skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google is not using a RDBMS to get Google Plus content on SERPs. What makes you think they are? It works just like the rest of Google on their leading edge kit: bigtable, GFS, etc. Amazon is able to personalize their site for each customer quite a bit more than Google is and relies on similarly horizontally scalable architecture.

Google talked a little about how personalized search works in a paper about BigTable, it's worth a review:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

> Personalized Search stores each user's data in Bigtable. Each user has a unique userid and is assigned a row named by that userid. All user actions are stored in a table. A separate column family is reserved for each type of action (for example, there is a column family that stores all web queries). Each data element uses as its Bigtable timestamp the time at which the corresponding user action occurred. Personalized Search generates user profiles using a MapReduce over Bigtable. These user profiles are used to personalize live search results.

Regardless, even in your scenario with the perfect RDBMS, the future web stack wouldn't change much. You still have the same issues with blocking and different languages for client and server. As a developer myself, it doesn't matter at all to me if my call to a method is backed by a relational, document or key/value database. It's all an abstraction somewhere. It just needs to come back quickly and be easy to scale up.

The big change we're seeing is the client becoming primarily JS driven and the server more or less relegated to sending/receiving JSON. It's a much richer experience, but a pain when the toolsets on either end are completely different.
Confusion? this is the first time Google has a clear and cohesive identity platform for all their services.
How Megaupload was Investigated and Indicted
Hey Zuckerberg, Take Facebook Down for a Day
For Google Apps G+ is an opt-in service.
Rails 3.2.0 released
The economic consequences of non-compete agreements are interesting, to say the least.

I'm curious to see what happens to average salaries for programmers over the next few years if this investigation results in more competition. I'd also like to see if programmers care enough to bounce back and forth even more for salary bumps, but that's harder to measure.
True, but Google Apps tends to follow Gmail's lead, albeit at a delayed pace.

I agree that Google Apps is the best of the bunch, and much easier to manage than your own server - but the privacy concerns have just nagged at me for years. I keep getting back to the core issue: is giving this (or any) company the sum of all my written communications in exchange for ease of use worth it? It's something I'm still struggling with.
I have no doubt that MS believes in having the best workers possible, regardless of their sexual orientation. I congratulate you for getting a good job.

What I do find interesting is that the Republican Party is becoming more fundamentalist as time and elections go on, especially when both Ballmer and Gates are Republican.

They're not Christian fundamentalists but they do happen to vote that way due to business issues.
It's a difference of mindset. Maybe you're just over thinking it. If you think it's a "goal", you aspire to it and hope to achieve it. If its just something you do, you just do it. If you want to complicate the idea, then think of it as developing an internal locus of control. But it's simpler than that.
They're not going to be able to get around the fact that the third-party they're entrusting their files to don't care about their data as much as they do. Its not a technology problem. You could pay more for a service that has a contract with an SLA, but all that does is give you legal recourse if they do lose your data. It doesn't mean that they're actually protecting it.

Today it was the Feds. Tomorrow, it could just be a poorly run company going out of business. Or a massive failure in a technology stack without redundancy. Consumers can't reasonably predict these sorts of thing, so the only reasonable course of action is to keep redundant copies of your data. Use SpiderOak and sync a few computers. Get an External HD.

So what the consumer should take away is that they shouldn't trust a third-party with the only copy of their unrecoverable data. The fact that they don't want to care doesn't mean that they shouldn't or that they can actually not care.
The next SOPA
There's a key distinction here between what happened to Megaupload and what can happen under SOPA:

The feds took a long time to gather the evidence they needed for a warrant before they took Megaupload down.

Under SOPA, all that would be needed is the accusation of copyright infringement alone.

That's a pretty important distinction.
> The iPhone 4S was 6 months late.

How do you figure? Apple announced it for October and released it in October. If you make the assumption that they wanted to release it in June or July, it's at most 3 or 4 months "late".

> If you stretch this chart back another 6 months you'll see a considerable sag in iPhone sales as the 4S waiting game began.

I'm pretty sure that iPhone 4 sales didn't slow down prior to the 4S's release. Not much anyway. Do you have anything to back up that claim?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/iphone-4-tops-charts/

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/09/iphone_4_sales...

> Android, due to it's constant upgrade stream, doesn't suffer from this cycle. Let's take a look at some yearly charts before we call this race...

I agree. Let's go further. Why does it always have to be a race? If you look at the big picture instead of the versus battle portrayed by the media then Android and iOS are together leading the industry. And next in line is Windows Phone which consistently gets great reviews.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns. iOS suffers somewhat from being so locked down, but there are advantages to that as well. Android benefits from the immense range of devices that run it, but that also contributes to devices not getting upgrades. Windows Phone is not growing as quickly as many agree that it should based on its merit.

But overall everyone is doing well and customers are happy. Nobody is losing except some of the old dogs like Blackberry.
I thought another proposal I saw, for a weekend, my actually be within the ability of much of the interested public to achieve. While I support the idea, I'm dubious about people's willingness and ability to commit to a month. Nonetheless, I'm in.

I'll make one exception: O'Reilly Publishing. (In part because I don't want to cancel my Safari subscription. Although some of that bleeds through to other, less friendly publishers... I'll have to consider this further.) Well, and Pragmatic Programmers and the few others who "get it" and have consistently treated me and their customer base with respect and consideration.
How does the consistency model work? I saw the page describing the eventual consistency referred to a routing parameter (which I assumes routes to the same node to enforce read-your-writes), but I assume you can have conflicts between writes from separate sessions? How is the conflict resolution handled?
This is really cool, but I'm curious what the performance implications are when doing fuzzy matching? I noticed that the list of types of errors did not include transposition. I wonder if the reason for this comes down to performance/technical reasons.
Alas, it is buggy, and the view in the pane goes away if you "select" any "conversations", which defeats much of the point of a two-pane mail reader. Sigh. Hopefully it will improve, but I think I'll to wait until they make it better.
Absinthe – Name Of The Upcoming iPhone 4S And iPad 2 Untethered Jailbreak Tool
Yeah, it'd be nice to see a side-by-side against other common DBs like MySQL and Oracle.
I wouldn't equate a pirated copy with a lost sale, but that is an approach that the businesses behind SOPA/PIPA are doing and they are pursuing censorship as an end result. Whatever a pirate may say or intend, they are supporting their opponents argument for censorship in the form of, "lost sales."

Censorship is as morally baseless as piracy, but I do not like it either, and like piracy it has a negative effect on everyone.

Maybe sales would increase if something prevented piracy, maybe they wouldn't. I expect that they would increase a significant percentage, but probably not even close to 100%.

People everywhere act out of self interest all the time, not just some of the time, all the time. It's just that for some people self interest involves having the perception to see beyond the immediate benefit of an act. Others do not, and eat donuts until they have diabetes, sleep with their best friend's spouse, steal cars, and act on each impulse as soon as it arises.

That people act in ways that are short sighted and then try to explain away their shortsightedness is only human, but it's not admirable, and it does no public service.

I have nothing against anyone saying, "I breach the contract between provider and consumer. I'm a leech off of others labor. I inhibit growth that would otherwise occur. I take and give nothing back and then lie and say I would do otherwise if only X business did Y. I will only act fairly when forced to by a parent figure, which will probably be the government if I can get others to take on this attitude."

The same as I would have no problem with someone saying, "I'm a habitual liar and a cheat," versus someone saying, "I help people to be more careful and to investigate what it is told to them. I help people to be more cautious. I'm a Highwayman, a Bandit!"

I have long addressed the question of whether I'm going to live my life righting every wrong and looking for people to save. That I do not save kids in Africa, does not mean I haven't considered it. I live my life with integrity to what I value and I don't have to make elaborate arguments as to why, I just do the part that is mine.

The reason I'm shocked that Minecraft was pirated as you say, is that I see "pirates" complain that they would buy this product if it didn't have DRM or that product if the cost was reasonable. Here we have a project in its early stages that is valuable and made easy to attain. Will they support it. Will they help make it better? No, the lousy excuse is now exposure. And then, "Why isn't this thing finished yet!?" Ha, ha.
7 glasses of wine in two hours is just under one full bottle of wine an hour. That's a significant amount of wine.

edit: What I'm trying (probably poorly) to get at is that almost anyone who kills a bottle of wine in an hour knows that they're drinking heavily.
SenseiDB looks really impressive. We were actually thinking about the same problem when we built ThriftDB (http://www.thriftdb.com) for Octopart so it's especially interesting to see LinkedIn's implementation.

Looking through the documentation a couple of things come to mind:

* Does SenseiDB support nested data structures?

* What happens when you modify the schema? Can you add/delete/modify attributes?
Sopa and Pipa bills postponed in US Congress
Introduction to Hadoop for Enterprise Applications (Part 1)
KeyStrokes: A Real M Dash
New video of Fukushima nuclear reactor interior
Anonymous Attacks RIAA, MPAA, Department of Justice Websites
Good idea on the backup MX.

I do have Exim4 setup on a Linode for outgoing status updates (mainly Fail2Ban), but have yet to use it in lieu of Gmail/Google Apps.

As mentioned previously I'm a bit nervous about leaving my mail on a third party box - though Linode has been nothing but a reliable service to date.
Another reason to focus on goals rather than obstacles is that it's the goal that matters, and there will be more than one way to get there. Obstacles on a given path may be unsolvable no matter your focus or perserverance, and the only way to solve them is to choose a path where those obstacles are absent. The other paths are difficult to find if you focus on the thing that's stopping you on your current path.
Say No to ACTA
That's before expenses, depending on their hosting costs etc they could have lost money. IMO, profit may have been in the 10's of millions but copying them is unlikely to make you rich.
Try to avoid metaphors when dealing with the Internet. It doesn't help understand the situation and just spawns the inevitable thread in which people argue about which inapplicable metaphor is the least inapplicable.

The Feds confiscated a cloud storage service used for both lots of copyright infringement and lots of valid files. The situation isn't so complicated to understand that we need metaphors anyhow.
Confession of the binge drinker who wrote this article: I don't understand statistics, or why anecdotes aren't the same thing as data.

Up next from this genius: "I smoke but I don't have cancer, so suck it, ALA!"
I'm not that educated regarding the accuracy of this website but perhaps others can comment on it.

http://www.campaignmoney.com/biography/bill_gates.asp
If the evidence is so damning, why settle? Why does the government seem so quick to settle when a company does something wrong, but lays down the hammer on citizens who do something wrong[1]?

[1] http://madmikesamerica.com/2011/08/young-woman-sentenced-to-...

PS: yes, I know it was reduced later; but still it's at 8 years.
Or, people could just run their polls using http://gopollgo.com and get a heck of a lot more analytics. Here's an example: http://gopollgo.com/what-do-you-think-of-gopollgo

Disclaimer: I'm the founder -- but this is really what our site shines with.
In 50 years it'll be robosexual marriage. Then 20 years later it'll be gay robosexual marriage (yes, I like my Futurama). I really hope we can get this issue with who-can-marry-who resolved before we get to that point.

Edit: In 70 years these down-votes will be seen as ignorant and intolerant, you apes.
no sane person would ever put some valuable/important things on megaupload

How do we explain to sane, but non-internet-savvy, people what rules they should use to tell "safe" places to store their data from "unsafe" ones.

Megaupload took pains to not show infringing content on their home page and they did not provide a search engine that would return it. I'd ended up at the site several times and, though it set off a few of my red flags, I can't really explain why.
Maybe it was a bit of exaggeration, but I think maybe you don't realize how much things have changed. In the late 90's it was difficult to avoid using a Microsoft OS. First, the commercial operating systems available were mostly niche products with relatively little software available. What was available was not compatible with what most of the world was using.

Linux was gaining popularity, but it was difficult to install and use. It lacked the quality desktop apps that are available today. It lacked a coherent and usable desktop. I think it was around 1998 or '99 that I installed RedHat 5.2. It came with fvmw2 or something. It was hideous, and that was only after I spent hours trying to configure X in the first place. There was no free MS Office-compatible word processor. StarOffice came out around then, but it was commercial and pretty lousy. It was years later that there was decent office software that was compatible with the rest of the world. Netscape 4 was pretty much the only game in town for web browsing. Fonts looked like total crap. Oh, and that's if you could even get your modem to work in the first place. Winmodems were everywhere. I went out and bought an external 56k modem for like $75 and spent weeks getting it to work. I could go on, but I really don't like thinking about the bad old days.

Basically, you were stuck with Microsoft back then. They may have only lost %5 market share or some small number, but there are very good alternatives available. Market share hardly matters at this point for end users. Whether you choose MS, Mac or Linux you can expect wide support.

It's a very different landscape for end users, as well as Microsoft.
They started allowing aliases on G+.
I don't know about Ballmer, but is Gates a republican? According to [0] he donates more to D than to R, although not by a great margin

[0] http://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/
The article's claim that AWS et al would do better under the circumstances seems dubious to say the least. Do they have an example of a more enterprise-oriented cloud service going under to generalize from?
> When he landed on Gibraltar in 71, Tariq ibn Ziyad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_ibn_Ziyad) immediately burned his ships...

As someone with two kids and plenty of bills, I'm fine with taking the British at Dunkirk approach - live to fight another day.
Why climagic chose to highlight ways to circumvent the SOPA blackout
I couldn't work out if I was upset that they were using business as the reason not human rights, or if I was pleased that they had figured out a way to help push for the right thing. Still not sure, really.
There is no more a "real name" requirement for G+.
That makes sense, if MegaUpload ever goes back up again - doubtful. That makes sense, if the feds return people's private intellectual property - doubtful.

This is more like the FBI burning the warehouse to the ground, with everyone's stuff still inside.
Law enforcement steals personal property all the time, with no recourse for the owner. All they need is an excuse to link it with an investigation. Even if nobody is ever accused of a crime, and nothing goes before a judge. Then later they sell it at auction and put the proceeds in their own pocket.

Worried about your files? Try worrying about your car or house, they're equally at risk. Not all cops are evil, but they'll all stand behind each other regardless.
The cleanest vimrc you'll ever see
So you think G+ is an identity platform?
As long as it was also possible to do some non-dumb things, of course...
Did youtube founders ever get arrested?
This should be something that is default in the browser, the issue is to stop the less tech savvy user unwittingly perpetrate a DDOS.
Games company reveals details of Resident Evil 6
This further proves that laws against this exact kind of thing have to be created, simply abolishing PIPA / SOPA is NOT by any means enough.

It's not OK to do this. This kind of thing has to stop.
China’s “Online Blue Army” Ready
I agree with your conclusion (life isn't straightforward, do what works for you, don't trust "secret to success"-pushers), and having never really read zenhabits before I'll believe your premise that a lot of the content there contradicts other content there.

Looking for the least-malicious way of explaining that though, you could say maybe the author is someone who is able to change their mind, even if it makes them look dumb. I think that's probably a good thing.
NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative
Did you have a point? Yes, JSON really is the best format for serializing data from any of those; for Tcl/Lisp/ML you might get lazy and use the native object format, but doing so will bite you sooner or later. For C/asm you might prefer ASN.1 but in my experience human-readability is worth the effort, and you can and should use a library rather than your own code for serialization. For Java it really is crystal clear; how else would you do it?
I'm sure you remember this http://qntm.org/gay
Whether or not Ballmer or Gates are supporters, the Republican Party's shift towards fundamentalism is not supported by all of their base. The number of votes for Ron Paul in the primaries show that there is a sizable base still interested in small government and minimal taxes.

I honestly do believe we'll see a third party (be it Fundamentalist of Libertarian, depending on who 'wins' the Republicans) with a decade or two. The outcome of this coming election (whether Romney wins, and how the party reacts) could be a deciding factor.
Megaupload terms of service:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sn3wCcf...

Whoever stored files there and had the idea they were "safe" should read point (8) of the above...
Israel's Secret Iran Attack Plan: Electronic Warfare
SymbolHound developer here, thanks for the mention boyter!
The author wrote more about the library here: http://laurikari.net/tre/about/

He talks about the time complexity ("O(M^2N), where M is the length of the regular expression and N is the length of the text"), and he talks more about it under "Predictable matching speed." It doesn't look like he talks about how the fuzziness feature affects that but I could have missed it.
Awesome! It would be nice to have prev and next button for the chart detail page. Even better if u could add a swipe for mobile devices
Respecting Others Privacy
I understand that Facebook is a phenomenon that many people enjoy on a daily basis. I was one of those people until I decided to cut it off in order to get more done. Shorty after I became very aware of my privacy and how Facebook is violating it everyday. The FTC is involved, many tech industry big wigs have plainly stated how Facebook treats their users as the product without their knowledge or consent. All of this doesn’t bother me as a non user until someone I know involves me in Facebook....
Expresso alleviates headache of big data transfer (YC W11)
How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server
'100 Best Companies to Work For': Google, DreamWorks in top 20
I'm not sure s/he was saying just this, but the point "since we love circumventing content protections/limitations so much, let's circumvent these!" is a funny/ironic/poignant one, in my opinion. Personally I disagreed with climagic's statement about "fighting anti-censorship censorship" ( @climagic you'd prefer to stay quiet and wait 'til there really IS no more wikipedia/reddit/worpdress.com, I suppose?), but I think the points he/she raises are valid. To what extent do we tell ourselves pirating is OK just out of personal expediency?

NOTE: I am not trying to restart/rehash the piracy debates of the past few days; I see this piece as a new angle/perspective on the issue.
I'm just waiting for the Google fans here to defend them and blame this on 'rogue contractors'
Unlimited data is dead, so let's fight a smarter fight
Data Infrastructure at LinkedIn
good point, so the idea would be to supply something like:

page.php?x=1&y=1...

where the x and y keys are going to have the same hash value, so that when it uses those vars in a page it will hit the same hash bucket and become O(n) not O(1)?

Of course you would want to send a lot of different vars in.
I'm not sure that this is the reason politicians don't understand the Internet. It's not because they're old, it's because they're fraternity-pledging C-student jocks. you see in the video they keep saying "I'm not a nerd" -- that's because being a nerd is the worst thing they can imagine. They know engineering is hard, but if people see them knowing stuff, they won't be cool anymore.
Not setting goals is dumb. When you lose aspirations you lose focus and you lose direction. A better way? Create attainable and realistic goals.

My resolution last year was to be more patient with my family. I'm the only one from my entire extended family that followed a techie path early on. Its a pretty damn clear fact that I think about situations differently and it creates tension in the family when we're having discussions. Taking more time to work with my parents and simply let go of some cases is a great feeling when you get along better at family outings like Christmas or Easter.

This year? I'm going to give back to those that deserve it. This means for alll the services that I use on a regular basis: imgur, Dropbox, Evernote, Serviio, TrueCrypt, Ventrillo, etc. etc. I'm going to go to their site and make a donation or purchase the paid version. These guys all deserve it so why shouldn't I help support them because God knows their work has helped me more than enough.

Good resolutions are worthwhile. Saying that you'll run a triathalon in a year is dumb and unfocused.