skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds like a CP system to me. There's nothing wrong with that btw, I don't know why people are so reluctant to admit this.

AP systems have some useful properties, but they're also (typically) more difficult to reason about.

The "hiccups" you describe are periods of unavailability. The increased latency is caused by an element of the system waiting for the data to become available again, a totally valid strategy for coping with transient failures/partitions.

Your argument about intra-datacenter partitions being unlikely are true, but they do happen. You also make a good point about such partitions also affecting client applications. Both of these are indicative of CP systems and, like I said: there's nothing wrong with that.

Personally, I think both AP and CP distributed systems are equally interesting. What I consider a red flag is attempting to rationalize how a system "beats CAP".
50 Things You're Not Measuring for ROI But Should
Shouldn't they have tried to eliminate instrumentation errors before going public with findings that conflict with all human understanding of physics?
The Problem with Facebook Connect
Microsoft Bing launches new feature called Linked Pages
Reward Value, Not Face Time - Tony Schwartz
Hmm. When I'm done with an app, I usually hit the home key. I usually use 'back' when I'm taken to another app by some other means: an email notification, a link starting the browser, opening a file in a file browser. Perhaps the confusion lies in different usage behaviours?

And FWIW, I just tried doing what you describe with the ICS clock / alarm app. It worked as expected for me: after tapping "set", the alarm was set, and Back took me back to the clock, and another Back exited the app.

One practical way the new semi-broken approach affects me is with JustPictures, a photo viewing app. I use it in conjunction with ES File Explorer. It used to be that when you launched a photo from the file explorer, it would come up in JustPictures, and then you'd return to the file browser when you tapped Back. But now, after JustPictures was updated to better conform with guidelines a month or two back, it goes into its own "tile" view of the folder before sending me back to the file browser. This behaviour is according to the new guidelines, but I find it quite upsetting. I launched JustPictures not because it has its own top screen and file system navigation etc., but because it has more reasonable photo viewing functionality (specifically, file-based rather than media library based) than the gallery app.

The new Android approach seems focused on becoming more like iOS, where each app is its own silo, rather than how it started out, with activities blurring the distinction between apps and enabling a higher level of integration. But the more Android becomes like iOS, the less reason I have to prefer it over iOS.

There's actually a similar dynamic going on with Firefox. Firefox is slowly cloning Chrome's look and feel, and I have to work harder and harder to get the menu bar, status bar etc. back in place. The day I can no longer do that, is the day in which I might as well give up on Firefox and use Chrome. (Well, that and Chrome's text selection algorithm. It's absolutely hideous for this compulsive text-highlighting reader.)
The code is open source. However, they applied for patents on the algorithm:

http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/search/en/WO2011137189
I don't know if scary is the word I would use. Exacting, that's for sure.
What's Wrong with the IGF
Why? If they have code samples and you think they are good, why are you giving them a pop quiz?
I got impatient after 14, I don't feel any better about myself for having got the first 14 right though.
Thoughts on Growing Old
Simple Chef-Solo Tutorial
The problem with uservoice/getsatisfaction etc. is businesses approach them as a replacement for normal support systems and then don't provide user support through them and rarely (if ever) bother with the ideas/suggestions users have, they think they're an easy get out clause for providing support (which is costly) and it ends up sucking.

When done right the systems rock, the way that Mint.com uses getsatisfaction is wonderful but the way most companies use uservoice/getsatisfaction isn't.

Perfect example of this model of support/feedback being done so wrong: Seesmic (http://feedback.seesmic.com/) just spend 5 minutes looking around, they have thousands of votes on thousands of suggestions and they've accepted only a few (back when the system is new) and now it goes completely ignored...
Why keep 100 ST2 tabs open when like you've said it's so fast to just cmd-p to pull up the file you need, open or not (unless you have a very large number of files with the same name)? I summon and dismiss files like crazy, but I generally only keep a few things open at any time.
When a node dies, the master reconfigures all the servers and clients with a new topology excluding the failed node. "Operations which are interrupted by reconfiguration exhibit at-most-once semantics." So while the system is reconfiguring after a node failure, updates can be lost.

Time windows of "at most once semantics" mean the system has none of C, A, or P. Which doesn't mean it's not a good database for many purposes.
Shouldn't you eliminate ALL bugs from your software before you release it? All of them.
Fun quiz, but the user interface is terrible. Too many ads, and showing each question again after you answer it is obnoxious.
This renders the Ubuntu for Android useless.
I was impressed with the Atrix (Phone that docked into a thin laptop) when it was released. I still believe it's before its time but I'm happy to see where things are going. I'd love to one day carry my computer around in my pocket and just dock it at work or home when I needed to.
Wow. Pageview bait. Ugh.
Right now we use the webhooks on Github and Bitbucket. Webhooks send to Masterbranch information about the commit, the message, the files and the date of the commit but never the code, in that way we protect the privacy of the code. This allows us to have a taste about what you are working on.

Due to the feedback right now we plan to release tools to upload full commit history and also hooks for the SCMs without having to host the private code on Github on Bitbucket. (already working on the git hook https://github.com/masterbranch/Jolly-Roger)
I haven't found CS degrees to be very well correlated with being able to program, so I think this need applies even to people who got an education in the normal way.
I've never had problems sleeping up to 12 hours. Might be a personal thing, or related to whether you have accumulated sleep debt.
The only UN rules that the US is interested in adhering to.
I'm afraid the first question was a general-knowledge question, which led me (perhaps unfairly?) to write the rest of the test off as nothing more than a specialised knowledge quiz.

I don't suppose it went into scientific method, controlled experiments, philosophy of science, etc.?

If not, then it could hardly be called a scientific literacy quiz, any more than a random series of questions about specific APIs is a programming interview.
Hiring Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs
Feds Request DNSChanger Deadline Extension
2013 Budget Proposal will triple dividend tax to 44.8%
But bugs in my software don't prove Einstein wrong. There's a difference.
I tried to watch Game of Thrones
Totally agree.

A shockingly small number of candidates I've interviewed have heard of fizzbuzz. The first time I mentioned it to someone, I assumed they already knew it and would just chuckle and crank it out. However, that's actually kind of rare.

When I do talk to a candidate and get that "knowing grin", my estimation of them jumps up a couple of notches. It seems to actually mean something outside of coder forums.

The real downer is how dismaying it as that candidates clearly have never prepared. How could they have done any research ahead of time and NOT seen fizzbuzz?
I'd like to add that I think and hope that the trend is for traditional corporations to keep getting replaced by a larger number of lean companies (where's it's possible). The larger the corporation (by total employee count) the less nimble they become. I think companies consisting of a small number of highly skilled individuals can focus on what they do best and work with other small companies on the work they need.

For example, traditional corporations I've worked for have had large HR departments. Now where I work (with 40 employees) we use another company to handle most of the HR functions. This allows us to focus on our core business model.
Bummer I signed up a while ago but never received an email that classes were starting.
The best pessimistic response I read to this experiment when it first came out stated that overturning well-established theorems in physics should be left to experiments where the result is clearly and simply binary, not where the result is an extraordinarily precise measurement in a complex system.
HN Feature request: Collapsable comments.
Dear PG, and community.
Now that the comment trees for each popular post are starting to get quite deep, it would be great to make them collapse in order to quickly scan through the info.
Surely this is just a reflection of the fact that science is performed by humans with limited resources. I mean, there is something to be said for getting the approximately result correctly many times over.

And don't forget there is a check and balance in the form of meta-studies and statistics that are sometimes uncanny can exposing bias and flaws.

Finally - this highlights the dual nature of 'experimental' vs 'theoretical' physics, and they work so well in tandem.
PPAPI is a platform for plugins to safely port existing native code, and implement performance critical components. The PPAPI platform capabilities (audio, canvas, webgl, etc) already exist as regular JavaScript APIs in Chrome. So, if you want to use them on normal web content you can. However, in doing so you incur both the strengths and limitations of the web platform (e.g. JavaScript dispatch, IPC overhead, and a single-threaded execution context).

You gave the example of using canvas from a web worker. Unfortunately, the whole web platform is built on the assumption of a single-threaded execution pipeline. Web workers get around this by using postMessage and not having access to the DOM, shared variables, and other stateful parts of the platform. Canvas and WebGl as spec'd and implemented are tied to these stateful parts of the platform (DOM, etc.), which is why you cannot use them from a worker.

So, your desired change would involve either a major overhaul of the web as spec'd and implemented, or a change to the Canvas and WebGL standards. The first is probably not going to happen. The second is achievable and implementable, but wouldn't help address the use cases I described in my first sentence.
I can't even believe this. What am I missing HN? Isn't this going to be a major damper on the economy?
Entrepreneurship isn’t about money, it’s about changing the world
It annoys the hell out of me that I can't launch the app by default because it points at directories that aren't user-writeable. Riak just has the etc and var directories inside the tarball. Cassandra just assumes that it is able to write to /var/...

Also: Setting up the Schema changes quite a bit since 0.7 and that was always kinda annoying. Nothing that is really that big of a problem, but it feels like I have to change the code every minor version since 0.7. (note that they didn't set up a schema in the screencast and the cluster that got started is pretty useless, isn't it?)
Because of what kstenerud and robododo wrote below

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622191
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3622441

Interviewers don't owe you anything. If you are over-qualified then within five minutes of talking you should be able to prove to them that you are worth skipping over the bullshit.

If the person still wants to go forward then that would decrease the value or working at that company in my mind.
The Tesla Bricking Story? It’s Nonsense
To verify that they can bang out code when they need to, not just when they're in the right frame of mind to create code samples. Also, ours is domain specific and measures multiple things about the candidate (but the primary one is just that they can produce sane code).

In this case, we're talking about FizzBuzz. The point of FizzBuzz is that it's a test that can be passed by literally anyone with an elementary ability to code. Optimizing for it is silly. Just bang out the fizzbuzz answer (make fun of it if you like) and get on with your life.
What you describe is more or less what Lakatos coined the "Research Programme" after. [1]

In a nutshell, we know that science more or less progresses from one theory to another after the existing theory has been falsified (Popper), but this transition does not happen overnight, even after a falsifying result has been put forth. That is because science is really structured with a "hard core" hypothesis (say, in physics, that nothing moves faster than c), and various "auxiliary hypotheses" that bear the brunt of criticism before the core belief is attacked (say those that posit the integrity of the measurement instrument, for example). And that is all that is going on here. There are many, many theories that are going to be dismantled before physics transitions to something post-relativity. It's just the way the assumptions are structured.

While this may seem trivial, we see this playing out in the battle of classical against behavioral economics. Are the results of experimental psychology admissible in the criticism of certain economic models? Models don't claim to be perfect, after all...

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos#Research_programme...
I think your resume and GitHub account can complement each other — which is why I keep my resume on GitHub :)

I had mixed feelings about making its history publicly available, but I’ve come to agree with the OP — how you’ve changed is at least as important as what you are right now.
The reloading of the page wouldn't be so bad if not for the gazillion social sharing widgets. Those things really slow down page loads.

I'm going to go install an extension that blocks those.
That can work if the server process is killed so that the master is immediately notified. But what about other failure modes? For example, if the disk has soft errors and writes start taking several seconds to complete, the system can't decide in a small amount of time that the node is dead.
Yeah, I can see now why it would give off that impression. That feature is going to give them so many issues in the future. I wouldn't be surprised to hear about its removal one day.
It was suggested repeatedly, and it was then repeatedly mentioned that GPS already takes relatively into account.
Interesting.. keep it coming.

We need a unified nosql language.. Basically what SQL is.
I don't understand why you came in here to say little more than "this costs money, I don't like it", while taking a shot at people who have earned disposable income.

Do you really think Khan Academy is free? It's only free if you have electricity, a computer, and a broadband internet connection. Knewton really adds only a tiny amount of money on top of that massive infrastructure cost.

Even if you think "oh, just go to the public library!" I would respond, "how, with what money or means?" That's not free either.

None of these things are "free". I feel that you've simply taken an arbitrary ideological stance where a company producing materials and asking for money to compensate them is somehow less "preferable".
The only scenario in which the operation has "at most once semantics" is when the node the client is directly communicating with fails. No other failure is visible to the clients. Furthermore, every failure scenario provides the following guarantees:

* If the result of an operation is visible by one client, it is visible by all clients, always and immediately

* Updates to the same key are always applied in the same order on all servers.

The presence of "at most once semantics" do not harm our consistency guarantee. In the database world, this would be equivalent to a client sending the final "commit" message, and then losing internet connectivity. In such a scenario, the operation may or may not happen, but the client will not know one way or the other.

Edit: Formatting of the list
Has it been proven in a pr0n environment? If not, I'll wait and see.
Ah, I see where you're coming from. I have a mental shorthand that basically says "DSA is the one that works like DH", and you're right, you need the inverse for DSA.

But regarding failure modes, I'm thinking of (as a starting point) things like:

http://www.ams.org/notices/199902/boneh.pdf

There are a lot of implementation errors that happen with RSA. What's a comparable list for DSA? Failure to generate good nonces, and then...?
basically depends on how much of bash you've been using. i'd say it's a strict superset of 99% of what 99% of bash users do. the prompt language is about the only thing i can think of at the moment that most people ever touch at all that's significantly different. (if you're into writing custom completion modules or something, that's part's completely different.)
"We have found something weird. We are suspicious; more investigation is required."

What's wrong with that?
What exactly do you think they were doing for the six months between finding their results and publishing them? Are you under the impression that the OPERA scientists just randomly dump unvetted data on the public?
I think we can say this if any of the YC companies are still around in 10 years and profitable.
Didn't Ronald Coase's theory of the firm predict this, right after the first world war?

(As transaction costs (search costs, costs to contract, costs to outsource, etc.) go down, optimal firm size goes down. In an efficient market for contracting, like IT, tiny startups turn into long-term profitable small-headcount companies (dropbox has, what, 70 people?). In inefficient markets, you end up with huge or state-owned companies, like in natural resource exploitation or the third world.)
I would like to see a quiz like that; "spot the errors in these experiments", "spot the statistical flaws in these methods" and so on.
Not really. Men who don't have a hard time acknowledge that fact too. When we say flaky, we also mean girls who reschedule for later because something comes up, emergencies, days or hours before the date. It's not just being stood up and taking days to respond to your texts.

It's as real as rush hour traffic and rainy days, and eventually you learn to just deal with the contingency and not take it personally. You don't judge the person specifically, you just know it's possible. You plan dates at places where you'll still have fun by yourself and so on.
Indeed - this is the first thing I looked up. It's directly against the Mission of the W3C to support proposals such as this. If people want this feature, it is going to have to be a non-W3C standard.

I've been commenting against various forms of anti-web proposals such as this for more than a decade. Every 3-4 years somebody proposes to accept RAND (non-free) licensing terms. This time around it's non-free content distribution. Let's hope the W3C remembers who they are, and what they're for, once again.
I'm really impressed with how open this group was to be proven wrong and how hard they worked to rule out or confirm error on their part.

Compared to Wolfe-Simon et al (the group that claims to have found arsenic in the DNA of certain bacteria) they show exactly how science should be done.
"The larger the corporation (by total employee count) the less nimble they become."

That's because of antiquated management structures. Look at Gore and Associates (makers of Goretex) for a modern corporate structure. Elements of a corporation should be almost completely independent and the only reason they are part of one entity is because of synergies and cooperation.

To give a toy example, McDonalds might grow and slaughter their own cows because they can better place them near their distribution facilities. Buying from a third party might create unnecessary overhead.

I'm sorta oversimplifying things, but I'd recommend reading

"Re-Creating the Corporation" by the late Russell Ackoff to appreciate why corporations exist (and why sometimes they shouldn't)

http://www.amazon.com/Re-Creating-Corporation-Design-Organiz...
They did exactly that - but failed to find the error so the next step was to ask others to look into it.
Sure, if I actually knew the correct solution...

Seeing as Basho is backing Riak, I would assume that they would invest a little bit of time documenting what they actually did :)
No, for a couple of reasons.

1: Competition isn't useless, especially if they take slightly different angles.

2: This works with your existing phone. Ubuntu for Android requires a new handset.

3: It's available NOW.
Who are you to make that kind of guarantee?
People who worked at Google a few years ago
Read-write locks also have involve more overhead, so the work that must be done while holding the lock had best be significantly more costly than what's required to take the lock itself.
This is exactly why Github will not ever be the standard. It's fine to show off what you play around with in your spare time, but the very best and most productive workers actually won't have an extensive up-to-date Github repo. This is because they're been gainfully employed and have spent the vast majority of their coding time kicking ass at their real job.

In short, while people with impressive Github contributions can generally be good employees (but not always!), many good employees simply don't have time or interest for open source / side projects.
"The other option is that Intel might be looking to boost the performance of its upcoming smartphone- and tablet-oriented Medfield platform."

I'd go with that one (the first reason was pretty implausible). Get the third party suppliers used to doing test chips on their fab, then pick and choose silicon-proven blocks like the SoC builders on ARM &co are used to.

Possibly, it would be a good idea to have more than one buyer (Intel) in that market ...
> as cliché as it sounds, if you are looking for it, the appropriate practice will come to you

Yeah. Keep looking for the right career / hobby / spiritual path / etc., and it will likely come to you. Provided you are sincere and are actually looking.

I've a different bias, myself, but to each his own. The various buddhist techniques also seem well suited for the western skeptics, since they typically don't require adherence to any theology at all. You could practice Zen and be a total agnostic or atheist. "Brain hacking" in its purest form. YMMV.

I find Zen difficult, myself. Feels too... um... dry, for lack of a better word. I require something that engages the emotional apparatus, and the physical base, in a more active fashion. I guess this is like preferring Python over Ruby over Perl over etc.etc.etc. Everyone's different.
Standard caveat: while Science is an extremely reputable outlet, this blog post is unsourced. There hasn't been an official statement from the OPERA collaboration yet.

Update: a spokesperson for CERN has confirmed "a problem with the GPS system." http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/02/22/technolog...
So what happens if someone is employed? Do you just not hire them? Do you expect your employees to spend lots of time coding random stuff outside of work? That's not generally a quality I would put a lot of weight on.
The charge circuitry probably turns on at a high charge rate, senses the line voltage drop below 100v, and shuts down for a few seconds. Stuck in this loop, it might never deliver much charge.
I've been told Coase not only foresaw the present trend towards more, smaller companies but also figured out the underlying dynamics. But I admit I haven't actually gotten around to reading "The Nature of the Firm."