skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, and if 80% of Mac users were going to make a "Genius Bar" appointment for this anyways, "mandating" the Genius Bar window is also another sales touchpoint for them.
FYI, most people using high-res DLSR's are storing data in .raw format, instead of a lossy (jpeg) format.

My 12.8MP Canon EOS5D produces .RAW files of around 13MB each. I don't store in .jpg, but generally post-process a jpg thumbnail and mid-size image to make browsing my photo catalog easier (or for emailing samples).

Edits to pics are always saved as a sub-rev, so it's not uncommon for all the files associated with an image to add up to 20-40MB. This is fairly standard for anyone who shoots for $$ (full time, or for a hobby as I do).

Anyway, kind of off topic, but your 3mb number is too low :)
Everyone in my office had the same reaction when I called this out; "oh, Pages is now almost as good as WordPerfect!". But we do a ton of data-driven reporting and documentation, and editing tables is a bitch in Pages.app and a breeze in Numbers.app; also, we have code to generate Pages documents, but it's extremely painful (for instance to size text fields properly); now we can import/export CSVs for the same purpose.
AMD: Creating a New Laptop Category
I believe a lot of standardized tests have added writing components because its a basic practical skill that people often arrive at university lacking. I may be wrong, but beyond just the score, I think the actual writing is also sent to the schools you apply to.
i'm unsure. part of the issue is that i don't have any hiring needs or budget, so my viewpoint is probably skewed.
Interesting. The firms high up on the list are as a rule also the most admired in the Valley. Esp. Sequoia, Benchmark, and Accel. So to the extent this list is accurate, Web 2.0 actually seems to be a good bet. I'd be much more worried if the top firms were all investing in methane plants or Chinese shopping centers.
PSA: /g/ is the worst board on 4chan. Neither funny nor interesting, and with no entertaining trolls. It is also more obsessed with Apple than even MacRumors itself.
I do know about the paradox of thrift, and it seems not only not paradoxical but actually false. Increased saving both lowers prices (increasing quantity demanded) and lowers interest rates (increasing investment), so the dynamical behavior is self-correcting. In Krugman's example, inflation solved the liquidity problem, but it introduces new disincentives to saving and distorts long-term financial planning. The hard-currency/free-market solution not only avoids these problems, it also doesn't count on an enlightened central banker making the right decision at the right time.

My analysis could be mistaken, though, and I'll definitely take a look at Keynes's argument more carefully some time.
This is a good summary of the conventional wisdom, but I don't know if it's right. Phones are now about as powerful as PCs from ten years ago; IIRC we were using JITs on those PCs. Is Dalvik really "fast enough"? If, say, 5x more performance was available, would developers not use it?
The Price Of Going DRM-Free: Apple’s Hidden $1.8 Billion Music Tax
There are a bunch of very obvious things that LJ could have done. For example, it does photo hosting, but there's no way to link a photo with users, like Facebook's tagging. It has a calendar and to-do lists, but has no event planning features (again like FB does). It definitely stagnated, and has definitely annoyed its users, but there's enormous inertia, since people want to be where their friends are. If a migration off happens, tho', for the same reason, it'll be brutally quick.
An Ioke Update (Ioke is an Io-like language based on the JVM)
Comcast bandwidth throttling active in all markets
Awesome so any good music recommendations, I have never bought from iTunes and I can now, so what should I get?
Still, thanks for the comment.
The MacRumorsLive feed was compromised as described. The cause of the security breach is best described as "user error" due to admin files being inadvertantly mirrored across multipe server instances with incorrect permissions. This allowed php code to be displayed rather than executed, which was clearly a "bad thing". Our actual admin panel is password protected, of course.
Whenever you outsource anything to an "as a service" company, there are a couple of sweet spots where it makes sense, and a (generally) larger area where it does not make sense to pay someone else to do the service for you.

Amazon makes sense for companies that are too small to dedicate an admin to a server and/or to load that server and bandwidth to 60%+ capacity. At some point, when you have a need for a small server farm and the uptime of those servers is core to your business you will likely find it is more cost effective to do the operations in-house.

Think about companies like Salesforce.com, for their datacenter needs, I don't think you could ever justify Amazon (or a similar) service.

As a rule of thumb, I charge customers in my colo facility $60/U/mo as a starting price. You get a shared pipe and relatively unmetered/unlimited bandwidth (for "business" use, no torrent hosting or stupid shit). For a little more you can get dedicated bandwidth, 95% billing, etc. I've got someone who is looking at bringing in a 3U backup server, they'll pay $200/mo to have 3mb dedicated bandwidth and the colo space. That server will have a few TB of data replicated from their main site, I don't think S3 would make sense for them.
You don't have to have it without DRM, and you don't have to pay if you want it to not have DRM. What you're paying less than full price for is a completely different bitstream that happens to be encoded from the same original source. It's not unlike getting a credit toward a CD because you happened to own a tape of the same music, which I think you can agree is a rather novel concept.
LJ features: http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/lj.intro.why_use.featu...
Hey there, I'm the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. You're overlooking a few things:

- Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. That's what we'd do ourselves, too, if we continued to use our own storage internally. So your math is off both on the storage costs and then the costs of maintaing two or more datacenters and the networks between them.

- When Amazon reduces their prices, you instantly get all your storage cheaper. This isn't something you get with your capital expenditure of disks - your costs are always fixed. This has upsides and downsides, but you certainly don't get instant price breaks to your OpEx costs. When they added cheaper, tiered storage, our bill with Amazon dropped hugely.

- There's built-in price pressure with Amazon, too. The cost of one month's rent is roughly the same as the cost of leaving. So if it gets too expensive (or unreliable or slow or whatever your metrics are), you can easily leave. And Amazon has incentive to keep lowering prices and improving speed & reliability to ensure you don't leave.

- CapEx sucks. It's hard on your cashflow, it's hard on your debt position if you need to lease or finance (we don't, but that just means it's even harder on our cashflow), it's hard on taxes (amortization sucks), etc etc. I vastly prefer reasonable OpEx costs, with no debt load, which is what Amazon gets us.

- Free data transfer in/out of EC2 can be a big win, too. It is for us, anyway.

- Our biggest win is simply that it's easy. We have a simpler architecture, a lot less people, and a lot less worry. We get to focus on our product (sharing photos) rather than the necessary evils of doing so (managing storage). We have two ops guys for a Top 500 website with over a petabyte of storage. That's pretty awesome.

Hope that helps!
It's a small industry?

"The total annual net income from members of the RIAA is reported to be $11.5 billion" -- RIAA - Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Recording_Industry...)

Wrong.
Just me, or is this headline a couple of words away from belonging on The Onion?
Great!

What was most evil about the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush era was the sociological contraction (reduction in good, stable, career-building jobs; mounting health and education costs; solidifying class barriers) that persisted in spite of impressive economic expansion. This was exemplified most poignantly by the 2000s "expansion", wherein job growth at its best was barely keeping up with the country's population increase, and salaries were stagnant except in a few industries. The average American has been in the damn recession for a long time, but now it's something deeper and it's being noticed because of its effect on "important people".

Consumer credit allowed this arrangement of economic-expansion-despite-social-contraction to continue, to the benefit of those riding (note my word choice) large corporations. People were getting poorer, less likely to find good jobs and less able to buy healthcare and higher education, but they could use a slab of plastic to buy trinkets, and this kept the consumer economy afloat, and the people in charge rich (and increasingly so).

The consumer credit rewind's bringing this arrangement to an end. This is beautiful. To those hard-working, saving Americans, keep it up!
Where did all of Madoff's money go?
This question has been bugging me for weeks. I hope this is not a repost.
Now just to figure out how to make yourself stop doing that...
He could have saved himself some time by looking at two different channels -- assuming the transmitters were in different locations, this would have given him two different ellipses which only intersected at a few points.
You are technically correct. My words were imprecise -- indexing into a B-tree does not require accessing the harddrive. But it is a rather large possibility, and it's something to be aware of. From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-tree ):

"B-trees have substantial advantages over alternative implementations when node access times far exceed access times within nodes. This usually occurs when most nodes are in secondary storage such as hard drives. By maximizing the number of child nodes within each internal node, the height of the tree decreases, balancing occurs less often, and efficiency increases. Usually this value is set such that each node takes up a full disk block or an analogous size in secondary storage. While 2-3 B-trees might be useful in main memory, and are certainly easier to explain, if the node sizes are tuned to the size of a disk block, the result might be a 257-513 B-tree (where the sizes are related to larger powers of 2)."

So yes, "there's no reason that a b-tree must be stored on a hard drive". There's also no reason why a car couldn't also have a built-in toaster. :) As far as in-memory data structures go, there are better choices than B-trees. Why use a suboptimal data structure?
LiveJournal Users Gather Together to Attempt a Community Buy-out of LJ.
I know, right! I mean, if music weren't free to produce and distribute it'd be one thing, but since it is, why doesn't everybody use bittorrent?!?!

sigh
You can add Aus ( http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en )

- Melbourne http://melbourne.siliconbeachaustralia.org/
Message passing is a much better approach than synchronous HTTP calls. The implementations, however, aren't that great:

Problem with ActiveMQ is that it doesn't seem to be handle high load. This isn't a JMS issue per se, just a problem with the ActiveMQ implementation. I'd be hesitant to use a commercial JMS implementation for most projects.

Spread is an alternative, but it seems to be too academic to be useful. I've found that it simply fails to work in some situations (doesn't work when you're delivering messages from multiple producers, across multiple subnets to multiple consumers).

"Roll your own" seems to the best option (e.g. connecting UNIX domain sockets on two end points with non-blocking TCP or where appropriate UDP between them).
Now, the next step... adapt his aerial to have minimal gain in the direction of Canary Wharf!
There's a reason security through obscurity doesn't work

The even worse part is, it isn't even obscure! The path is /admin/ not /walrus/ or something. And why would they have plain-text php files at that URL? It's like shooting yourself in the foot and lighting yourself on fire in a bear pit at the same time.
"The Capps started cutting back. In late spring, they began to trim their spending and paid down about half of their $11,000 credit-card debt. This summer, they used more than half of their government stimulus check, about $1,000, to open a savings account with an attractive interest rate of 5%."

They'd probably be better off paying off their credit card than opening a savings account.

Edit: Just got to the part that says they had already paid off their CC balance. My mistake.
Dear God. Although I hope to one day become financially independent and no longer worry about paying the bills, I hope I never become so enthralled by money that I value it above my (or anyone else's) life.

What a sad tale his life must have been.
MacRumorsLive admin folder is still unprotected
Phil Greenspun: Affirmative Action for Open Source Software
I didn't like the reddit-style title but really enjoyed the explanation from that guy.

The explanation and method are actually pretty simple but I just wouldn't have thought about it.
I mean .30 cents per a song (that you have already bought) kinda makes me cringe; although DRM free music is awesome..and I'm glad its here.. :)
Unpleasant Google Trends Subversion: ✈ ▌▌
Sweet, just added: http://utahcodemasons.blogspot.com/ we are having our first meeting this thursday at borders in provo at 6:30pm if anyone on here is interested. We are thinking something akin to the free hackers union.
A question I find connected: What defines a hacker group?

Presumably in this site's context, what's meant is the nerdy end of web entrepreneurship. There are a number of events here in town which have elements of web, nerd, and entrepreneur, but don't really capture what comes to my mind when I think of a hacker meetup.
Yeah, but that's no fun ;)
Gordon Bell, architect of the DEC VAX wrote "High Tech Ventures" and included this section on NNP's

Negative Productivity is a principle that I claim is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Normal principles of productivity assume that workers create positive output.
Brooks refined the concept of software productivity to express it in terms of
the "mythical man month," and in software engineering, it is understood that
different programmers vary in their productivity by several orders of magnitude.
According to the principal of negative productivity, it is possible for an individual
to produce bad results that others must then redo; hence, someone who is
very negatively productive can keep a whole team busy with damage control,
preventing the team from producing any output whatsoever.

For me this reduces to a set of four challenge for a software startup:

1. Screen out folks with negative productivity in the interview process.

2. Avoid screening out potential employees who have great strengths in addition to some obvious weaknesses.

3. Attract, hire, and retain enough strong players from the start to complete your first product in a timely fashion.

4. Fire anyone who made an initially strong impression but who is actually negatively impacting the performance
of the team (more broadly: identify and eliminate sources of negative productivity).

This last category, the "plus minus" people, are only truly dangerous if you don’t have the ability to detect them and acknowledge that you have made a mistake.
I doubt that it's the loss of status that drove him to do it. Fear, paranoia, and stress are probably the major contributors.

If your net worth is $1 billion and it drops to $5 million, and you have no financial commitments that will take you under, you're almost certainly not going to commit suicide. Very, very few people would. Most would downscale their lifestyles and adapt, as a lot of wealthy people are doing right now.

On the other hand, if you're going to be severely in debt and face major embarrassment, and have no hope of ever regaining your honor and getting out of the muck, and everything you might earn in the future will be garnished to pay off creditors whom you'll never be able to pay off, you can see that it might be tempting to snuff it. For example, if your net worth goes from $1B to -$1B, and you lose your job, and you're in your 70s, and you might be going to prison (because, even if you did nothing wrong, there are powerful people pissed off at you)... then you're fucked.
tax: a compulsory contribution levied [... blah blah...]

hidden: kept out of sight

I think this got mistitled on at least two words.

No one is required to upgrade their DRM laden tracks. They presumably bought them and considered it a fair deal. If in the future they wish to upgrade to a DRM free format with better audio quality then it will cost $0.30/track by the current rates.

I've read at least one DRM track owner who is not planning to upgrade on the theory that eventually Apple will get tired of supporting DRM and will offer free upgrades. I don't see any reason for the labels to allow this, but one can hope.

501?! I am astounded that I have accumulated 501 Protected AAC files over the years since I more or less stopped buying them a couple years ago (unless I need one in a hurry to learn the song and can't find a DRM free one in iTunes or Amazon). $150 to upgrade? Suddenly it sounds expensive.

I think I'll wait for the slim chance of a future discount.
no problem. i've not played with it enough, yet, but it seems like a very nicely constructed site and product. i'll have more time to play with it later.
2009: The Great Consumer Crash
Sadly, no. Some asshole out in Easthampton is on the verge of throttling his maid, screaming at her, "Why aren't you spending?!?!?!?!"
Even if you're not in to sports, the circumstances & details of the deal are an interesting read.
The article sure reads like it at times:

Even the family's cable-TV subscription didn't escape the scalpel. "It's been killing me because I don't get the Cartoon Network anymore," says Noah, a shaggy-haired teen. "I'm missing so many new shows."
I idly wonder how much IPv6 google runs internally and if this has any bearing on this story.
Plus Minus People (Startups & NNPP's)
Java VM: Trying a new Garbage Collector for JDK 7
Going to prison? I'm pretty sure they don't have debtors' prisons in Germany these days.
wiki what?
That Amazon S3 is cheaper than traditional dedicated servers is a myth that's been spreading for a while now.

You can argue all you want about how reliable and convenient it is. But it's not cheaper. In fact, it can be very expensive especially as you consume more bandwidth and storage.
GemPlugins: A Brief Introduction to the Future of Rails Plugins
From what I remember of econ 101, if people are saving more, that should mean more deposits in banks which should then provoke banks to lend more out - easing the credit crunch, which should then lead to more spending, etc so in the long run the extra saving should actually help the economy, no?.
Very nice! Now we just need a plugin that automatically silences troll commenters.
s/take/copy/
I wasn't mentioning prison in any context specific to his case. I'm saying that, in general, it's hard to lose a billion dollars (even of your own money) without someone wanting to throw you in jail.
Hmm...yes but at home I dock it and use an external keyboard + monitor. It isn't that crazy, that is probably 30% of my laptop usage.
Maybe this paradox is real, I don't know, but it seems quite contrived. I don't think congestion really changes based on T/constant. It's almost certainly a log function.

And try this:

If just one person goes from start to end it will take him 4.8 seconds (.08 minutes).

So just line everyone up, and let them go one at a time. The last person in line will have to wait 80 minutes, but the average travel time is 40.04 minutes!

So adding a road does make it faster - much faster, contrary to what the paradox says. All you need is someone to police them and make them go one at a time.

And you are even waiting till they finish the trip before sending the next person. Send two at a time (one for each leg, since they are independent after all), and it's twice as fast.

I say putting in the road was a great idea! You cut the average travel time from 70 minutes to 20.02004 minutes. And the max from 70 to 40.08.

If I'm right, this does bust the paradox, but even more than that it shows that T/constant is the totally wrong formula for calculating congestion. Put in a correct formula and I bet this paradox won't exist.
The Archive Team are here to save you from the digital apocalypse
Sorry, I had posted this earlier but the site went down while being set up.

The idea is from Jason Scott and you can read more about it here: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1649
Great rationale, and it has served you well. I am a happy smugmug user.

I have a question about data security. If I wanted the data to be safe (in terms of intellectual property and corporate secrets), what do folks here think about using S3 and EC2? I really like the flexibility of using Amazon instead of buying servers for internal corporate data processing... but is secrecy a good enough reason to keep everything inside one's own firewall? (I suppose one could encrypt a whole TB of storage)
Indeed. If your business relies on keeping 1TB of data alive, you're going to have dedicated staff keeping an eye on it.

So now, you're looking at ~$2k hardware + $150k salary for your dedicated box watcher.

Compare that to $3k for S3 where it's their problem to keep your stuff backed up and deal with hardware problems.

It's a no-brainer if you ask me.
Carol Dweck's research on mindset

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...

is closely related to this issue.
TV is my new radar. Such a nice title. I'm expecting some downmods. :(
To be fair Brad didn't either; that's why he sold it.
I'm fully aware of the raw file aspect (I shoot professionally with various gear, including a 5D). I didn't consider it in my calculations for two reasons:

- SmugMug doesn't include it RAW file storage as part of the their accouts. You have to pay extra for it:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/smugvault

- Most pro photogs are using services like SM after first editing their raw files locally (in Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) and then exporting high-res JPEGs.
Kodak K7600 Universal Li-Ion Battery Charger
Compatible with Kodak KLIC lithium-ion batteries Rapidly charges batteries in 4.5 hours or less, depending on battery and remaining charge.
Inline comments organize comments around the subjects of a post.

That's neat for code. Not so for discussions I think.

Inline comments make it hard to read all the comments at once. And I often care more about that than being able to select which comment I'll read according to it's subject.
Google "Canary Wharf TV reception" and you'll see that this is not unusual. Those buildings really messed up reception.

Is digital TV immune to these analogue problems?

We actually have it worse in the part of North London where I live - we're in a dip, behind a hill, and don't have line of sight on the digital/freeview transmitters. Everyone has cable.
The odds that Google has the best whatever engineers in the world diminishes as whatever gets further and further from search and advertising. Are they going to be designing their own processors? Fabbing them? DEC is the last company I can think of that was fully vertically integrated, even Apple isn't.
I agree, this is a worthy cause, but you'll have to prise real cash out of a Debian user's cold dead hands ...
You see, I carefully didn't use the word "steal" to avoid the copyfight pedantry, but that wasn't enough for you. "Copying" commercial music that you didn't pay for is unethical, just like "copying" a typeface family, "copying" a website design, or "copying" and black-labeling a GPL'd software package.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421638
Fwix launches redesign - nice new local focused site.