skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Originally, ext3 filesystems maintained journals of all metadata and data changes. This substantially decreases the likelihood of the filesystem ending up in an irrecoverably inconsistent state, but it also has major performance implications.

Relatively early on ext3 was extended with "data=ordered" and "data=writeback" modes (with "data=ordered" being the default and recommended mode, as "data=writeback" is marginally faster but offers few consistency guarantees). In these modes only metadata changes are committed to the journal.

In "data=ordered" mode the filesystem attempts to guarantee that data will actually be written to the disk (not merely cached) before any related metadata writes occur, as opposed to caching and writing all data according to an outside schedule. Obviously, this also has certain implications for write performance.

I would say that Firefox was incontrovertibly broken in this case, but my views on the adoption of ext4 would probably be considered rather conservative. Regardless, ext3 isn't going away any time soon so this fix will be appreciated.
WhisperSystems' secure text messaging client for Android is now open source
What are people's overall impressions of Firefox 9?
I like both Twilight and Zenburn. I've ended up sticking with Twilight for several years now, Solarized looks similar to it. Zenburn is lower contrast which I sometimes had trouble with.
Google, Mozilla Renew Firefox Search Deal For 3 More Years
Please do an Android version.
No, not search engines. Merchant sites like Amazon on the other hand let you get affiliate money without having to bind a special deal.
Make Your Laws project
Dear fellow hackers interested in reforming politics:

I'm working on a project @ http://www.makeyourlaws.org

In short, it aims to gradually replace governments that allow small forms of democracy (e.g. in the US we have a republic with fairly widespread state-and-lower right to citizens' referendum) with liquid democracies, by bootstrapping entirely through existing systems. See the site and G+ page for more detail. As Clay Johnson recently challenged, it aims to disrupt and replace the system rather than just bitch about it. ;-)

I'd like to get it up to speed a bit more quickly than I can do on my own. It'll need a pretty wide array of skillsets, so whatever you do, you can probably help.

Please ping me if you're interested (see saizai.com sidebar for contact info), or comment here and I'll try to address any questions / suggestions you have. Please do read the 5 pages on the site first, as it'll hopefully answer most of the obvious questions (if not, please suggest how to fix it so it does :-P).

Thanks,
Sai
Cool interface with JSON representations as well....
Was there ever a serious "debate" regarding search versus sort? They clearly complement each other. Google, by failing to support meaningful sorts, removes a convenient way to access information.

For example, in my old mail system, I could often home in on a particular message by sorting the relevant messages by size (simple communications < code exchanges < zip files containing all project files). Gmail's search-only approach-- while no doubt theoretically pleasing to a company that cut its teeth on search-- feels like half an implementation to me.
My interview strategy as a Rails dev:
reversed = File.open('list.txt').gsub(/[\n\r]/'').split.reverse

I don't need to write Ruby in C.
I like your idea but I sincerely believe that congress(wo)men will only think of this as another attempt by infringers to continue to infringe and steal. If anything, it may want them to wish they could prevent tools and techniques like this from from being available for "just anyone" to download. </cynicism>
Protect your MacBook with style
I concede that your example is more applicable. Perhaps something relating to L1/L2/L3 caches and memory might have been more suitable as mine.

I'm still not fully onboard with your general claim though. Someone building the most brilliantly simple, computationally simple Android calendar/planning/todo application might not care about dividing in half when all they have to do is Collections.sort(). Someone building a CRUD web app might see their most significant performance issue in HTTP throughput or latency. You'll be wondering how often they program a computer.
By the way, I'd love to hear feedback from the HN community.

iPad dev in HTML5/jQuery was really a pleasure. As long as you don't need photo upload support (Apple, this is ridiculous), it seems like a really decent way to approach mobile app development for a ton of use cases.
You are not the only one.

What's more, Apple didn't start this. A few times in the past, I've traced the history of these suits in HN threads. Everyone is suing everyone, but reporters love to highlight Apple because it's a brand that ignites page views.[1,2,3]

Part of the (broken) cross licensing process is testing and setting cross licensing pricing using these suits and settlements. Given the limited market and limited market info for patent values and the unpredictability of enforcement results, this litigation seems to participants as reasonable a method as any for determining the cross licensing value if you're not going to just put everything in a pool (which certainly is supposed to work better, except when Samsung or Nokia sues over the very patents they put into the pool).

Most forget that Apple spent 20 years of R&D on personal mobile devices, then moved into phones in a way that made it obvious the rest of the industry was stagnantly producing what the carriers wanted instead of what humans would really use.

As Apple's "Jesus phone" swallowed demographic segments whole, raking in the lion's share not of units shipped but of profits, the mobile industry went nuts at seeing the lucre they'd left on the table and started suing Apple from every side, both directly and through intermediaries. Of course, Apple, with its 20 years of actually innovative R&D in the space, countered.

When some of the industry start playing the "fast follow" game instead, Apple is forced by trade law to defend against that or they de facto give up their rights to the undefended points.

The charger and cable design show this wasn't a happy design coincidence; this was a calculated move to establish a "me too" product line. Part of that calculation was "What will be our expense from design and patent assertions by Apple when we fast follow these products so closely?"

Before Apple got into mobile, this was how the business was done, but it wasn't in the press because nobody was interested. The only thing different now is that we're talking about it.

(Footnote: the Prada phone design timing has been debunked[4] previously.)

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-motorola-android-patent-lawsuit
2. http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209
3. http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/
4. http://www.slashgear.com/iphone-samsung-f700-prada-phone-rumors-debunked-20147320/
Fears Grow over Lab-Bred Avian Flu Virus
I've been following the iDoneThis story since before it was iDoneThis. Walter (one of the co-founders) is scrappy & I don't doubt he will find success!
It's been shown in court that source code is free speech, protected by the First Amendment (cf. Bernstein v. US, Junger v. Daley). I don't want this to get to that point, but that could be a way of getting around it.

Some might argue that speech telling you how to commit a crime is not protected speech, but the Anarchist Cookbook is legal to possess as well.

Dammit Jim, I'm a hacker, not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
we give users options to muck with data to their heart's content

The answer there is probably to let the users pick their own tools too. If someone wants to chart data in your system for a PowerPoint presentation, the answer might be to give them a CSV export, instead of building a chart drawing tool into your application. (Of course, that assumes that your monetization strategy doesn't rest on restricting access to your data...)
f = lambda g:(0)
f()
<function <lambda> at 0x113478>.
This is accurate, and a big reason why the EU officially passed a resolution against U.S. domain seizures.

All SOPA can do without infringing upon another country's sovereignty would be to remove the DNS entry on the U.S. servers that ties back to a foreign server, but they can't impact the foreign content itself without violating world law. The EU resolution strengthens that by saying that if the U.S. had hoped they'd be able to censor foreign content, the EU isn't going to just casually allow that to happen.
* In your statements of work, be as explicit and detailed as you possibly can in stating assumptions -- especially assumptions about what the customer is supposed to provide and/or do. Drill down to a suitable depth, even if it seems silly --- if you're assuming the customer will have 110 volt AC power, consider saying so.

* Keep the customer informed --- no one likes surprises.

* Make a habit of sending short, just-the-facts-ma'am email summaries confirming oral discussions --- they can be incredibly useful in the event of later finger-pointing and "why didn't you tell me X?" accusations.

* In the same vein, seriously consider never deleting any email to or from a customer or otherwise relating to a job.

* Consider treating development of the specification as a separate, separately-priced deliverable.

* Consider providing an "extension of time budget" in the contract --- that is, you've got X days of extension budget that you can allocate to individual deadlines as you see fit, with a max extension of Y days for any single deadline.

* Watch out for IP-ownership provisions; try to make sure you get the right to continue using general knowledge, tools, non-customer-specific code, etc., for other projects.

* Be extremely careful using FOSS (free / open-source) software --- the customer will be really PO'd if it has to release the source code to its product. Microsoft had to do that a couple of years ago because one of its consultants included GPL code; see this blog posting [1] by Silicon Valley lawyer Mark Radcliffe for details.

* In the contract, try very hard to (1) exclude consequential damages, and (2) limit your liability to X or 2X or even 3X, where X is the amount you're paid. If the customer balks, you can respond that you're selling services, not business insurance, and that uncapped liability will have to carry a higher price.

* Investigate whether you can get professional-liability insurance (errors & omissions or "E&O"). If so, try to have a separate cap for your contract liability in the amount of your coverage --- that is, your liability won't exceed 2X, where X is the amount you were paid, or your policy limits, whichever is less.

[1] http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=306
Data tables (jQuery addon) does a pretty good job with HTML tables.
Legally, you'd have to show a meeting of the minds.
What integration are you talking about?
Thanks for all the great feedback. This is a side project that I had been sitting on at 90% completion for months and finally got it out.

As a side note: I need to remember to not publicize newly launched apps until they have been indexed by the app store. It might not show up in the app store search until tomorrow.
SoundOff.fm - Trending New Music Identified by the Masses
Whether Referring to Startup or Life These Words of Advice Never Get Old
I have to refer to this once a year to remind myself
37signals is pretty dogmatic about their design: what features _37signals_ believes their products should and shouldn't have. Just because they don't have the feature doesn't mean lots of users don't want it.

Furthermore, sorting large data sets is a huge performance challenge. I think that's the main reason why you don't see it in Gmail. Not because sorting is not desired.
Hopefully I will have time to get around to this someday.
> The NK brand of communism is just a thin veil for the old dynastic feudal caste society that Korea traditionally was.

While your argument is defensible, I think characterizing the NK autocracy as a natural progression of pre-occupation Korea is misleading and perhaps unfair.

It's important to remember that at the time of the NK invasion in 1950, Korea had only recently been freed from the 35-year Japanese occupation in which the Japanese actively sought to eradicate Korean culture. The successor to this was another occupation by the US and USSR.

Although the new interim governments were more benign I don't think it was clear that the future would hold any kind of true independence from foreign states, and certainly US style democracy seemed quite far fetched.

And so it seems to me that if I was a young man of fighting age in Korea in 1950 (and thus born during the occupation), I would have found the NK motto of "Juche" (self-reliance) much more compelling than the murky, foreign roadmap offered by the US. Indeed, the professor in this article, Kim Hyun Sik, expresses this sentiment.

Even for many years after the Korean War, it wasn't clear that the US-led South was superior in ideals or in practice. The industry-heavy North (aided by infrastructure built by the Japanese and by Soviet engineers) flew ahead of the South in terms of economic growth and actual standards of living. Meanwhile, South Korea was embroiled in poverty, military coups, and cruel suppressions of student riots. You really couldn't have called SK a democracy until the late 1980s.

Of course, fortunes changed for NK. The classic Soviet style N-year plans were failing to meet their quotas, and as this began to happen, Kim Il Sung, who was really a foreign plant from Stalin, began to emulate Stalin's tactics of self-aggrandizement and brutal extermination of opponents.

If you wished at this point to question why it was that nobody stood up to Kim Il Sung in his rise as tyrant, you could very well blame Korean Confucianism and the hierarchical nature of Korean language and society. This is a strong reason, but I don't think it's sufficient.

There is a simpler answer: NK is a very tiny nation, with a reluctant ally on one border and a perpetual enemy on the other. Total control in a country of NK's size is actually possible, and with a constant menacing enemy, it was relatively easy to manipulate a small society into subservience. Think "1984", or the "War on Terror", but constrained to the state of Indiana.
PressMonk :No Discrimination Technology News Blog
Irrationals Exist - a simple and elegant proof without diagonals.
Yup cocos2d, with a pretty thick custom level editor built on top.
How do you feel now about the route you took to learn "desingineering"? Would you go about it the same way (school) if you could do it again?
Yeah I should have waited until it was indexed before posting.
we use splunk in our office and i must admit, it's one of the greatest tools! to move from syslog to splunk has made life so much easier :) kudos on a great product and company.
ahem maybe I should have put </sarcasm> tags around that. I don't believe in this, burger there are those alas that do.
Is it US only? Can't find it in UK store
I totally agree. At every job I have worked at, whenever I make tools to eliminate my position, so that previously time consuming work is done automatically, enlightened bosses recognize that this is the best thing ever and make sure I stay happy in interesting work where I can do it again.
The rate limit has been increased a bit but still remains. So, the bot is up for now, but it's not really a solution, just a temporary fix. Go get your nostalgia on while it lasts! ;)
Should be everywhere, maybe there is a delay.
The old pastehtml.com seems easier to use to me.
What would you say is "The Future of Gaming"?
Yes, they never deserved the birds' misplaced anger to begin with.
Thats just the thing - while that worked for me working a bit at the forefront of this trend, this doesn't feel like a long term solution. Entrepreneurship != being a desingineer, as the market is clearly showing. A student / aspiring desingineer shouldn't feel forced to start a company too soon simply because we lack the structure to help support that student grow into our industry properly.
ISO C is increasingly moronic
C is a very robust language which is hard to ruin, but ISO surely is trying. The latest draft has a new mandatory one-macro #include file, and new incompatible and useless thread API, but still not compiler support for big-endian/little-endian variables or structure packing to match protocol specifications.
So for "infringing" sites hosted in the US (or on .com, .net, .org) What can SOPA do?
So does anyone know if it's dead for this year or not?
"influenced by the dark theme propaganda (screencasts etc..) that swamp HN"

The thought of people consciously using screencasts to promote their dark theme agenda made me chuckle.
The Road to Clojure Survey
Stuff like this makes me seriously doubt whether Python critiques of Ruby's "blocks and methods" (SO MANY CALLABLES; ONE AND ONLY ONE) are actually made in good faith.
And Nokia. And, arguably, Netflix.

We'll call it "The Digg Awards".
A lawyer needs to chime in, but I believe those signs in the US may only help some in cases of accidents. Just putting up a sign that says 'do X at your own risk' does not suddenly free the liable party from being sued for something happening due to negligence.
Some feedback:

The UI needs some work. Running on an iPhone 3GS, it felt very laggy, many of my touches didn't register correctly.

Tap to rotate is an odd concept, and combined with the lagginess above, I was always moving when I wanted to rotate, or vice versa. Maybe two fingers to rotate?

Move the advertising. Having it right on top of the playing field caused me to accidentally click it when trying to move around a block, taking me completely out of the game.

A better visual distinction between blocks I'm allowed to move, and blocks I'm not allowed to move would be nice, I spent a few minutes of the first level trying to move the block that was already there.

Otherwise, I love the concept.
I prefer white backgrounds out of habit. So my terminal is white, text editor is white, browser is white, Linux desktop theme is brighter...

I must say that other users may well like it the other way, because when I used to browse for GTK themes on the http://gnome-look.org/ site, many of the new themes were cooler when they were darker...

BTW, I just found out the http://gnome-look.org/ itself is whiter and brighter. Oh the joy! Cheers.
Glad to hear - please get in touch if you have any requests for the dev platform (or in general). One of our goals is to make it easier for people to integrate Splunk with their other tools and processes.
Apple to buy Anobit for $350-400m
New Dilbert Comic Mocks Google Employee 20% Time
They do. This is why, even after you are shipped a product from a merchant, you can go to your credit card company, take the money back from the merchant and ding them an extra fee on top. Meanwhile, there doesn't seem to be a good way for merchants to cite customers for fraudulent usages of these mechanisms (you might win the chargeback, but honestly if that happens the customer's credit card should be put on hold or cancelled).
Photos Of Facebook's Glorious New Multimillion Dollar Headquarters
If we're making our own lists, here's some that others haven't mentioned:

* Jumpcut - http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/ - simple and unintrusive clipboard history

* dterm - http://decimus.net/DTerm - popup terminal

* bwana - http://www.bruji.com/bwana/ - man pages in your browser

* Grand Perspective - http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ - disk usage program
If Groupon considered their own data center then I predict their code is horrible and their top tech people suck, frankly. It's too simple of functionality. So many standard ways of making websites scale up.
I've been running Aurora for a few months. It's been stable and gets the new toys quicker. Some add-ons break on some updates, but the few web dev. add-ons I use are always quick to update. I get questionnaires from time to time, but they don't take long to complete and are a trivial way to contribute to Mozilla. In short, give Aurora a try. It works as my full-time browser.
I both agree and disagree with this post.

The age old idea of "do one thing and do it well" certainly works, and it makes sense to hire experts rather than jack-of-all-trades if you can afford it. My team has tried and failed to be a team of generalists in an environment that is very silo'd with a lot of politics and a lot of undirected and uncontrolled customers. Experts counter-intuitively are better to have than generalists in this situation, because experts would have to collaborate and communicate to get the job done; in a team of generalists where each works in a silo, no one has reason to talk with each other unless forced, and this is dangerous if one were to leave, as there would be little familiarity with the application they developed by the rest of the team.

But, on the other hand, this post was about startups. In a startup, it makes more sense to hire good generalists, or to hire someone that is good at one thing, but learns the others. The reasons for this are (1) startups usually lack funds to hire three experts vs. one generalist, (2) fault-tolerance: if you hire two generalists and one leaves, you still have someone that can run development.
The Engadget Interview: ARM co-founder John Biggs
Thanks for the feedback. An iPad 2 was my primary testing device so I surely didn't give the iPhone version the UI love it needs.
Please help me pick a color scheme (comment on HN)
I love Firefox (and Chrome! no need to be zealots :D ), but I'm even happier that this means there will be no interruption to the full-time development of Mozilla's new systems programming language, Rust:

http://www.rust-lang.org/
https://github.com/graydon/rust

Coincidentally, for those who like to make much ado about Mozilla vs. Google, Rust has a lot of similarities to Go. (As both projects began as semi-secret, low-key affairs, this is due more to convergent evolution than anything.)
This is a good idea. I'm going to try to do it on my next project. I don't know if I can stop thinking about the data and implementation. It is just where my mind naturally goes. Someone presents me with some type of data and a way they want to present it and I immediately start thinking about data representation, persistent storage, data abstraction models.

I think more important is just to get out of the engineering mindset and try to think like a user. I bet just sitting down with a non-technical person and working through the UI design would help a lot to keep me from going into my engineering mindset.
> So this extension would have to be removed from the Mozilla repository.

IM unfamiliar with the bill, but given SOPA's wording, could it be that the whole of addons.mozilla.org, or even mozilla.org end up banned?

> At best, it would be distributed underground

If it were to happen, I envision a world where Aunt Jackie will ask little nephew Steve to enable her the full internets because she can't watch some photos on Flickr anymore, just like she could not install the Flash ten years ago. Steve will simply be asked to provide a piece of software to bootstrap, which if banned from the internets, will be distributed on underground network channels then diffused on a local scale through sneakernet.

It looks awfully like the BBS and early Internet in the '90s, with those warez sources like IRC DDC bots, and a select few having access to such sources and able to distribute pirated games on high-price CD-Rs.
On that note, I'd still worry. Essentially, they have 3 years now to come up with some other means of funding. I've donated to them before, but I don't think they can stay afloat with just donations.
I always understood the sort in "Search vs Sort" to mean manually categorising documents/things into boxes or folders. Not sort as in an SQL order by clause.
You knew the old Mozilla, meet the new Mozilla