skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't watch the video right now, but the idea that "Everybody's the DBA" is risky in general. I'm hugely in favor of developers writing and optimizing their own SQL, being able to create normalized schema (and know when it's worth the tradeoff to denormalize), how to read a query plan, and generally be as competent as a DBA. But... it's good to have one person who has the global view of the database for things like tuning extent sizes, selecting the optimal types of storage for various partions, doing reviews on the schema, capacity planning, etc, etc.

The right setup (IMO) of having a DBA in an operational role with developers that are highly proficient/self-sufficient is hard to get right and expensive enough that it probably isn't right for an early stage company. And a bad DBA can be a nightmare. So there are tradeoffs on both sides.
1. End users don't configure web servers
2. Since when is "it's too hard" an acceptable solution for HN or Google?

Have you ever tried to tell someone nontechnical how to reboot their router over the phone?

"Just unplug it and plug it back in"
"Unplug what?"
"The router - the thing with the network cables in it"
"The one with the tv cable?"
etc.

Now try to tell them how to reconfigure their SSID, and then reconfigure all their connected devices to match.
Jungle Disk support sends login credentials over http
I noticed today that Jungle Disk uses SSL. A lot. And passphrases and encryption too. Which is good.

Until you need to use support. Their support site sends your username and password over plain old http, no SSL involved. Try it: http://support.jungledisk.com/

A truly facepalming moment.
It's not like they're breaking into your house and stealing private information. Your router is broadcasting your SSID.
There are several ways of ejecting. Drag to trash. Select the disk icon and choose File->eject, or hit command-E. Use Disk Utility. Use the command line. If all else fails (such as if the screen is borked and you can't see what you're doing and you can't use the network to get in) the disk will eject if you hold down the mouse/trackpad button when the computer reboots. (Not sure how that works with bluetooth mice/trackpads.)

That said, yeah, stupid to not expose access to the eject button on the DVD mechanism.
I love that these guys are so consistently open on their scaling strategies. Does anyone have any similar resources for Rails stacks?
the list of authorised methods for passenger screening

How about that. The EU has a system limiting government authority to a list of enumerated powers, while the US government runs around doing whatever it damned well pleases.

US Government: please go back to your copy of the Constitution (I assume you still have one) and re-read the 10th Amendment.
Actually I don't think there is. Consumers have gotten used to free, and 50% daily deals... The only way to make a profitable consumer business is to make the consumers the products themselves. This is with apps though, with hardware it's different obviously. There are some exceptions like Photoshop, and operating systems... but by and large, it's hard
America's Productivity Paradox
"I honestly don’t care about your f*cking opinion... I just ask all of us to show a little respect..."

be the change you want to see in the world.
Fortunately, my Apple II GS (Woz Edition!) had a physical disk eject button.

I understand the dislike of physical buttons, but I don't understand why Apple doesn't at least put a capacitance button on there (like the 360 has).
Excuse my presumption if you already know about this, but there are ways to make the I/O less aggressive for processes that hit the disk hard.

Since your graph header says 'linode', I'm assuming your servers all run Linux, and you should take a look at ionice[1]. It adjusts the IO priority of a process like 'nice' adjusts CPU priority. For example, prefixing your call like this: "ionice -c 3 tarsnap...." will give tarsnap the lowest priority access to the drive.

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/1/ionice
While this could change the game for electric cars (Edit: as others have already been discussing), it would also be an amazing advance for cell phones and computers. Imagine a cell phone that had a lighter battery but still lasted through a week of use between charges. Or an incredibly thin and light battery (and a correspondingly thin and light phone) that still lasted a couple of days.

Or a notebook that didn't need all the power management to dial down the CPU and GPU when unplugged, and could barrel away full speed and still last for a day or two. You'd still have to worry about heat dissipation, but there are plenty of fast notebooks that handle that fine when plugged in.

Or an iPad with the battery life of a Kindle. Or a Kindle that you charged once a year.
Yeah but locally, not to the whole internet.
Exfoliate: the Android app that can kill Facebook's Timeline
From a symposium on Graphene at Mcgill earlier this year. One study presented was Graphene/Metal contact

http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~maassenj/aps/2011-March-meetin...
Side note, no Mac (as far as I know) has ever had an eject button

My MacBook Pro and most MacBooks have an eject button on the keyboard right next to F12
OK, so who's going to start sendperson.com?
I don't get it - when I click on available wireless networks I see all of my neighbors SSID names, should I not read them? These are not private, the default setting of a router is actually to broadcast this name.

So, perhaps we should advocate router manufacturers to change the default SSID broadcast?
There's always the whole "we haven't invented a good way to recycle the 20 thousand dollar toxic battery" problem still to deal with.
I <3 PVD. It's a great place to live and work. Affordable living, excellent bars and restaurants, tech and design energy from Brown and RISD, and an active and vibrant geek community (http://www.flickr.com/groups/providencegeeks/). It's really a great place to live.
Slight deviation but I'm seeing a telling pattern among my friends which is that after making the jump to a Macbook two or three years ago because of their great experience with the iPod they've now reached the time when it starts needing new parts.

Because the batteries and hard drives are so crazily expensive I see them making the decision that it's cheaper to buy a new PC (possibly even a nice light netbook) then replace the battery / hard drive on their Apple.

Before they'd made the jump I'd encourage them to switch because they hadn't yet "experienced" Apple. Now that they're making an informed decision I can't argue with their reasoning for switching back.

Apple's upfront premium pricing is defensible and sensible but their aftersales costs are doing everyone including them a lot of damage.
That's correct. They offer an opt-out mechanism.

Same here.
Why would I choose your site for suggestions over Amazon.com which has a vast catalog, decent search, user reviews, and a review rating system?
Quality is unbearable.
I think part of the problem is that a significant portion of the US doesn't fly often enough to be greatly inconvenienced by this. And, of course, the media can always find people willing to say "Well, if it will make us safer..."

Imagine the outcry in New York if they announced that they were going to install metal detectors and x-ray machines at the entrance to every subway stop. --That would (hopefully) never be implemented because the number of people who would complain and campaign against such measures would be much higher.
Is the API now free?
I was sucking it big time on a video game once, and my friend turned to me and said "Don't try harder; try better."

We should be working young people better.
This looks very interesting, though it definitely needs a free edition for developers to play around with. Perhaps limit the maximum number of concurrent clients or other artificial scaling limits. At €99/month there's no way I'd try this out even for 1 month; these prices are definitely targeted at the enterprise.
Search for IT undergraduate of the year begins
Y Combinator and The Five (or Six)-Tool Developer
When I saw real-time, I thought you meant real-time as in medical devices, where data incorrectly processed in the interval means someone may die.

I believe that would be a novel and very interesting use of Python, possibly even requiring a new interpreter...
Exactly. Useless solution for the majority. But who gives a shit anyway? In tech it's hard to decide what's good for you and what not. Privacy is nothing trivial anymore. You are out there or you live in a forest without any technical device at all.
Their home router SSID isn't on a map. Look, my home router's SSID is ListerNet. I'm in London, UK somewhere. Where am I?
It's still their business model, they've had a free version and a premium version (w/ the revenue split) for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem like this announcement changes that. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the big change is that the apps are now free too, or maybe that some premium features have become available to everyone.
Why does your country require clearance to let people rate apps?
Low doses of radiation can actually reduce the risk of cancer!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Two alternative that don't require users rename their entire networks. One, opt-out via MAC address. Or two, opt-out via geofencing: let me pick my house off a map and type my SSID. Both of these solutions could be automated by a little program that ran once in the user's network. I'm sure the clever engineers at Google could come up with even better solutions if they actually cared about a usable opt-out solution.
I nominate that last graf for "smartest thing anyone's going to say on HN this week".
Thinkup: Open source app to capture activity across social networks (FB, T, G+)
He is a good writer, great analyst and knows how to get to the point. You just feel offended when someone is right and you can't cope with it.
Yes. I have a lot of apps from when I lived in Canada. Now that I'm in the US, it's fun updating apps.
Cupcake Wrapper Creator at Eight Months
My understanding is that Google's servers keep the wifi location data. An app sends in nearby SSIDs, and Google sends back a probable latitude/longitude. I don't think they keep a database of public access points.
Well, to be fair, replacement batteries for Dells are crazy expensive too. When the batteries in my wife's laptop start going bad (which they inevitably do because of her usage pattern) she usually just limps along until we can buy a new machine and hand the old one down.
Angry Birds Catapult to Life at MIT
The mapping is not done so people can find your WiFi and connect to it. It has nothing to do with whether your access point uses encryption or not. It's just a way to do triangulation using known anchor points.

Suppose there's 3 access point advertising their existence around you (most access points do by default). If you know their coordinates on earth and their relative signal strengths, you can pinpoint a pretty accurate position of yourself. Kinda like GPS.

Google screwed up by collecting more data than they should, and now they are doing a little dance to appease the lawyers.

The solution is indeed a joke, because there's no problem. It makes no sense to not want people to pinpoint an access point on a map, when it's actively advertising itself. The way I see it, there's no privacy breach whatsoever.

The real problem (Google collecting too much personal data) has already been fixed.
Thanks for the comment Daniel, i totally agree with you in almost all the points.

I live in a very peaceful zone in Mexico so i have no problems with security .. Actually its kinda funny that the only time i was victim of robering was in LA and not in Mex.

About startup chile; try to apply. If you need help on your form dont hesitate in contacting me (my twitter is in my hn profile).
I keep bouncing between Readability and Readable[1].

One thing I like about Readability is that it's not affected by saved zoom levels because it displays the converted page on its own domain. For example, if I have BBC News at 120% zoom – remembered by Chrome – Readability is still at 100% – or whatever I've set it to – whereas Readable uses 120% zoom.

[1]: http://readable.tastefulwords.com/
Sure -- this is like playing roulette, (game A, a constant-losing-odds game,) while simultaneously watching the blackjack table (game B,) waiting for the deck to become favorable. As soon as the card count gets high enough, switch games. Once the blackjack game turns negative, switch back to roulette to pass the time.

This should be a winning strategy, against two losing games. The key is that the odds in game B vary, and you structure your gameplay such that you're mostly playing game B when the odds are better than even.

Oh, and you'd likely be kicked out of any casino in Vegas for doing this.
Why Is Payroll Hard - Ron Jeffries
Things to Know Before Implementing and Integrating Your Business Cloud Apps
Is your argument that this is an invasion of privacy? If so how.

Or is your argument that Google is using the 'untapped resource' of Router location to build a business.

If the latter, do you have the same issue with atlas publishers who without my permission put my road into their big printed books - indeed mapped out the whole of London without a city-wide referendum to check whether this was OK.
PG almost certainly can do it.

But that sort of editorializing does not seem consistent with the culture which has grown up around HN.
You seem to be confirming my point. You seem to be saying that anybody with an idea in the US can get money invested into their business without having to do anything other than produce a business plan, and an idea, if they search hard enough.

Doesn't that sound rather odd? Let me tell you where I'm coming from:

I've started 8 companies in the last 25 years and not one has had external funding. I've built them from scratch and earned every penny, but you seem to be suggesting that money grows on trees.

I don't think this has anything to do with language differences, I think if you've ever started a company you know what it takes, you know the risks, and so do investors. It is not credible that the sort of sums of money that are required to employ people run offices and pay taxes are available without a running busines already in place.

And US or English or not, the fact remains you are no longer starting something at that point in the life cycle of a business. The label therefore is just that - a fashionable label, not a meaningful title.
That's not really the point of this thread. The point was the next two sentences about "data protection hounds" and a failed ideology. European standards of privacy are not less legitimate just because they are different from American standards. His argument apparently was that since we allow house fronts to be photographed (in America), we should have no problem with SSIDs being captured. I was explaining why they would matter in Europe.
That isn't the least bit of what's happening here. Google's streetview cars simply map your router's SSID (actually, as far as I can tell, it's the MAC address) to coordinates that the car's GPS provide. They allow for devices to determine their location more quickly than acquiring a GPS lock and more accurately than relying on cellular tower triangulation. When you combine all three, you get phones that can figure out their current location quickly and accurately.

At no level is google telling people where to find free WiFi. They simply provide a correspondence between MAC addresses of nearby routers and latitude-longitude.
I have been reading about this all week, but having a banner on my Mozilla home page reminded me to write my congressmen. I can't hurt to remind people about this -- especially considering the impact it is going to have on the users of this site.
iOS5 removes the iTunes requirement to activate a device.

These mostly sound more like issues with South Africa than Apple.
I agree. I've struggled with highlighting my accomplishments in the past, "tooting my own horn" so to speak. I guess to me it can feel like bragging or boasting, but that is something to get over.

I have found that where I work, if I don't explicitly tell my manager(s) what I've been working on and spotlighting the important things I've gotten done, they simply won't know about it.

It gives them ammunition to "fight" for you, to justify raises etc...
Schools of Psychology
Yeah, that sounds pretty accurate as to how things work in the OP. As he and some others mention, if you say that you are with the "press" or "organization X" you are much more likely to get to talk to someone who has direct involvement with the congressman i.e. an LA (legislative assistant) or even chief of staff although he's about as scarce as the congressman at least in my instance. It's unfortunate though that you have to lie to order to get your personal opinion conveyed. I agree that we should have more congresspeople or at least a way to better account for everyone's point of view.
It's defective. Take it back.
Understanding Diabetes Food Properly
It's about moral authority. The only people touching production should be those whose pagers go off at 3am if it all goes hatstand. Everyone else is the peanut gallery.
What are the new parts this Macbook is requiring? Batteries will need to be replaced and Apple's prices are around market for these. What specific aftersales costs are you referring to?
I'm almost convinced that the Google solution is a demonstration of intent to overcome legal hurdles in places like Germany. It's not at all a real solution that real people will use.
I don't think the blame can be necessarily be placed entirely on the school systems though. I find that I have to fight my own urges to over schedule my kids' free time. I am also way more involved in my kids' lives than my parents were, for better and sometimes for worse.

I think it's important for parents to make sure that their kids have some time to do nothing, get bored, and find their own mischief and passions. It's a tough balancing act.
Here's an idea, Wikipedia could redirect to "Sorry this site is not accessible due to an enforcement action under the Stop Online Piracy Act. (This is a test)" That would start a debate in the mainstream pretty quickly...
Nokia to launch Windows Tablet soon……….
Our suggestions will come from users who have already read the books and have determined the bare minimum you will need to read to maximize knowledge.

Amazon suggestions simply basis off of ratings and copies sold so you might buy two highly suggested books off of amazon only to find out that it's the same materials covered, written by two different authors.
Ask HN - Is there any website that lists real problems to solve, by computers?
Not the usual ones like photo sharing or task management kind. But problems like the one that was mentioned yesterday (onevoice) - that <i>really</i> helps people with their problems, helps them lead better lives. (for all kinds of people - normal, physically challenged and mentally challenged)
I don't know how everyone else does it but in my case:

1). You remember to take cash and if you forget, you always have your cards on you and an atm is usually no more than a few minutes away. You can also increasingly pay for these sorts of things via mobile phone.

2). The school sends their bank account details along with the trip information and I setup a same day wire transer online.
This article finally revealed to me the mathematical structure of curriculum optimization. It's a bias/variance tradeoff.

If you've done statistics, you know that B/V tradeoffs are more or less an unavoidable feature of optimization or learning. If you go in with less clear goals, you depend on learning on the fly to find the best solution which means your performance varies a lot depending on environmental conditions. If you go in with very clear goals, it's likely that people will cluster around them tightly, but if you're wrong with your bias, you'll be surely fucked.

How do you beat B/V tradeoffs? You put in more effort, more experience, better sharing of information. You select your biases very carefully such that they are less clear but cannot possibly be wrong. You constrain your variance such that it is less harmful to your task.

Finally, there's the idea of consistency and convergence rates. Consistency means that if any person spends enough time and effort they will eventually overcome both bias and variance and find the best solution. Rate of convergence is how much time and effort it takes to get reasonably close. Consistency and fast convergence are highly valuable properties, obviously, but both are easy to hurt and destroy, especially through biasing.
If you don't need a backup right away, then this loss really doesn't affect you. Just switch to a new provider and be on your way.

The people who get screwed here are people who just lost data, or who lose data before they can switch providers. All LiveDrive really needs to do is make the data available for a short time to cover those people. A month would be more than enough, and probably even just a week would do it.
There is no "anti-Android bias." Marco is one man, and does not want to make and support an Android app in addition to making a web app, iOS app, and the backend to support the two.

There is also not a good profit motive for him. Android users, on average, not only use fewer apps, but especially buy fewer apps - very few paid apps on Android are as successful as iOS counterparts.

As for Readability, I use the excellent mobile web app. I will check out the iOS app, I suppose, but for Android phones the web app should be fine.
"Are you certain (and when I say "certain", I mean not just speculating about how things were set up between LiveDrive and Backify) that LiveDrive are able to tell, without a shadow of a doubt, which files belong to which Backify clients?"

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3242903
What 6.7 TB/s of raw bandwidth look like
I believe he means the iTunes version of ESRB ratings, which are designated by the developer of the app and not by an "interdependent" review agency.
Cool, but how do you know who signed up?
"Is there a reason why the concept of 'security theater' hasn't caught on in the mainstream?"

If Americans were intelligent enough to understand the concept, it probably wouldn't exist in the first place.
fans are what i have had to replace on each macbook my partner has owned. that and power cables fraying (they do not replace those for free in chile, so we've been through one expensive power brick after another...).

by the way, for power cables, i have, finally, found a solution: use silicone sealant (the stuff you use around the bath) to make a cable strain relief. it doesn't look that great, but it works. splodge sealant on the cable where it leaves the plug and smooth it out along the cable. the sealant should join the end of the plug and taper out over a few inches of cable.
…Oh dear… | Where Am I?
A web form to submit a MAC address would make more sense, but if this were a serious problem the solution would be to go to the manufacturers. A standard for broadcasting an "opt-in" bit configurable in the router's admin interface might be reasonable.

(But standards take time to develop and implement. Not to mention that the existence and location of certain MAC addresses is far from the biggest fish to fry, right-to-privacy-wise.)