skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> VPNs these days are one-click to establish

DirectAccess is a zero click connection where the company network and resources are available any time you want it. I tried it for a few months and it works like a magic.

For things like security and data protection, you always have bitlocker
Herd mentality of apps developers
I'd say the demo itself is incredible. It only became better when I realized it was WebGL
Try running it once it is inside the folder. Fine with me because I don't use it (yet), but others may not like the outcome.
Couldn't agree more. For the past year+, Firefox has been getting noticeably slower and slower, to the point that I would cringe when clicking that little fox planet and thinking of what I could do in the next 3 minutes while Firefox opened.

A few months ago, I finally switched to Chrome 100% and very rarely use the bloated software that is now Firefox.

I used to recommend Firefox as THE browser. Now I recommend people uninstall it.
Hourly rates considered harmful
I have a few issues with the current Firefox, but I use it as my full time browser and I never see a crash.. I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Mozilla itself and not some other piece of the ecosystem like plugins or extensions.
I'm going to admit my ignorance here...what is Blit and what is its significance? Most of Richie's contributions were made before I was born, so I did not grow up with many of these things.
These lines of text have very strict rules limiting what they are allowed to be.

If you try to process source code with the unix tools built with the "just lines of text" model, you won't get very far.

If you use a parser with rich data types -- you can do so much more.

Unix is not just a kernel -- Unix includes the "application programs" and criticizing their weakness is criticizing Unix itself.
Google Announces Q3 2011 Financial Results, Google+ has 40 million  users
> totally kills the value of the Awesome Bar

I disable the (air quote) Awesome (end air quote) Bar every time I do a fresh install of Firefox.

I hate this damned feature with a passion (thank you, but I already know how to type, so get the hell out of my way!), and if the product doesn't have a switch to turn this damned feature off I'll find a competing product that does. Note that so many people loathed this feature that Mozilla added an option to turn the damned thing off.

And yes, I always do my Google searches by launching a bookmark that has their damned look-ahead feature disabled as well.
anyone know the developer(s) behind this?
Lack of emotion doesn't necessarily correlate with intelligence or success.

Also, an "emotional outburst" can be the product of knowing you're correct, AKA you've done the research and know the ins and outs of the situation.
Compiz supports focus follows mouse, though it is broken in 11.04. Maybe they fixed it in 11.10.
When Netflix Dumped Qwikster, It Left One Exec Stranded In NoCal
Google trends shows a recent uptick also, particularly in Ireland:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=stumbleupon&geo=irl&s...
"I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9."

So.. in the past 2 weeks?

Seriously, that absurd numbering scheme needs to stop too.
Just use xmonad. That runs fine.
What do you find lacking in Debian security updates and support? This is quite baffling.
Attacking and Defending NoSQL
Yeah. I had the same problem with chrome as well. Same setup. Maybe web browsers can't handle how I work with them at the moment. Maybe I'll go down the rabbit hole and try to fix some of the bugs myself.
Wifi Syncr syncs your Windows shares to your Android phone Wirelessly
I would really like `rm` to just deprioritize the space taken by the file, so if enough time passes and space is needed, old deleted files are reclaimed.

That is, institutionalize the idea of "undelete" -- but still allow `rm` to make a good trade-off between space reclamation and irreversibility.

Manual memory management is still useful for some things, but it seems you're implying GC is wrong in every situation? I'd say the vast majority of software today is better served by GC'd languages (That does not include many forms of systems programming, however).
How does the system deal with real-world data that has cross-datum consistency requirements? Many system mnodeling real-world have this issue: accounting, inventory, ...

I'm also annoyed by the repeated mantra that you must have partition tolerance. In fact, most naïve systems are designed without it, with some central authority that must always be accessible. (Any system that is stricly a tree with an essential root node is like that. Any partition that does not include the root node cannot do any work, thus the system is not partition tolerant.) You can then have CA (by requiring that all requests and updates must propagate to the root.)
You could try enabling the "Override software rendering list" option in about:flags, although that is probably the same as the --ignore-gpu-blacklist option.
Actually, if you don't mind spending a few minutes to go on a bit further, I think it would be useful to have it all archived here for future reference.
80 hits and 3 leads (A Comparison of HN, Reddit, Twitter, and Forrst)
I wrote my own web-based terminal emulator, but shortly thereafter found shellinabox (http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/) and I use that instead. It looks like GateOne might be a bit more configurable, and I don't think shellinabox does tiling or bookmarks. Can anyone else comment on other relevant differences?
and to answer my own question: http://helloenjoy.com/ looks like dev team behind it.

Do some other cool work in webgl: http://helloracer.com/webgl/
http://helloenjoy.com/helloflower/
How are users who casually browse news.yc supposed to look at this and have any clue what they're clicking?

Since there's no way to hide these links with uninformative titles, the no-addon solution is to get them to display as "visited". So I click them and then immediately close the tab.

Website owners: Sorry for throwing off your stats.
> The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on disk after every single click

No, this is not true. Since Firefox 3.5 they have avoided this entirely:

https://autonome.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/front-end-performa...

This approach has been largely replaced with asynchronous queries off-the-main-thread, since the temporary tables were actually a performance problem:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552023

So they've already done what you've suggested. It turned out to cause problems, and was replaced. AFAIK, there's basically no database queries in the Mozilla UI loop.
See, the problem here is that I do that with Opera on my EEEpc too, except I only have a gig of ram, no swap, and I don't have to kill it every week.

Firefox just doesn't cut it.
Google profits and revenue surge in the third quarter
That's not the point, the point is that Firefox still gives you the choice, while Chrome devs don't think you should have a choice.
Have you considered using a window manager that's not so fancy?
You add a version number or timing information to each update. Node A says Atlanta, with version 42. Node B says Chicago, with version 41. 42 > 41, so you go with Atlanta.
Bootstrap + Skeleton + HTML5 Boilerplate
Or perhaps the fact that CS has always been a naturally political issue. Is RMS apolitical? Is CS not used to wage wars?
http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+7&b2=chrome+16
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3251
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606

No, Chrome still does not have mathml.
I need a fucking Halloween costume
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal) had enough to satisfy my curiosity.
Box One-Ups Apple, Offers 50 GB Free Cloud Storage to iOS Users
oh god you just made this happen in my head lol
This is the key point. You either set your writes to be synchronous or asynchronous, depending on whether you want consistency or high availability. The point of having no updates means that you have less possibility for conflicts when sites A and B are appended to simultaneously. This means robust replication even with async writes.
Haven't all iPhones used TriQuant amplifiers?
You can actually do it with a pulsed laser (hook up a laser diode to a function generator), a stationary mirror, and a photovoltaic cell. Hook up the function generator and the photovoltaic cell to an oscilloscope, mount the mirror a suitably long distance away, and you can actually see the timing difference between laser pulse and detection at the photovoltaic cell. Vary the distance and you can subtract out the delays in detection and such.

I did this as an experiment in a junior physics lab last semester. It felt like cheating. All you needed was twenty feet of space.
Because https is still included. It needs to be, so that users know it's a secure connection. This makes https URLs appear more crufty than http URLs. This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to be insecure.

The fewer such excuses there are, the better.
You're being overly sensitive. Jobs passed away first, and was remarked on first.
Not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a really good solution: http://osqa.net

As a user I prefer an stackoverflow clone instead of a typical forum
Alleged Celeb Hacker Glad He Got Caught; Was Addicted to Hacking
The Science of Inbound Marketing
Scott Pilgrim had some of the most affecting moments in recent cinematic memory when sampling Nintendo classics - the combination of young adult infatuation and the Zelda wishing-well fairy music was fantastic.
All my VMs run 10.04. Been thinking that when it gets too old due to the packages supported getting to far out of date, I'll just switch to Debian.
Try changing LIGHTS.releaseBuild = true to false.

Interesting debug data.

This must have been a beast to build, sync and debug.

I'd like to see the author post a "making of" entry.
In practice, beating the CAP theorem inside the data center is achieved by using a 2-tiered system.

Have a set of lightweight controller processes which use a consistent majority voting algorithm (Paxos) to replicate the state of the cluster. Since it's lightweight, you can run 5 or 7 of them, meaning 2 or 3 can die. This is enough Availability in practice, per customer input.

Have a set of data nodes which actually store the data. Put groups of 3 of these in replica sets and use consistent replication (Paxos). If one or two of them goes down, the controllers reconfigure the replica set, so you get Availability even if 2 of 3 goes down. (Customers love that they get Consistency but 2 of 3 can go down.)

This scheme is used in my company's product. The idea comes from academic/Google papers, and is used in other products, too.

The scheme does not work for multi-datacenter use-cases. If you want that, you have to give up consistent replication (Paxos) inside the replica sets and use some kind of eventual consistency. This variation of the 2-layered scheme is used by one of the popular competing NoSQL systems.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3106488

Nothing wrong with GMOs, lots and lots wrong with Monsanto.
when you have fault in the system so you can't access node A, node B returns Chicago with version 41 and you proceed with it if your system choice is Availability at the price of Consistency, or you wait for the node A if you choice Consistency at the price of Availability.
Starting with something like a GNU Radio board (http://gnuradio.org/) and a commercial antenna, you could put together a basic CW or ICW radar in a weekend without too much trouble. A little bit of care is required to not break any local laws or piss people off.

Simply, you would send out a radio signal, bounce it off a target and measure the time between when you sent the signal and when it was received. That delay is inversely proportional to the speed of light. Take a bunch of samples to integrate away short term clock inaccuracies (but don't integrate too long, because some types of clock noise will make your answer worse and not better) and you'll get a pretty good estimate of c.

Another GNU Radio based experiment would be to attempt to pick up multipath reflections of TV or radio broadcasts off large geographical features or buildings. Basically, you would capture two signals - a direct version of the broadcast and a delayed version. The errors would be large, but you would be able to get fairly close to a reasonable estimate of c (in air).

Before doing either of these experiments, mocking them up with a speaker and microphone or two ultrasound transceivers is a good idea and will save you a bunch of time. 40kHz is easier to work with than 2.4Ghz for sure.
Oh I completely agree, there should definitely be some indication or link to process the search exactly as typed from the results page (or a user preference to make one the default). That's how spelling suggestions work, so there's already precedence for it.
> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness.

I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence?

The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0 was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,30...

Edit: Looks like I'm being downvoted. Please tell me hacker news isn't deteriorating into reddit, where opposing opinions are downvoted by reflex...
You then do not have the A part of CA. Your root node is not accessible => your entire system is not accessible.
What an ignorant thing to say. HN essentially is social publicity and PR for YC startups.
Thanks. That is very good slides. You should email hanns, to have this slide to be featured on the ringojs page. I just did a site in Rails, thinking of migrating it o RingoJS though.
A few days ago I posted my frustration with Cassandra counters, this article articulates a solution elegantly:

'if you make a mistake or something goes wrong in the realtime layer, the batch layer will correct it.'

The resiliency of this protection however is limited by the time it takes to do a full re-processing of the historical data. If there is a processing mistake in your real-time layer, it is likely to exist in your batch layer as well, thus invalidating the pre-computed results as well.
I loved that movie. I totally felt like it captured the video game vibe while turning the movie into a great story
I wouldn't say that the articles' metadata (URL, title, date of download, maybe thumbnail of the 1st page) is downloaded content. It's clearly user-generated, and should be in the "home" of the app IMHO.

The articles themselves, yes, send them to the cache. If the user needs to reclaim the storage used up by the articles, let the OS delete them. Then, when the user needs to read the article again, it will take some time to download. But don't get into an "all articles gone" situation. Just my 2 cents.
URDU SEX STORIES: Office Sex
As a young whipper-snapper upstart with some big ideas, this is inspiring. Maybe I'm not quite so crazy after all to think I can pull them off.
I actually was thinking the other day if Firefox performance would be improved if SQLite was swapped to a "real" RDBMS like PostgreSQL (or mySQL).
Designing for Startups: A Conversation w/ Garry Tan, Khoi Vinh, Charles Adler...
Google Translate conversation mode expands to 14 languages
>Beating the CAP theorem inside the data center is fairly easy in practice by using a 2-tiered system.

>Have a set of lightweight controller processes which use a consistent majority voting algorithm (Paxos, Consistency, Partition Tolerance) to replicate the state of the cluster. Since it's lightweight, you can run 5 or 7 of them, meaning 2 or 3 can die. This is more than enough Availability in practice, per customer input.

it isn't beating of the CAP theorem. It is decreasing the Partition Tolerance and thus getting more Availability while preserving Consistency in full accordance with CAP.
Earlier this year. Can't remember exactly when. OSX.
Maybe this?

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545220)

Or this? (doubtful)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3026230)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1921154)
GitLab - All for what you so love GitHub on your server
Android conversation mode, live translation
Has anyone figured out where the high water mark is? When will the cleaning behavior kick in?

This is an interesting twist especially with the 16GB devices which tend to actually be above 50%.
I'm absolutely sure they're woefully inaccurate. We've compared their data to our own GA data and their numbers are so far off it's laughable - or it would be if we weren't spending an arm and a leg to get them.
But you can always correct the mistake and recompute things. Unlike systems based on mutable data, mistakes aren't permanent.
I'm not sure if you're trolling here:

> The CAP theorem has been beaten.

> As you are about to see, a system like this not only beats the CAP theorem, but annihilates it.

The CAP theorem states that you can't have all three of strong consistency, partition tolerance, and availability at once. This is a proven fact (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6464/2009sp/papers/brewe...).

I don't see how your proposed system provides strong consistency. Eventual consistency is not strong consistency. Let's pretend the HDFS deployment in your batch workflow is partitioned from the rest of the system: sorry, but you won't be able to get strongly consistent data from it, and you'll have to either read stale data or simply block until the partition ends. This is pedantic, the CAP theorem is pretty specific.

Now, if you're saying something about the eventual consistency of logically monotonic facts in the system (see the CALM conjecture, now theorem: http://databeta.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/the-calm-conjecture...), which I think you are, then I agree that you have a system providing (even provable) eventual consistency. The basic idea is that if code is logically monotonic, meaning the set of facts it operates on continues to grow over time, then it will obey eventual consistency properties. If I'm not mistaken, your notion of "immutable data" is equivalent to restricting programs to operate on logically monotonic data (in your examples, this is accomplished by making data take the form "fact X is true at time T").
What's your C migration plan?
Get the OST from Bastion. It's new, awesome and memorable.
I'd link to it but I don't have access to streaming sites from this computer.
I'd submit that this is, in some ways, worse: instead of all articles being gone they're now all grayed out, so the user knows they were here, can still see there, but if he's offline he can not access them because only the metadata is left, the data itself is gone.
If the device is low on space I think it makes sense for Apple to purge cached data and tmp directories. For an app like Instapaper which relies on local documents, some of the documents should (imho) be saved to the home directory instead. And yes, I know this is hard but I'm just thinking aloud.
Clearly, apps that cache data need to be modified to show the difference between having no data and having no data cached. IMAP clients have dealt with this, for example; they show a message like "the contents of this folder are not available offline".

Perhaps Apple could have made cache cleaning opt-in on a per-app basis until iOS 6, though.
I'm Confused. Is Team Important or Not?
Ask HN: Would you reply to an email inquiry...
Especially if you are a freelancer or startup mentor?

I have approached freelancers, startup community mentors and others who either claim they are for hire or available to “assist” with startup related questions.<p>In each case I send an email or a tweet requesting specific advice but I stress that I do not want to be a pest so they should only reply if they are truly interested or have the time. Like clockwork, I get a response along the lines of “hey, thanks for reaching out, I’d be happy to help…”<p>I reply with thanks and gratitude and proceed to explain my situation. It is precisely after this that the conversation drops dead. No replies or response. Zero. Why does this happen and am I doing something wrong? The reason I reach out to these people is really just so they can point me in the right direction. Is it spammy for me to reach out in this fashion?
I would appreciate your feedback.
To a baby, a magazine is an iPad that doesn't work
The Quiet Health-Care Revolution
They are using asynchronous queries still, and the problem is that they aren't always asynchronous if there are any long-running queries happening in the background. That's the reason for the hang per the most recent bug.

If temp tables were causing problem, then there's something seriously wrong with SQLlite's in-memory temporary tables (or how they are being used). By definition they shouldn't be blocking...
I thought Instapaper scraped the page and stored that, to accommodate sites that require login for access. So not trivial to just re-download the articles. Plus the whole point is to have them available when you're offline.

I'd say in this case, the content is user-generated and should be backed up.
The fact that you are willing to trade away freedom for meaningless and short-term convenience does not necessarily qualify you as a sane man.

Also, "blocks basic functionality for absolutely no reason whatsoever" is not - or rather, should not - be in any definition of "just works".
What you're describing is a query. "What is Sally's current location?"

Queries can be inconsistent during partitions. This is what eventual consistency means. But once the partition clears, the queries will be consistent again.

The data is immutable. Both "Sally lives in Atlanta as of time X" and "Sally lives in Chicago as of time Y" are true.

This is far, far different from databases based on mutable state. In order for a database like that to be eventually consistent, you need to do read-repair to enforce consistency. This is besides the other problems I brought up with mutable databses, such as a lack of human fault-tolerance.
These "I have X tabs open" comparisons are very unhelpful. Different sites take hugely different amounts of memory in just the same way that different desktop applications do.

If you want to make a even-slightly quantitative comparison you need to at least start by loading the same set of sites. Then you need to worry about them sending different content (e.g. different adverts) to different browsers.

In the end most people go by metrics like "how responsive does the UI feel", which is fine, although since it's a perception thing it can be influenced by factors other than the actual speed e.g. preconceived notions set by marketing.
Development has built-in network effects
Is it possible that a user could use Instapaper to save a document that they wouldn't be able to download later, even if they had access to an internet connection? If that's possible, I think Instapaper would have every right to store things in the Documents folder, since you're asking it to create something more akin to an archive than a temporary cache of data.
My thoughts/involvement with the "Cash Crunch" article