skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the Riak pages are not geared at the people making the selection, e.g., architect-level technologists. The wiki is full of marketing claims ('Riak is the most powerful open-source, distributed database you'll ever put into production') ('Riak is the most boring database you’ll ever run in production').

But then suddenly:

'curl -v -X PUT -d '{"bar":"baz"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "X-Riak-Vclock: a85hYGBgzGDKBVIszMk55zKYEhnzWBlKIniO8mUBAA==" \
http://127.0.0.1:8091/riak/test/doc?returnbody=true

now, I understand why that is the way that it is -- the Riak guys are simultaneously very proud of their product, and also extremely technical -- but it's missing the middle ground. The middle ground is where you explain the characteristics of the system in non-marketing terms, describe what it's good at and what one could reasonably expect it to do, and describe also where it fails horribly and what you should not try to use it for. Once that's been outlined, _then_ bring out X-Riak-Vclock.

By comparison, e.g., redis.io has simple pages describing every command in the system and, critically, the associated algorithmic complexity and discussion of likely issues and problems. It describes what performance expectations are likely to be achieved on commodity hardware. And it allows you to test out your thoughts in real time right there on the page.

Personally, I have very little idea how, e.g., Riak compares to Redis. And I built Erlang and Riak from source and did the tutorial. I don't have a sense for how many ops/sec Riak can manage, what the equivalent to sinterstore and sunion look like, what the minimal real architecture for a production box setup should be. And a lot of the tutorial fills me with The Fear.

Which brings me to the last point: The Fear of Riak is pretty strong, and that's because very few people are running erlang on purpose in production. A lot of developers (and certainly devops people) have a hard enough time with their existing stack, without bringing on an entirely alien software, logging, alerting, monitoring, managing, and developing stack, and trying to understand how to reason about it. And, even those developers who can work up the courage to dive into erlang will have to deal with the fact that they will be novices for quite a long time on an extremely technical product that is designed to be at the core of their world.
Square's 'sexy growth curve' accelerates again
Looking back on my highschool years and previous, my parents tried to encourage me to grow out of all sorts of phases.

They'd barrage me with empty platitudes like "just be yourself" when my primary frustration in life was that I didn't know who I was, or that being myself so far clearly led to nothing but social dejection. "Just be yourself" became an epithet that mocked me all day from the walls of halls and classrooms, often found block-lettered across posters of celebrities and eagles soaring over canyons.

It did nothing but make me feel like my parents were disconnected from my struggles, unhelpful in the same way "just go up and ask her out" fails to encapsulate dating. Convincing me that it really was that easy, sound advice for everyone in the world but me.

You grow out of phases by coming to terms with them yourself. It's how you evolve.
Securing Investment: How to Counter Common Startup Mistakes
I concur. I think you expressed my thoughts on this better then I did myself.
firehose.io for real-time applications
An alternative to meteor, derby and firebase. Easily integrates with backbonejs and emberjs. Suited to ruby folks.
Like many NoSQL databases, we don't really have a query language. Mostly you read a few columns from a particular row. That could contain a combinator, such as at TopN containing 1,000 inlinks to a webpage... something that you would ordinarily fetch using a range query that returned 1,000 rows from a table.
Paxos would be good for electing a master, but we wanted to avoid having any masters in the architecture. There are also scenarios where paxos can be slow or fail to reach a consensus. We wanted high availability from each node in the cluster regardless of whether 2/3 of the rest of the cluster were down or unreachable; both parts of a partioned cluster should also be able to continue to function as best they could.

Individual nodes can often make "personal" decisions about what to do in subobtimal situations. If you can answer an incoming request, even with partial or out-of-date data, do so; it's better than not replying. For the repair agent, each node can see its own view of "holes" in the 3-level replication, and offer to make copies of <3 buckets to bring back up to three copies.
interesting. so, they basically require it to be open-(to them)-source?
How about you decide what you do with your money, and Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen decide what they do with their money?
Obviously it might seem silly to make this comment here, but would this really protect in many cases besides this one? It seems like almost every time the intrusion would occur somewhere where the intruder will have access to the mounted encrypted disk, no?
> atheism is intellectually justified

It is, and will be, until the people who believe in the supernatural provide solid evidence for their specific claims.
Native desktop/console could possibly be dropping possibly due to recession and also the fact that we haven't had any new consoles released for a while.

I find it difficult to believe that in the future everyone will want to play all of their games on a phone/tablet.

There are huge categories of popular games that really don't fit well to a touchscreen.
Ferrari's other work or what you want to call "mastery" is all irrelevant. manuscreationis said s/he would like to be able to draw as well as what can be seen in this demo. Acquiring that level of skill does not require 10,000+ hours.
Not true. It fetches the URL every single hour, not just when the user requests it. So Google is claiming they can ignore robots.txt because it was an action performed by a user (true) but they're unleashing a huge problem with this background refreshing. Google is wasting gobs of their own money, too. What if I made a bot that generated 1000s of Google accounts with 1000s of spreadsheets hotlinking 1000s of big files stored on S3? This one guy's one file did TERABYTES of transfers over a week. The underlying problem is that Google is relying on the domain name to indicate the company size, and thus the bandwidth allocation for this service.
That might also qualify as an "accident".
You are right, hence the reason they redirected the dashboard stats to wordpress.com. I think they're gunning for an IPO or sale.
I don't know a single Cs Graduate at my state school with those kind of credentials. My questions is who _wouldn't_ hire him, lol.
I'm a principal at exactly the kind of company you'd expect to end up benefiting from such a requirement.

And, I agree that this is a policy vector that is in the discussion mix. In fact, I think it's much of what the Administration has in mind.

But I strongly oppose this policy, because companies like mine almost certainly wouldn't end up doing the audit work.

Mandated scheduled audit is a race to the bottom. Look no further than PCI-DSS to see the end result of audit done for audit's sake: the winners are the ones who can deliver the most audits with the best cost structure, and once they gain a foothold, the winners can roll their previous success like a snowball to capture more market share regardless of the quality of the end result. The major credit card breaches of the last few years were all audited by reputable PCI-DSS audit firms.

In the Government, the problem is even worse. Government contracting is procedurally tricky. Most companies that do significant government contracting have entire GSA and DoD business units to handle the sales cycle. When it comes to "security" x "services", the overwhelming majority of the dollars go to a few giant companies (Raytheon, Lockheed, SAIC). These companies aren't winning business because they deliver results; whether any of them ever do or don't, you can look at the security of government networks today to see that mandated audit- for- audits- sake isn't working.

What's needed is liability, or at least toothsome penalties.

People respond to incentives. The problem we have today is cleanly illustrating by looking at the incentive structure, which overwhelmingly favors getting ambitious systems fielded as fast as possible, offseted poorly (if at all) by post-deployment risk of any sort. From a careerist perspective: it is much better to get something deployed --- especially if it will appear to work long enough to soak up credit --- than it is to delay deployment for ambiguous "security" objectives. It's so much better that it's still better to get something deployed even if 2 years from now it's going to cough up 20 million credit card numbers.
Full disk encryption is unlikely to protect you from anything other than custody issues at your hosting provider.
If case anyone is interested in installing dtrace on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install bison flex zlib1g-dev libelf-dev binutils-dev libdw-dev libdwarf-dev
wget ftp://crisp.dyndns-server.com/pub/release/website/dtrace/dtrace-20120409.tar.bz2
tar xvfj dtrace-20120409.tar.bz2
cd dtrace-20120409
make all
sudo make install
sudo make load
I think that is typically legislated at the city level and the intent is to prevent slum housing, but I could be wrong. I just recall reading an article about Tumbleweed houses where he stated that was why he put it on wheels. In a former life, I wanted to be an urban planner but life gotin the way. So I have some pasing familiarity with things like that, enough to mention anecdotally, but not really detailed knowledge. Another anecdote: Some places, like Apple Valley CA, also have quite large minimum lot sizes. This is frquently done to try to preserve rural character but the typical result is that it becomes an uber rich suburb. Apple Valley is quite expensive and driving through there is an exercise in touring neighborhoods filled with mansions, some of which literally belong to famous movie stars.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.
I'm intrigued by your analysis of the dated "modernizations" the government has implemented, ie the SCADA networks. Iirc, this president was the first to have a "CTO" (I forget the exact title); any comment on the effect6 of this position existing?
Though I'm not religious, there's a specific set of bible verses I think of when I see news of someone being publicly charitable:

1 Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them. Otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. 3 But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.

--Matthew 6:1-4

I think it means that the spirit of charity is purest when it is anonymous.
At first I thought this was going to be the issue where people were sharing their EC2 instances and were leaving their keys or un-wiped copies of their private keys or tokens on images that others than stumble upon.
It would almost certainly be criminal regardless of the method (Google, EC2, botnet).
Previous submissions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2791565

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793205

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2796291

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798214

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798498

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812563

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2830149

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2854737

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2859958

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2883207

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3755109

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784485

None of them have any discussion - perhaps this will be the first.
Well of course I'm not suggesting we forcibly make them do anything with their money. I am just saying, in terms of societal net benefit, we are probably much better off if our most successful investors continue investing in more businesses rather than charities. Not a fan of thought experiments?
Because he is concerned that it isn't being left to the people and instead is being artificially dropped. In general this seems like a valid concern because I've seen a lot of "whoa why did this just die" questions over the years. A little bit more transparency might help. I dunno
There are other email clients? LOL. (I use the web interface through chrome on ios and osx)
Hangover heaven
A doctor in Las Vegas decided to build operative care for suffering from a hangover.
It's not just a matter of "how much" regulation, but which regulations.

A field can be both over-regulated and under-regulated at the same time, in different ways. It might have the right total number of regulations, but too many that stifle innovation and too few that actually protect consumers. (Unfortunately, due to the nature of politics, those trying to remove the stifling regulations and those trying to add consumer protections often end up at each others throats.)
I cannot help notice that Hetzner offers 5000 GB/month AND a full dedicated server, for 39 EUR (51 USD) [1], so his traffic would have cost him at that rate a total of 100 USD if he were to use a dedicated server instead of Amazon.

(before mentioning Amazon's scalability, consider that Hacker News is ran on a single dedicated server, and the moral of the story seems to be how not to scale especially when you don't want to)

[1] - http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/x3
Wow, thanks for including my tweet. :) I wrote that after being annoyed that a good friend, who had finally taken the leap from his full-time engineering job and quit to do a startup with friends wasn't really doing it 100%. In fact, he got bored or something and picked up a part-time job at a clothing store.. for the "discount" he said. Even though he had about $100k already saved up and was living outside of the bay area.
It's unbelievable how much genius is wasted in poverty.

What if those charitable dollars helped someone in an absolute destitute situation, who later turned out to be a success?

Let me give you an example. In New York there is a non profit called "East New York Farms." If you aren't aware, East New York is one the roughest places you can come across in Brooklyn. They provide kids with the chance to run an organic garden from both the operational/agricultural side and the business side of things. And on top of that, they sell it in the local neighborhood. I talked to a girl who didn't know what broccoli was before she did this program. Her parents just gave her honeybuns from the corner store for dinner. Now they have Whole Foods quality vegetables in the middle of a destitute area for cheap, and it services the community. https://goodkarmaapp.com/np/enyfarms

Think of the marginal increase a dollar creates there vs going to a kid from a top university.
IronWorker Goes Hyperpolyglot - Adds Java, Node and Go Support
That's my understanding, but I'm not sure.
Among people who actually operate companies or top the commit charts on major projects, "CTO" is already a stigmatized title. Tom Preston-Werner is clearly not a do-nothing status-obsessed hanger-on at Github, but truly excellent people who hold the CTO title may actually be the exception. At any rate: the joke is that CTO is the title you get when your team stops letting you commit to the main branch anymore.†

The stigma to holding the title "CTO" in any Government is way, way worse.

At any rate, whichever private sector notable is promoted to whatever vanity "technology" role in the government is of little impact to the security of SCADA networks, which are virtually all operated by private companies. The Secretary of Energy had more impact on utility security than any other person in government, and that impact was (from what I can tell) largely negative.††

† Again: I'm sure Tom can commit to whatever branch he wants.

†† I'm not myopic or tunnel-focused on my own field; the social value of getting responsive billing and utilization deployed may end up dwarfing the cost of widespread utility vulnerabilities or breaches. Steven Chu is probably an excellent Secretary of Energy.
> What is so hard about not posting an opinion on subjects that you don't have knowledge of or any proof to back up your claims? If you haven't studied psychology, have even a vague idea of what it's about, or what its past or present state is then why muddle up the conversation with you BS conjecture?

This isn't a psych journal -- this is a discussion site -- and what's so hard about not reading "muddled up" discussions? If your concern is that laypeople are getting the wrong idea about Important Things, then you're squandering your opportunity to nudge them in the right direction.
I love that the statement says "his senior advisers will recommend a veto" and not actually that he plans to veto it. There are weasel words in there for him to pass the legislation as-is.
there may be no similar words, and indeed the social structure is different, so transistors would not get you into immediate trouble; but, my guess is that you have been rather lucky -- either due going to somewhat unusual schools, or due to not noticing what was happening around you.
It's easy to get into murky arguments about this, but I think it's safe to say that regulation can, and often does, prevent market competition from solving problems like this.
This is great. Something people often disregard, but which is hugely important, is charity effectiveness. This boils down to measuring the impact that you can make with a given donation: it turns out some charities are literally thousands of times more effective than others.

A lot of people don't realise how much good they can do with modest donations to the right charities -- until a year ago I really had no idea myself. There are a couple of groups which I know of which do analysis of charity effectiveness:

* Giving What We Can (http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/) are an Oxford, UK based organisation who estimate that you can save a life for ~£300.

* GiveWell (http://givewell.org/) are a US group who do similar research

They both publish lists of the most effective charities they've researched, and Giving What We Can have a calculator which shows you how much you can achieve by donating 10% of your income each year:

http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/what-you-can-achiev...

I think these stats are astonishing and it's really changed my approach to charity. Worth checking out if you're interested at all in philanthropy!
The simile to Microsoft's early (and, arguably, continued) tablet efforts is apt.

Google isn't a social network, and the products they offer us as users will be stronger if they don't pretend to be. But they've built their business on selling insights into our preferences, and Facebook has shown that a social network is the richest way to gather the data needed for that model.

I'd find it more hopeful if Page showed any signs of understanding that Facebook isn't about the social graph, but rather about communications. Google should be using Gmail as a fulcrum, rather than Google+.
Google Drive files can end up in ads, even though you still own them
We're not counting rebates yet - we're saying "This guy ran X amount of bandwidth through our system which we normally charge Y for" - how much did Amazon pay their upstream for that bandwidth and the billing (which is all completely automated)
What you generically call "government meddling", I call (more precisely, imho) "corporation-funded, lobbyist-enabled legislative corruption".

Most legislators don't wake up in the morning and say, "Oh boy, time to do evil deeds for money today". Regulatory capture normally involves exploiting the government's natural tendency to meddle.
Climate change proponent realizes he was wrong, but for the wrong reasons
Yeah the law really doesn't mean alot. I know for a fact that the usual suspects like bankers, lawyers, middle management work crazy hours like everywhere else. There was actually a high court decision not long ago, where a lawyer demanded overtime pay for a few years of 60-70 hour workweek. But since his base pay was around 7000€ / month the court decided he shouldnt get anything, all hours are included in the salary - which is of course a totally reasonable and expected decision, but it shows that the 40 hour limit isnt too meaningful.
> I started posting public articles from various financial news websites on my Facebook page, putting my own spin on them. I reached out to friends on the page, asking if they wanted to start a stock advisory group to pool ideas
You are saddened by other people giving money to charity? As in, that makes you sad?

As stated in the fine article, this is their management fees. So e.g. when they invest $1.5 billion, they will give about $15 million to charity.

It saddens me that you rally on these friggin' aces instead of people not putting their money to work, nor giving it to charity.
Don't mistake a bubble with a financial crisis.
Background refreshing is a common feature in client applications, like RSS readers. I think their reasoning makes sense.

I do think they should change their process (making it lazy-load instead), but that's a different issue to robots.txt.
I tried for the second time a couple months ago and found the documentation to be incomplete and inconsistent.
e.g. This has been on the Riak Fast Track for many months now:
"There are various screencasts throughout the Riak Fast Track. At the time they were made, Basho was using Mercurial and Bitbucket for our version control system and development platform, respectively. We have since switched to Git and GitHub but the screencasts do not yet reflect this. Do not be alarmed. We will re-record these using Git/GitHub when time permits."
> when the charity doesn't deliver great results, they will feel like they are half-working for little results.

What information do you have about their decision making process that makes you believe that they will select charities that don't deliver great results?

What about success in venture capital, in your view, would prevent these individuals from successfully selecting/starting/advising philanthropic endeavors?

I have a hunch, for example, that Marc Andreessen isn't going to roll up and pour a bag full of money out into the little jar the Salvation Army Santa runs outside of Macy's.
Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: the disastrous conclusion
depends on which is employable longer
Sometimes All You Have is Time. Sometimes, there is never enough time. The reality is, there are always limited resources of one kind or another, and your primary job as a founder is to maximize the usage of those resources in every way shape and form.

The real practical value of this should be applied to maximizing your time when you are actually "working."

Asking yourself is this coffee break, phone call, friendly chat, HN comment, or whatever else you do at work, "Directly Contributing to Making Money (i.e. talking to users, building features,etc...)"

As a consultant, I set a goal how much money I want to make this year. I assume I get about 800 actual productive work hours a year(being honest with myself) and divide it by the goal of what I want to make and now i have a minimum value of my time.

In this context, when I stay true to it, I eliminate a ton of wasted time at work because I know every moment I waste is another dollar i need to make up elsewhere.
Deploy your own Cloud with Debian 'Wheezy'