skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well that's a load of arse. The Lenovo X201 sucks - it crashes all over the place on Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit and it's certified!

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201102-7305
I use them pretty heavily for reference/todo/toread type of stuff. And I have a terrible memory.
PlainSite Launches: A web site to fix government
This general problem is a symptom of a major issue regarding the use of software that does not respect the freedom of its users. Every non-apple developer and user is required to bend to the will of the programmers who develop the proprietary iOS. Any negative choices or limitations imposed by Apple Inc. are virtually uncircumventable.

On the other hand, if users and developers in a community are free to view, modify and share the source code of the operating system and programs they are using, then that creates a dynamic where software cannot remain defective by design, something which cannot be said about Apple's hardware or software.

If we were talking about free (as in speech) software, users would have control of their data, and their choice of how to manage it; not some distant programmers working for a corporation's bottom line.
That's pretty interesting. So, the three non-backed locations are tmp, Caches and the Application Bundle. tmp and Caches are now swept. So, if you store your real cache stuff in the Application Bundle, it won't be backed up or auto-deleted. But maybe it gets trashed when you update the app.

I wonder if OS X, in line with its trend to be more like iOS, is going to start automatically clearing the ~/Library/Caches directory as well.
And how many of those accounts are spammers getting in early to build rep and appear legitimate?
Well... Not to be all self promotional about it or anything, but:

http://lookingbackaretrospective.posterous.com

I've received plenty of positive feedback about the writing, so hopefully you'll enjoy it.

It isn't any kind of major traffic success, however. Its only reached just under 3k views, and I imagine most of those come from the fact Posterous' new dashboard counts the stories that filter in your Reader as a "View" every time you log in. Kind of lame, as I feel that unnecessarily inflates the view counts of yourself, and the Posterous blogs you follow... So I'm not sure if I'm the guy to emulate if you're looking to make your blog a "success", haha.
There needs to be a file storage location that behaves the way Caches did before iOS 5

I'm confused. If the goal is for documents to be available in the near future in offline form, why not keep documents in /Documents until the user has read them (or some sane amount of time has passed), and then move them to /Caches or some temporary storage?

I've never used Instapaper, so perhaps documents are only stored until read anyway?
I like Woz, but his "everyman" schtick for new product releases is getting kind of old.

He's got connections to Apple, I don't think anyone would begrudge him getting a pre-release unit, or having one held for him, etc.
Anatomy of a Perfect Mobile Email
C is the best thing we have that's truly cross platform and has consistent performance everywhere without any company to claim ownership of it.

Until that changes, C is here to stay.
Sure, just install the ChromeFrame plugin!
It seems fair to say that Instapaper's version of an article can't be "redownloaded" for various reasons (offline, paywall, article removed, etc.) so it would be OK to put it in the Documents folder.

The argument against that is that you're now syncing that article with iCloud in addition to Instapaper.

But I wonder whether the correct answer is instead to eliminate Instapaper's sync feature, and just let iCloud do it. Once you have system-level cloud sync, don't you want to let Apple do the work? Sync is hard, and it isn't really the core value of Instapaper.

Edit: I was wondering about iCloud only for iOS 5/MacOS 10.7.2 devices with iCloud accounts. But that story does fall apart for people with mixed devices. So never mind.
I'd say I do too, even for stuff I have bookmarked. In fact 80% of my bookmarks provide nothing other than peace of mind for a person with a terrible memory. :)
While I agree with your comment, I would also point out that the fastest, most reactive and most scalable webapps have seen were written in C.

Some people out there actually know how to use C, and instead of battling with async JS do get a 5000hits/s hello world, they code a webapp that can easily handle hundreds of thousands of requests/sec without a blink.

Granted, it's less and less common.
RSA details March cyberattack, blames "nation state" for SecurID breach
There were also concerns about running arbitrary shader code on the GPU, which has DMA access (Yes, Direct Memory Access access is a bit redundant...) to system memory, as well as the framebuffer which is in GPU memory.
It has "support" for this, unfortunately support varies depending on your driver. e.g. Nvidia Quadro: http://www.brighthub.com/computing/linux/articles/31614/p2/ and some Radeons: http://niccolofavari.com/ubuntu-10.04-lucid-issues-with-exte... and so on.
This is covered in the link only it uses a chocolate bar instead of marshmallows.

EDIT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9O2Keu6o3i0
Ask HN: What's the Right Answer for API Authentication over HTTPS?
I've found a few good articles but they seem to disagree with regard to how many layers of security are required. Looking at other popular APIs doesn't offer much clarity. Twilio uses basic auth + HTTPS, Twitter uses OAUTH, AWS uses HMAC.. WTF?

Specifically if I'm using HTTPS, can I get by with a simple secret key sent with each request? I'm trying to balance ease of use with security. I don't want to require the API user to sign the payload/query using their private key if I can avoid it.
:) I've read your blogpost early on from day one. Incredible writing.
You're quoting that out of context.

His point is, if you back it up to iCloud, to get any use out of the backup, you need to be online. Therefore it's a waste, because in that scenario, you can just download it from Instapaper anyways.
Hovercard - a light weight jQuery plugin
This is Hacker News, where everything anointed by Larry and Sergei is to be revered and worshiped by all, forever and ever, amen.
What Cash Crunch? Khosla Ventures Closes Another $1 Billion Fund
Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome:

-A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

-Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing

-Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load

My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs simply take up too much screen space.

Honestly, I just haven't had any complaints with firefox (beta channel) apart from the recent interesting decision to change dragging tabs to bookmarks to require hitting ctrl - https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/bro...
so this is more complicated than your schema ? :

http://wiki.basho.com/Replication.html#Read-Repair

"Read repair occurs when a successful read occurs — that is, the quorum was met — but not all replicas from which the object was requested agreed on the value. There are two possibilities here for the errant nodes:

1. The node responded with a “not found” for the object, meaning it doesn’t have a copy.

2. The node responded with a vector clock that is an ancestor of the vector clock of the successful read.

When this situation occurs, Riak will force the errant nodes to update their object values based on the value of the successful read."
Unfortunately you can't write data to your application bundle. That folder is read-only.
Right. If full consistency is a requirement than you can still have it, at the cost of availability. Alternatively, since the dataset is immutable, it contains a history of everything that happened. So you can resolve problematic actions later on (this is similar to what banks do).

It's important to realize that the tradeoff between consistency and availability is a limitation of nature, not of our tooling.
FTR, Pioneer HiBred recently patented their own glyphosate (roundup) resistance gene (a different one than monsanto has), although I'm not sure if they have any varieties that have the gene incorporated yet. Obviously, they're excited about it because now they don't have to pay royalty fees to Monsanto anymore.
The application bundle is signed. Writing to that location should be blocked by the sandbox.
Why not test 64-bit first and only try 32-bit if it fails?
I have the X220 and I love the display... Did you not get the IPS option?
Maybe the solution is to make it a choice for the user? An option to "clean up documents when space is low on the device" in the instapaper options. If checked, stuff gets stored in cache. If not, in documents.

That way, the default behavior is that "download something = want to keep it on device", but users can do the other one too if they want. I don't think the option is particularly useful, but it might make the app reviewer happy?
If you go for the premium service, a bargain $25 a month you get the ability to have it scrape and download every site you bookmark. So even if the site you bookmarked goes down, you retain the content.

Pinboard also has good APIs so you can backup your data. No lock-in.
Bullshit.

They're listing "Preinstall only" for quite a few machines (including the Lenovo W520, which I just bought), but the "preinstall" image isn't available. In the US, you can only choose windows as your OS. You can't get the compatibility-tested version of ubuntu anywhere on that page, or anywhere else I've looked.

Rather tragic for an open-source operating system.

Note: I didn't look too far, I just installed arch instead.
Ask HN: Seeking advice in scaling Customer Support
I'm a long-time YC reader and I've recently launched a boot-strapped B2B company with two friends (all first-time entrepreneurs). It turned out though that the product we're selling is more support intensive then expected (which is not a problem in itself because customers are paying for support), so the "nice problem to have" is to scale the team of three devs, automate various tasks and measure the performance of the support work-flows (response times, SLA violations etc). I'd really appreciate if you could share your experience and stories with customer care management and the work-flows and tools you're using to execute and monitor them.

We settled with SugarCRM to manage our customers and their contact persons as well as the leads and opportunities. Internally we use MantisBT (with an LDAP back-end) for bug-tracking and feature planning, and that's what our customers use to submit tickets to us as well. So we've already redundant data, on one hand the Contacts in the CRM, and on the other hand the accounts in LDAP, which we need to insert manually. This is ok for now with only three engineers and a handful of customers to manage, but I fear it'll get ugly and unmaintainable as we grow.

Can you recommend solutions or services for customer ticketing systems, which integrate properly into an existing CRM system by using it as an authentication backend, and which check in the CRM system for a valid support contract and use the SLA data to properly set escalation triggers? Also our current setup doesn't allow to easily fetch metrics for performance measurement, so I fear we started off with the wrong tools I guess.

I'd like to avoid to implement all that kind of integration using the Mantis and Sugar APIs and some Dashboard system if possible, probably we can migrate to something more suitable as long as the amount of data to migrate is quite small? How did you guys handle that part when growing your startups?
Here are a few of the articles I've found:

http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/designing-a-secure-rest-api-with...
Complete, easy to understand article that outlines the HMAC approach but suggests that things can be much simpler if HTTPS is employed.

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/12/principles-for-standard...
Claims that you should use HTTPS and sign your queries using a private key. This seems onerous for the API user.
Mark Cuban looking to tame Wall Street's "cheetahs"
True and I have no idea why you were downvoted.
Bedtime Calculator
Here is a bedtime calculator that you can use in your spare time.
> Account created after prior account( haploid )was inexplicably silent-banned.

A bit more civility might help you avoid a repeat of that.
Too bad WebGL doesn't work on my linux box
Do you consider a Broadcom 802.11n radio "compatible" even when Linux runs it in g mode?
At least in GNOME and XFCE you can decrease the default font size, which is what I did right after installing Debian with XFCE. XFCE also has really slim buttons and borders. Sadly the file manager, Thunar, is not slim at all.

So if you have not already given XFCE a try I recommend you do. Personally I wont use Unity until the skin i as slim as XFCE.
TwitchTV / Justin.tv SF mixer with pro-Starcraft player
Hey, cool! Thanks man!

I just read through yours, and was about to come back and comment on how we seem to be touching on a common theme.

I'm not sure if this blog is meant to be ongoing, or a chronicle of past events (like mine was), but if you guys are still developing and trying to succeed, I wish you nothing but the best of luck.

From one failure to another: It's journey, not the destination.
One-click 3D printing from WebGL CAD tool
Buy patents apparently :-) More seriously, I asked once about this when they were removing bottled water from the local mini-kitchens and dropping over 1 billion dollars a quarter into the bank. My question was "Gee, can't you spare a couple of million this quarter to keep the bottled water restocked?" and obviously the answer was that they could not.

But from a corporate/strategic point of view having a lot of cash on hand makes executives more aggressive and that can be a good thing for the company. Just like employee's that are too afraid to lose their job to say what they really need to say, executives who are too afraid that their next decision could doom the company won't take those risks.

Like anything there is a balance.
I love that research is going into disproving already superseded theories.
I had the exact same question and your idea as to the answer is interesting. Perhaps this new behavior is in response to Newsstand's ability to automatically download new issues--users may allow those to stack up without any thought and run out of space. The question then becomes: why not just enforce this behavior for Newsstand?
Your quarrel is not just with Wall Street...
Additional details:

We've jailbroken the device and performed a tcpdump capture of the 3G packets (while the device is sitting idle).

The traffic appears to be a semi-constant HTTPS connection to an Apple run server:

Primary name: p02-quota.icloud.com.akadns.net

Within about 20 seconds of connecting the iCloud account, the HTTPS connection is opened and the seemingly sustained data connection begins (1 kbyte/sec).

Doing a MITM capture of what's actually going back and forth probably wouldn't help us at this point. It's just enough to know that it is indeed iCloud causing this data drain.
Motel miami beach
I was last week at a conference on tourism and travel motel miami. Every day I find myself a little more than how many speakers named websites related to your field of expertise and this time was no exception.
And one by me for Bjarne Stroustrup:

"They said it shouldn't be done, & he did it".

(yeah, a joke. Humor's not only for Reddit).
When we got mitochondria, we weren't mammals yet. ;) Apologies for spelling.
Yes. First of all, not every algorithm is amenable to read-repair. Imagine, for example, storing a unique count in the database. There's no way to know how to combine divergent values in that case. (If the root value is 4, and you have two divergent values of 5, you have no idea if the increment was due to the same element or not. The right answer is either 5 or 6, but you have no idea).

More importantly, if you make a mistake, you corrupt the database. The system I described based on immutable data is human fault-tolerant, which is a critical property. If you mess up, you can always correct things.
Lots of people are focussing on Marco's particular use case in the comments, and I think it's a valid one, but this extends beyond simple documents.

There is a category of data that is aimed at offline use. Streaming apps like Spotify, that let you download playlists for offline use. GPS apps that download hundreds of MB of map data. You get the idea.

On one hand, this data is a form of cache. The data is always available elsewhere (on the content provider servers) and it can be restored if necessary in a worst case scenario. But the key word here is "offline". This is the kind of data that, by definition depends on being around if the user is offline and therefore cannot be easily restored on demand, when the user needs it.

Obviously, having all of this stuff backed up to iCloud and using up GBs of people's capacity is not feasible or even logical. So this kind of data does not belong anywhere that iCloud will back up. But it must be stored somewhere that is safe from being purged.

Yes, a users GPS maps can be restored eventually but that doesn't help them when they are stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a weak GPRS signal and all of their maps gone.

Apple have made an almighty cockup in overlooking the "offline data" use case.

In Marco's case, I'd agree that the articles represent user data that should be stored somewhere like Application Support, which will be backed by iCloud but I think that's probably fine in this case.
Glad that they took away the bottled water. It is still H20 from the water fountain.
Interesting, do you have an example?
CM 7.1 Alpha released for Touchpad
the database does it when partition ends. Its called eventual consistency. The database would use something along the lines of vector clocks.
Although these headsets are pretty decent, they pale in comparison to similarly priced headphones from companies that specialize in audio equipment. Something in that ($200) price range are the Sennheiser 595s. I say this as someone who has used both.
If BYOD and telecommuting was just held up by "security" it would've been steamrolled a long time ago. Very few organizations take security that seriously. Articles like these frame IT strategy about as accurately as a courtroom drama depicts the legal process.

100% of IT decisions you'd probably disagree with are driven by responsibility and/or costs.
I'm not mistaken, only you appear not to have experience with FORTRAN and Pascal.

> There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware.

Of course ALGOL easily matches this claim. Proof: Knuth's TeX was written in Pascal.

Not to mention everything that was written in FORTRAN.

> I still occasionally run programs originally written in 1981 for a single-processor 16-bit PDP-11 with 64k of RAM per program, and they're still efficient

Try to check when most of the FORTRAN libraries still used today were written. Some -- decades before 1980.

See also how long FORTRAN compilers generated faster scientific code than C -- for decades after C appeared. You can also find why:

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

> "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language"

The paper, as far as I remember, doesn't claim impossibility of writing useful software, mainly laments for the lack of return, break, continue constructs, which are convenient to have but not real show-stoppers. Note also that Pascal standard features are just to be a "learner's language" not a "system language" -- for which there were working compilers and uses before C.

> You couldn't run the Burroughs 5000 Master Control Program on a PDP-11, as far as I know, at all, and certainly not efficiently.

You'd also have to port Unix the same way you had to port MCP -- you can think of MCP as Unix in which drivers are part of the kernel -- but "integer" in ALGOL is certainly as portable as "int" in Unix -- they both fit the "hardware word."

Nicer pointer arithmetics in C is a good point. Though note that Wirth also had "Pascal lite" with pointers and which was closer to assembly for OS-level stuff just as Burroughs had ALGOL lite for OS-level stuff. The concepts of "closer to assembly" but higher-level languages existed certainly well before C. The idea to separate kernel and drivers is something else, and I don't know who achieved that first and when.

Finally, see Google's go -- it's more or less acceptance of Wirth's directions, mixed with terser notation of C. (Now, finally, why are you still on my lawn?)

> The C abstract model of computation is an increasingly poor fit to modern hardware

No, you can observe C (as well as more or less all ALGOL descendants) as a higher level representation acceptably close to assembly, so as long as there are CPU's which execute machine code and we need to care about details (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068513) we'll need something like that to have efficient and not too low level representation.
Instapaper is more than just an iOS application, so no, iCloud is not the answer for syncing.
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

(Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.)
Spawn of Stazi dogs. Thankfully USA has this shit well covered off with 4th-A. Unthinkable.
Good grief.

"trade away freedom for meaningless and short-term convenience"

Is such a loaded sentence I don't even know where I am supposed to start. What, exactly, is the definition of "meaningless" here?

Customising your search engine beyond a choice of search providers that >95% of users use is not basic functionality. Not by any definition. Apple have demonstrated time and time again that they DO cater for the majority (whether the majority know what they want at the time or not).

Yes, Apple locks stuff down. If you don't like it, don't buy an Apple product. This is not a complex issue. If someone considers it a more valuable use of their time to have a device that works better but with fewer options, that is their choice. They are not insane.
Maybe you could list most common failing tests, let people decide what they could live without:

- wifi chipset

- vid cards (GPU set)

- sleep/resume
New interview about the ideas behind Akka, upcoming Akka 2.0 etc
What laptop are you using which supports 16gb of RAM? I'd love a portable computing juggernaut!
>Imagine, for example, storing a unique count in the database. There's no way to know how to combine divergent values in that case. (If the root value is 4, and you have two divergent values of 5, you have no idea if the increment was due to the same element or not. The right answer is either 5 or 6, but you have no idea).

if 2 nodes are allowed to accept writes for the same "cell" independently without synchronization, ie. node A : 4->5, node B : 4->5->6 how your schema would work in this case?
(of course any schema would work fine if only one node allowed to master the "cell" )
No, nor IE9 support. Nor IE10 even.
Microsoft isn't too keen on WebGL.
Changing languages will not save you from security holes, only change the kind of mistakes you have to worry about. Only knowing how to write secure code can save you from security holes. You cannot ignore how computers work, no matter how many layers of abstraction and libraries you pile on in an effort to shield yourself from reality.
i don't see any reason to 'sign' a request over HTTPS if you're going to implement authentication.

hmac / signing makes sense if you can't afford the overhead of SSL, and don't mind exposing the request to a man in the middle / eavesdropper.