skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem can be that operating systems and databases work in block sizes of 4k (8k on some UNIXes), which is appropriate for regular disks, and flash SSDs are organized in blocks of 64k, 128k, or even larger blocks, which need to be written en bloc for certain kinds of write (erasure).

That means if you write a 4k block, your SSD has to read its larger block, combine it with the new data, and write the big block back. So depending on your write patterns, you're suddenly writing at 1/8th or 1/16th the speed. Command queuing can help, but not for truly random writes.

It's actually even a bit more complicated: SSDs only need to erase the entire block when writing ones back over zeros, but it's probably safe to assume that most writes will end up doing something like that. Erasure is also slower than just writing.

Regarding the Wikipedia quote, it really depends a lot. Write speeds can be the same as read speeds if you're just writing 'fresh' blocks, but as soon as your drive needs to erase blocks, the story will be very different.
I bought it, read it and it gave me huge insights into our own product which contains a scripting language (not an area I usually work on). My degree didn't include a compiler course (or perhaps it was optional and I did NLP instead).

The book is short but I didn't find it lacking. If I have a need to create my own language, I'll have no fear about the task. It was also a fun diversion during a slow week :-)
I don't think it's just a long term effect. I've already experienced this attitude from potential customers:

"So what happens when you guys get aquired and shut this product down"

"We don't plan to, it makes money and we're growing"

"If you keep growing one of the big players will get worried or interested or both and make you an offer you'd have to be stupid not to take"

It makes sense, the aqui-hire doesn't just get you a proven team with known talent, it removes a potential competitor that might disrupt the status quo. There's a reason it's happening so often and it's because it's great business.

But as a trend it's certainly going to make it harder to get customers for startups that aren't based on creating a fad-ish service for consumers but are providing services people consider important.
Don't use PayPal. They are legendarily evil.
Agreed. I keep referring back to Maciej Ceglowski's fabulous post, Don't Be A Free User: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user

Posterous had a good four year run, but the strong hint from the press release is that they'll be shutting the service down.
Which one, whether GUIs were shiny and new in the 1980s, or whether Bill internalized the lessons that made the GUIs work?

The former assertion is certainly true (I was there!), the latter is arguable, but even as an ardent Linux user, I'd have to say yes -- at least the engineering aspects (the more touchy-feely aspects, perhaps not... as discussed by the blog post).
I don't know ASP.net MVC, but this comment at the bottom, by Betty, gives me pause:

> Using TryUpdateModel like a lot of the mvc tutorials has the same issue

If it's in the tutorials, there's a good chance it's made it into practice in a lot of places.
Bridging the Gap Between Lawyers and Social Media Managers
In addition, of the fee-free services, Paypal may be the only one that does not require end customers to make accounts to use it. This is, for me, by far the biggest disadvantage to the otherwise competent Google Checkout product.
This looks great. Will try it out.

Just FYI -- I found the shaky window upon inputting an incorrect password very annoying and disorienting. I just wanted to reenter my password but wasn't able to because the window was still shaking.
I never said the position was coherent or viable. ;)

That said, I think there are various answers.

One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles. Anarchists who are also pacifists naturally reject this option.

Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property. John T. Private can take his guns and go live in the woods if he wants to, what is essential is that the majority of property is public and therefore private property does not give a specific class control over the output of others' labor.

Another position, and this was Proudhon's, is that there is a distinction between personal property and private property. Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves. As industrial society developed, fending for yourself because less and less plausible, and eventually the choice was between selling the output of your labor for (a socialist would say) less than its cost, or dying, basically.

Calling that choice barbaric is the essence of the social-anarchist critique of capitalism.
I'm basically just thinking about the right to reside and work. And it would be on a monthly or yearly basis, not a permanent thing. Citizenship is a permanent thing, so it's a different beast entirely.

Of course, if citizenship were an option after n years of residing and working in a country (which is the case in many places), then one would expect the market prices to change considerably...
Arriva anche il Sony Tablet, con una doppia versione
That's the basic premise I'm fighting against. What I'm arguing is that that's not actually true.

If you cure cancer but you keep it in your basement should you be rewarded for that?

If you know the cure for cancer, but you didn't invent it yourself, should you be prevented from spreading it?

Your argument is that you never get the cure for cancer without incentivizing someone with the financial rewards to do it, which is a fair one logically, but in the case of the reality of the music industry it's quite simply not what's happened (the RIAA themselves have funded studies that actually showed piracy increasing profits). Instead the music market has been enlarged, and the RIAA is simply getting less of it. This is a Good Thing.

My argument is not inline with the entertainment industry because I am arguing that copyright infringement should no longer be a crime. People who provide the value of getting valued ideas to people should be paid for it, regardless of who created the idea. Publishers don't provide the value of creating or spreading ideas, they provide the value of selling a copy of an idea. We shouldn't give them licenses that says they do anything else because they don't.
The only thing I’m screaming about is the idea that your views deserve a wider audience than here, especially with everyone derailed into a debate about what is or isn’t Libertarian(tm) :-)
>So, you might find it unethical, but its the norm and avoiding it is like shopping for clothes that used no-sweatshop labour.

If he finds it unethical, it doesn't matter if it's the norm. He shouldn't do it. In both cases, there are clear and relatively easy alternatives.
cheers, it was our search feature that was killing performance, we've had to put it a dumber search for now.
As a developer, I totally agree that we're often quick to reduce things down to a bland set of repeatable elements. I think Google's recent re-design (mail, groups, etc.) is just terrible and it feels like some engineer got their way ("Make every button use the same CSS class so we can keep it DRY!").

A healthy tension between Design and Engineering seems to be the best - sometimes the best UX isn't the most efficient and engineers need to get pushback on that.

Similarly, sometimes the "coolest" UX isn't technically reasonable, and the Designer needs to come back with something else.
Another example: bitcoin/namecoin are arguably a technology innovation arising partly from novel thinking about what constitutes property and ownership.
I don't think you really need to worry about Path being acquihired. Given the people involved, and the fact that they already turned down a reported 100 million acquihire offer from Google, I don't really expect Path to go that route.

For your question about a place to store all of your data, check out: http://lockerproject.org/. While it doesn't support Path yet (they don't have a public API) it certainly will when Path makes their API available.
Man hit, killed by Caltrain in Menlo Park IDd
as long as you have the extension installed, everything you bookmark will be available in the service, regardless of which instance of chrome it came from.
https://www.quantcast.com/posterous.com

Although this is just a subset of their total traffic, they were consistently doubling traffic every 4 months or so.
'umms', intentional or not, can actually help the speaker in seeming more genuine.

For example, I hit on a lot of women and in the process, over some time, end up saying basically the same lines and stories. I risk coming across as too-smooth/scripted which is just as bad as being very nervous.

Especially when retelling a story, I intentionally inject plenty of 'umms' and look up as if I am trying to recollect something from my memory.
Potential employee Y U NO GITHUB?
Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course.

This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky considers his anarchism a straightforward extension of the principles of enlightenment political philosophy to industrial society.

There's a layered irony, of course: most of the founding fathers were members of a political and economic elite which openly favored aristocracy and commerce over the 'regular folk.' Not all of them of course. The American Revolution was a strange tenuous cooperation between an economic elite that saw independence as the way out of a mercantile demand on the part of Britain, and a political class which was versed in Enlightenment political philosophy and saw an opportunity for using Locke and Montesquieu as a handbook for a new kind of government.
Is Twitter profitable? It seems one company without a business model acquires another company without business model?
That was my first thought.

Though I'd argue that Apple is bucking that trend. And by your logic, IBM's been dying for decades.

OK, for a few decades, they really were dying. But they got better. Or turned into a newt.
No, the mafia thing is merely humorous.
Having read a few comments regarding the valuation of Mashable at the $200MM range, I've decided to post my 2 cents here.

Personally, I think the valuation for Mashable is achievable when we consider Mashable as similar to HuffingtonPost rather than TechCrunch - Mashable is no longer a tech/startup blog.

HuffingtonPost which was acquired for $315MM which was 10x its 2010 revenue and it is this exit, which I believe turned Pete's head and meant he's seeking an exit. Whilst, I don't know Pete personally to confirm if this is true but from what I am hearing this seems to be the case.

I may be completely wrong but, I doubt it as Mashable has been expanding its verticals & focusing on them more since, the HuffingtonPost acquisition to become more like them rather than TechCrunch etc.

Bringing TechCrunch back into the mix and you consider they are on course to do $10-15MM this year & you consider the fact that Mashable hosts similar events AND has more pageviews/visitors than TechCrunch then $20MM seems plausible.

Remember, Mashable virtually doubled its revenue in 2010 or 2011 just by focusing on selling its advertisements itself rather than through ad networks.

Additionally, Mashable also offered some of their top writers retainer bonuses in order to stay and prevent the turnover they were experiencing and to stop it putting off potential buyers - some writers/editors were offered up to $200-300k to remain at Mashable from what I have heard as a cash bonus on top of their normal salary

As I highlighted earlier with regards to the expansion of Mashable, Ulanoff was brought to expand Mashable into general news which again proves my theory as highlighted by the launch of World and Entertainment News.

Likewise, I have been told that pageviews have also become the main metric for success at Mashable. This is over unique visitors and their writers have been told to insert a gallery where possible to increase and generate additional pageviews (For instance, if you go on Mashable yourself you can see that they have more of the BusinessInsider feel with Slideshows).

With all these things considered, I think that Mashable can easily be worth around the $150-200 Million mark especially when you consider the HuffingtonPost acquisition price.
"I don't like Amazon (for a variety of reasons) but at least they are a reputable business. I have my beefs with other companies, but they aren't criminals."

I have a similar story with Amazon. I was doing business with them for a couple of years. I passed all of their tests (in the beginning, your account is put on hold for 30 days).

2 months ago, I had my first complaint (I have nearly 100% feedback, no complaints, and if there are any problems, I always pay return shipping and give a full refund).

The customer was nasty, spiteful, and didn't want to send me back my goods (it was worth $100+). This was after I immediately apologized for any issues (which to this day, I'm still not sure the exact problem. The message I received was a babbling mess of terrible English) and gave them a return label. I think they scammed me.

Amazon takes the customer's side and gives them a full refund and they got to keep the item. When you email them for support, you get automated responses signed with a name. In the automated response, they told me that I most likely just didn't make the customer happy enough. I should have answered their messages faster (I answered within 5 minutes on a Friday night at 10pm), or I should have made it easier for them to return my product (they just needed to print out the pre-paid label and mail it back).

2 days after this, my account was permanently suspended without warning (they are also keeping $5K of my cash for 3 months). I called them many times and was told that I can only get support through email (this was from a call center in India).

Email support gets you absolutely nowhere. I don't even know if there's a person on the other end. Just automated cookie-cutter responses signed with a name. They most likely do this because they pay people peanuts to answer emails and don't want the backlash of having broken English in the responses. Amazon is also the biggest marketplace for sellers besides Ebay, and they know they can get away with it.

As a marketplace seller, I was giving them thousands of dollars per-month in fees+$50/month for a pro account.

They don't respect sellers at all and I advise anyone wanting to business with them to steer clear.
Using your example, at 30K/year you'd have alot of US/UK students offering to trade places with citizens of other countries.

And if the poor of one country can be incentivized to switch with the rich of another country, wouldn't that just further stratify wealth?
To be sure, Twitter's non-tweet features need a lot of improvement.
The same way I propose blacksmiths, phonograph repairmen and punch card programmers make a living: not doing those things. Just because some people can't make a living doing something does not mean the government should protect it.
It's an interesting problem in game design I think. If one of a game's principle mechanics is weapon progression, it's fun only so long as the weapons continue to progress. It's exciting to see what new powers you've just been granted.

It reminds me of tech trees in 4x strategy games. They're fun until you've maxed out the tree.

Some games make you choose a particular path that you have to commit to, making you replay the game to see different parts of the progression tree, but I've always hated those.

A big problem, and this is where Borderlands lost me, was that the enemies simply became too easy/boring. I ended up just driving across the world ignoring the enemies as they weren't challenging to fight and I had no need for loot.

Some games make the opposite mistake, like Oblivion. You level up, but so do your enemies. So there really doesn't "feel" like a reason to level up. You don't really get anything for it.

So the hard part is finding the right balance where your weapons and stats improve, but so do your enemies. But at just the right ratio to make you want to grind for stuff, but to keep it from getting boring.

It's a problem as old a the first Dragon Warrior (which incidentally solved it by having the player enter new parts of the world with harder enemies, leaving the easier enemies in already explored areas).

To answer your question, I thought Diablo's environment and atmospherics were fun. I got bored with it eventually about halfway through the game. I think I found a gold cheat someplace and just loaded up with gear and finished the game off.
The question on how much Joe would have paid is interesting in an academic setting, but quite impossible to answer. To make an example, tap water is worth exactly 0$, but had my only option been to purchase water from the store, then the price I would be willing to pay would be substantially large.

The way west society solved the question on how we pay the utility guys who maintain the water supply is with taxes. Copyright is an outgrowth of taxes. A private monopoly granted by the state that can be used to generate revenue without any unit cost associated. In any free market, if the unit price is zero, the then market price must be zero too.

The thing I personally wonder is, since copyright is a form of tax granted by the state, is this the best way to reward creators in the art of science and beauty?
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Badges are a much welcomed feature, but it's too bad they don't have any live examples in the documentation to see how they look.

Mark mentions fixed-bottom dropdown menu's, but I don't seem to see it mentioned in the docs anywhere also.
Yeah, just like Facebook; I don't know if you have heard of it.
Microsoft’s voice translator captures user's tone and cadence; audio included
It's not a matter of whether they're willing or not. They're compelled to by US federal law.

The best part is, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act, cops don't even need a judge or a warrant to get it anymore.

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

From 2003 to 2006, the FBI averaged about 65,000 NSLs sent - PER YEAR.

Twitter has the username to ip+timestamp mapping, your ISP has the ip+timestamp to name+physical address mapping.
Absolutely, which is why I didn't say mere "focus." Just something to be aware of when deciding the benefits of a technology.
Very cool! What happens if a group just does not show up?
I can understand why it may 'look like a scam' to you.

The sales tactics on that page are also used by people trying to scam you into buying their product. It's almost like "it's too good to be true" -- but no, it's true and the book is quality. Buy it, you won't regret it.

Marc-André Cournoyer, the author of the book, also writes about his sales tactics if you're interested -- you should go buy that book too.
> I neither own nor possess my apartment

In a legal sense, a renter actually does possess their apartment (but they do not own it):
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/possession
Cancellations through the service went down, but did actual cancellations (as in, the person just doesn't show) go down?

If you make it harder to cancel you're relying even more heavily on the integrity or conscience of the cancelling party to notify the other group members of their desire to cancel. 90% seems like a really drastic decrease which is why I bring this up.
Yes, but if they haven't received those assurances, there's no benefit in highlighting the fact (for either the users or Posterous), and much potential harm if users spook and Twitter later decides to continue supporting it.
So it is OK for your employees (that you share your code and data with) to distribute it among third parties as they please?
When I said "pay attention to this because it is your future" I was specifically thinking about Google. I basically guarantee that somewhere down the road Google will abandon their "only for defensive purposes" stance.
Yes, absolutely. Different people think in different ways--some in language, some in images, and some even more abstractly. (I suspect this is the key to mathematical talent--whether or not you can think purely in mathematical abstractions without the need of other aid.) So unless you're thinking in language already, there's often a translation process you have to run your thoughts through before saying them, and this process can be expensive, especially with the pressure of people looking at you.
>If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it.

So most web businesses are not providing value. Neither are any other software businesses. Neither are authors.

Except that loads of people want and need software and websites and books. Somehow it seems like this scarcity-based, property-based system of valuation doesn't work well.

Who wants to build the start-up that disrupts capitalism?
The fixed bottom navbar isn't documented yet, but we do have examples of the "dropup" menus in the dropdown buttons section here: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#buttonDr...
Hey OP This looked really cool, so i installed it.
Then it asked me to log in, and I uninstalled it right away.
I want a nice bookmarks-handler, but i dont wanna log in to your shit.
Apple In Two Pictures
> maybe an equivalent dose of pain to counteract the plesure?

So, they would have to watch it again?
Here's the problem. The problem is not that they're freezing accounts, its' the fact that there's no bloody CS to go along with it!

They refuse to tell you why you're blocked.

They refuse to allow you to talk to someone to appeal the decision.

PayPal's CS is absolutely _horrible_. This magnifies any other issues you may have with them.
We recognized that problem pretty early on. Some of our favorite customers have been teachers using Minecraft in their classrooms and in cases like that having one person paying makes total sense. Working on it! We decided to launch with individual accounts first because that's what made most sense for us and our friends.

Regarding Bukkit, we've been holding off support because of this: http://www.mojang.com/2012/02/minecraft-team-strengthened It's running in beta but the real value of Bukkit is being able to use mods. We're working on an experience that lets people enjoy mods without having to handcraft massive YAML files or run up SQL databases.
Disney-Pixar, NASA, Mozilla Partner On Badges To Shape The Future Of Learning
A device that charges your phone while you breathe
Yep, it had a very real business opportunity.

It really does make me want to take a run at getting the platform from Twitter, if they are in fact going to close it down. I've got the perfect name to rebrand it with, far better than the Posterous name.

Twitter might see serious tax benefits from shutting it down after the acquisition unfortunately. To them it might be worth more dead than alive.
Very cool! I am just getting ahead of myself it seems. I'll take a look at the documentation tomorrow to see all of the cool stuff you guys have added.
It's not successful companies like Facebook that get acqui-hired. It's the unsuccessful ones (like Posterous).