break it now".

Which is, of course, still a mental discipline, and a nontrivial one. But it's easier than the ones that involve more deciding on the spot, and a lot easier than the ones where I think, "I will try to mostly avoid...", which usually don't last very long. I'd never really thought of that in terms of number of decisions before, or decision fatigue, but it's an excellent explanation for a phenomenon I was already pretty familiar with.
$DEITY thanks...
How to Break All the Rules
Looks totally like a fake :-)
Boiled down even more, a one-size-fits-all approach fits no one in education.
Tell HN: Suspicious but well-meaning new spam accounts?
Take a look at these users: deathmatch, redrising1, keyboarder, whiteduck, arcanebook, gildedsuit

Quotes:
I wish more people did this. //
This is a good addition. //
Look amazing. I wish you guys all the best. //
Yeah I imagine Y Combinator is a lot more important. //
This is amazing. //
Maybe you could try some sort of side project? If it's exciting enough it might motivate other areas of your life.

All registered within the last 24 hours. All posting in the same threads. All with the same (positive) tone. Yet they aren't generic enough to be auto-generated, so it looks like a human (humans?) are writing these.

Is this a social experiment, a way to build credible accounts which can be used for spamming, or something else?
Clickable links:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=deathmatch

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=redrising1

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=keyboarder

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=whiteduck

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=arcanebook

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gildedsuit
It is instructive to look 100-200 years back to see what people thought that. A lot of things were pretty spot-on (Jules Vernes description of the fax machine, which he actually named facsimile; Tesla's prediction of the mobile phone).

A theme that was commonly wrong was the belief that there would be a big engine in every home, with appliances using its motion/torque for stuff (instead, they became miniature and moved into devices). In the 50s, the same wrong belief was held with respect to computers (you'd have a few big ones, and you'd use their power when needed).

And if you asked someone in 1900's New York or London, what's going to be the century's biggest challenge, the answer would be an unequivocal "Getting rid of all the horse shit"
If sudo works the same way on Mac's as it does on Linux, then anyone in the sudoers file could give a rogue application root access.
That risk level is not at all on par with this though. That won't help with filevault turned on, and it requires both a reboot and a physical presence at the machine. This can be done remotely with shell access, and discloses hashes from other accounts.
We do understand why this problem is happening. The algorithm that takes the nice fast (but limited in size) sequential log writes and tries to intelligently write them (mostly randomly) in the background to the data/index blocks where they live can't keep up, and eventually stalls out as the amount of free log space dwindles.

SSDs really help this process happen faster because they have way better random write performance than hard disks.
Protein folding is quite possibly an NP-complete problem. Determining the relative energy of a given protein-chain conformation can be done in polynomial time, it's a pretty simple problem. However, minimizing the energy is very difficult because there are so many degrees of freedom (on the order of the number of amino-acids in the protein).
I don't think the PA is trying to join CERN, they're trying to join the UN. Silly!
So you're saying that an early stage company trying to grow exponentially is spending the majority of its early funding on salaries? I find that hard to believe. Especially for some of the biggest tech players in the industry today.

I'm trying to figure out the nuances of spending for these companies in their early stages and how important certain things are relative to others. As a founder, what would you have spent more money on and what less?
This looks like a great tool. I plan on testing it out. I've been used to using SVN to diff changes but I have some websites in Dropbox that I haven't yet put into an SVN repository so this would help a lot.
By default, Mac OS X disables the root user: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1528

That said, reset or crack any admin's password and you can go to town with sudo.
Yeah, I saw that -- still couldn't. bstx's annotations look good though, in which case it flies higher than I thought. I had the scale wrong by maybe a factor of 3.
The extension says it needs:

1) Your data on dropbox.com and www.dropbox.com

2) All data on your computer and the websites you visit

#1 is obvious. I think it needs #2 so it can save a copy of the older version to disk and then launch the diff tool. If you want to check out the extension before installing it, see http://superuser.com/questions/337172/how-do-you-do-examine-...
The Subtle Poetry of Blog Spam
Aren't these days over?
Grub-fuse bridge. (ro-)ReiserFS on MacOSX and more.
Show HN: Find new music with your friends
But imagine how badass you would look picking a newspaper box.
"All data on your computer and the websites you visit" means that it needs to run native code, which can't be sandboxed.
You’re asking excellent questions.

Basically, your doubts are well founded: you don’t have very much reliable control over typography on the web.[0] Things like kerning.js are probably best regarded as admirable proofs of concept for future work.

You’re also right that webtypography.net is limited by our technology, but I think it’s also limited in its approach. ETS is a wonderful book,[1] but it’s really about print typography, and few of its practical guidelines are both possible and wise to apply directly to the web.

TypeKit is pretty good. Google Web Fonts is kind of a disaster from a fine typography viewpoint. Some of the fonts are nice for headlines, but last time I checked there isn’t a single text typeface which is reasonably attractive, kerned well, and has a real italic. Not one. There are some good decorative faces in there, but no drop-in Verdana replacement.

And text figures? Pffft. Small caps? Double pffft.

Here are some things that you have control over and are worth worrying about if you’re interested in web typography, in no particular order:

— Get past ASCII. Use real dashes, quotes, and apostrophes. Don’t put too much trust in automatic curly-izers, even when attached to reputable projects like Markdown.[2] And so on.

— Design on a grid. Set CSS’s line-height property by hand, or you’ll have interfering vertical rhythms. I like to set h1-6’s line-height to an even multiple of the base, but some people would consider this overkill. Set the sup and sub element’s line-heights to 0px or else they’ll screw with the leading. And so on.

— Think about how people actually read on screens. For example, on my screen, reading on full #ffffff is slightly uncomfortable after a while. People with wide screens will get ridiculously long lines if you don’t set a width to something sane like 60em. And so on.

0. Before someone says that this is a good thing because content and presentation should be separate, let me point out that we’re talking about presentation defaults here. No one wants to force everyone to see (or be screen-read) exactly the same thing. If we had some support for things like kerning in CSS, they would stay in CSS and be expected to degrade gracefully.

1. So good that I recommend it as an example of manual-writing to people with no interest in typography.

2. I’ve written about the problem of automatically curling apostrophes at http://rheme.net/apostrophes . In short, it’s hard to have a simple and fast algorithm that corrects the apostrophes/quotes in both:

She said "I like rock 'n' roll".

and

He said "I have a 'friend' who does too".

This is the kind of thing that only people who care about it will care about.
No, you need to have units on your data. Without units, numbers mean nothing. You select a country, and then you're presented with a list of other countries and some numbers. It's not clear that these are lifetime immigrants or permanent residents. There should be a title on the country info box "Total lifetime immigrants" or "Total lifetime emigrants", and ideally a legend at the bottom defining what that means.

It's also confusing in that the number format follows a European convention of using decimal points rather than commas in between every three digits the numbers, though I can accept that localising your site isn't a big concern.
"Like I said, it's not good, but it's not what I would call a "security hole" because there is no escalation of privilege."

Doesn't the end of the article suggest that without admin access, you could just reset the password for any admin user, then be able to log in as them? Sounds like priv escalation to me.

Edit: Actually, reading further comments, it seems you can only reset the password of the currently logged in user without reauthentication, so you can only get admin privs if you've already got a console with admin privs. I'm wrong.
That's exactly what I use it for. On big projects I use github and tower. But on smaller projects or for just general diffing things in the dropbox this is pretty amazing.
`dscl` should change the FileVault disk password for the associated user as well.

Note that if you're able to run `dscl`, the disk has already been unlocked and is insecure. You may as well just copy any interesting data while you're there.
I think you've got the illegally occupying force and residents of occupied territory confused.
On the topic of discipline, yesterday I tried a new way to work.

I placed a few large boxes on my regular desk, and placed all my peripherals and monitor on an elevated plane (too cheap to get a standing table :D). Then, turned on some good dance music.

Funnily enough, I found that by dancing (in my own awkward way) to my favourite music I actually stayed on track with what I was working on instead of procrastinating by visiting HN or Reddit :)

Well, bring on day 2.

(solo-ing a project for 6 months now.)
When I am faced with colleagues like the ones you describe, I, as politely as possible, point out we have an HR problem. I have a good relationship with my HR people and I hope this kind of input goes somewhere.

Truth is, the larger the organization, the lower the chances of hiring only the best people (and even the best can be corrupted by the bad apples). At some point, your average will approach society's median, which is pretty bad.
It's hard because we're travelling in a weird direction, so everything's "upside down" as well as distorted. The first easy-to-pick-out spot is about 13s in: you can see the shape of San Francisco Bay (upside down) in the bottom of the image (as well as, less obviously, Sacramento and then Reno to its left) and a huge city right in the middle of the image (near the top of the globe) that is LA. The Central Valley (Fresno etc) is also clear in this spot once you've picked out the others.

The second really clear spot is about 17s you can see Baja California fork off from the main continent; a moment later, the first big electrical storm is just west (i.e. to the right of) the Mexico City mega-city.
What are the interesting frameworks these days?
Everything takes longer than expected. That's why you should choose projects carefully--don't just jump into stuff. Here's a somewhat nerdy treatment of these topics: http://lesswrong.com/lw/600/heuristics_for_deciding_what_to_...
Ask HN: When is the first meeting for the YC Winter 2012 class?
Browser-based upload, but with file-hash-based deduping to skip the upload if possible, à la Dropbox? (Not a use-case for this site, but one for in-browser file hashing)
http://wordwar.ru/#q-408
It's important to distinguish between reliability in the protocol and reliability in the implementation. Spending time and money to be reliable in the face of disasters like falling planes is about the implementation. An example of reliability at the protocol level is TCP vs. raw IP. IP routers will try to get your packets to their destinations, but they'll also happily discard them if that's more convenient. TCP adds some reliability - the other side will let you know if they didn't get everything.

The issue you bring up with HTTP is actually related to HTTP being synchronous rather than unreliable. If you wrote your program to fetch data by sending an email, it would probably work even if the SMTP server that had the data was down: your local SMTP server would store your message and forward it when the destination server came back up.
The Vogons would be proud.
Just from looking at Apple’s security page, it’s pretty clear they don’t ignore security issues: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222. Organizations and researchers are even acknowledged in the release notes: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4826.

Like a lot of things, Apple does things quietly and on their own schedule without a lot of hoopla.
"Please cite billion dollar corporations that do not hold strategy sessions."

HP? RIM? (</snark>)
I find this to be a fairly hostile attitude toward management roles and unfortunately it's one that many people share. And it's ruining part of this industry. Not every manager is a 20-year old MBA grad who's out to ruin your business.

What you're describing -- a small team of independent programmers -- accounts for only one part of software engineering projects: programmers are at the center of the efforts, everything else is just overhead.

Many projects are more complex. Development spans multiple long-termed iterations, is time and safety-critical, very expensive and only an integrated part of a larger development process (e.g. automotive, aeronautics, ...). A lot of the man hours on these projects go into tasks that don't directly include programming. These are not necessarily management roles. You have Architects, Test Designers, ... not to count all the roles that have nothing to do with IT at all (if you design a car, what percentage or project members are programmers?).

I personally think that anyone who works in software engineering should have a strong background in programming/development. But active programming is not necessarily part of many roles in many software engineering projects today.

If you don't wish to work in such an environment, no one is forcing you to. If you are, and you are unhappy, explore different options. But don't underestimate the incredible importance that non-programmer roles play in many, many, many projects.
This is very, very cool. Is it your project?
Doesn't sound any worse than regular credit card transactions, where signature verification and ID checking are never done. It might even be better, since you can lock your phone, and presumably wire it to wipe remotely or after some failed guesses.

If the wallet is something you have to manually summon and isn't running in the background all the time, it'll be safer than the contactless RFID credit cards out there now.

If you're in the US, if your card does get stolen you'll only be responsible for the first $50[1], just like if you were paying with plastic or online.

1: Legally; some cards protect you from the first $50 too, but none will make you responsible for more than $50.