skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wasn't Cuil all about getting acceptable search results with less iron in the server room? If that's the case, no one should suspect they could beat Google.

I really haven't researched this, but I was under the impression they were hoping to get bought by a search giant looking to cut the operating overhead of their search division.

If that's true, they don't care about uniques, and thats why they don't seem to be doing much (from the outside).
And when all the servers run the new code, are the databases changed to remove old columns or is it an absolute no-no with ever-expanding tables?
It's a flawed philosophy that (often) goes against developers' best interests. I'm not surprised that it's not very popular around here.
That's exactly what I was trying to get across. I thought an analogy might help, albeit an imperfect one.

To replicate a computer game is trivial, but when buying a computer game, one is not so much paying for the replicated copy of the software as one is paying for the time and expenses that went into producing it in the first place.

A lot of people do give software away for free, but that's their choice.
How is this contrary to what I said? I didn't say Amazon sharded. What/why would they shard? Clustering != sharding.

They most definitely have multiple instances of the app running around the world, which synchronize data with each other, which is why you've never been unable to buy something. It's highly unlikely that all their instances would be down or overloaded at the same time.

Also, they most certainly don't have a single logical database. They use all kinds of things, including SimpleDB. You think product information is stored in the same database, or even in the same away as customer information?
It's a nice algorithmic arrow to have in your quiver. It allows you to determine if a piece of data is missing before you do an expensive lookup.
Heh. That comes from the old Kids in the Hall characters Cathy-with-a-C and Kathy-with-a-K.

I'm probably not going to use Clojure any time soon, though am following it at a distance.
So what you advocate is the ajkirwin planned economy, where things cost what ajkirwin thinks they should cost. Games: fifty cents to maybe a dollar of storage costs. Can I lobby you on prescription drugs? The marginal cost of a pill is like $0.05.
What kind of advertising? Traditional media or web-based?
The funny things is that the same result for an orbit on a sphere doesn't need the Axiom Of Choice at all. It just uses the concept of actual infinity.

"the axiom of choice has many other mathematically useful consequences." is an understatement. It's like a life in Space. You can live in Space (in a specially design isolated constructions e.g., a space station); you even can go outside (not for long and only if you are wearing a space-suit) but It is much much easier to live on the Earth.
Once you are sure you are never going to roll back to the old code you can wipe out the old columns.
Or maybe he's just unlucky, or maybe he's just decided that by paying attention to how people treat other people, he can get a good readout on how they'll treat him when the chips are down. There's a classic sales interview trick that has to do with taking the candidate out and seeing how he treats the waitstaff and how well he tips. Same idea.

It's also possible that he just has a lot more life experience than you.
It's different for every site, db backend, etc.

If it's just 1 column, and it doesn't store much data, then probably no.
If it's a bunch of columns and it's taking up lots of disk, they they probably migrate what they need to a new table and drop the old one. Altering tables is usually not a good idea. In mysql it can stop replication and can mean hours or days of downtime depending on the situation and amount of data.
RMS advocates boycotting commercial software. He doesn't just copy what he wants.
> Finally, I'd just like to point out that two people with perhaps the highest tax burdens in the United States (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) both support Obama and his tax hikes.

It's relevant to remember that neither Buffet nor Gates will be paying those rates.

And, even if the proposed laws would affect them, it's worth noting that nothing stopped Buffet or Gates from paying those rates in the past.
Yea, I got what you meant and thought it was pretty obvious personally.

What some of these guys don't seem to get is when you buy something physical you pay for the whole thing, production costs and all, right in one go (or if it's too expensive for that you make payments). When you buy media of most any kind you don't because few could afford to pay what it cost to produce. Instead the total cost is kind shared between lots of people. We all sort of pay a percentage. So just like in brick & morter stores: when someone starts stealing product they push price up for everyone else.
That philosophy just seems Martian to me.
Your school system is the same fundamentally broken system of corralling children into a pen and expecting them all to learn the same basic things at the same basic rate. Every industrial society seems to do it this way. I'd argue that some systems are slightly less broken and some slightly more, but compared to what could be, none of them are even close to their potential.

And maybe you should specify your exact country. For instance, France (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9241927... ): "France, like the United States, relies on both private insurance and government insurance. Also, just like in America, people generally get their insurance through their employer." Government health care as seen in the UK is hardly any different from employer health care in practice... it's slightly more disconnected from feedback, but employer health care is already pretty disconnected. So, exactly which country has fully individual health care with no government or employer involvement?
Did you consider the possibility that maybe people in general (and in this case, women) are capable of making their own decisions and maybe most women genuinely are not interested in pursuing a career in mathematics for reasons other than coercion by society/tradition/etc...
Unless you really need the space, I suggest leaving the columns there. Fewer chances for error. If your columns are nullable, the amount of space taken up by an obsolete column tends to one byte, particularly if old data is deleted.
> 50% (1982-86) 70% (1965-85) 77% (1964) 91-92% (1946-63) 94% (1944-45)

Never confuse marginal rates with average rates.

The fact is that the top few percent pay a huge fraction of the income taxes. (SS is retirement and the return is skewed towards low income folks, so it's reasonable to omit it.) When folks don't spend their money, they buy dumb.

> paying taxes is patriotic

If it's so patriotic, why do you want to exclude people from it?
> $200/barrel is indeed wrong, its a lowball number. i expect $500 or more.

Where are you stashing what you're buying?

You are putting your money on that prediction, right?
Actually, given how strongly RMS believes in licenses I would expect him to think the unethical ones are both the ones not given away the software and the ones violating the license. After all, if they'll violate one why wouldn't they violate the other?
By saying the universe has an arbitrary state before the Big Bang you're also assuming the universe has _a_ state before the Big Bang. But perhaps the universe had no state at all.

A variable is a piece of memory and always has _a_ value. The value may be arbitrary, the value may be unknowable, but we know at least one thing: that at any point in time a variable has exactly 1 value.
In practical terms you generally don't tho'. You might need them again, for example, for some as-yet-unplanned new feature. And doing so is of limited value anyway in many databases, you won't get the space back without a re-org and that's a costly operation to do hot, if you even can at all.
At Yahoo we drop columns from the previous version the next time we upgrade the database, e.g. if you stopped using a 1.0 column in version 1.1, then you drop that column as part of the upgrade going to 1.2. The key thing is always being able to roll back if things go seriously wrong; hardware is much, much cheaper than downtime.
Pirated copies should automatically call you. :)
Shouldn't the culture secretary be doing something about, say, culture?
My Favorite New Year’s Eve — So Far
The product data will be in multiple physical replicated shared-nothing databases each of which has the entire dataset - a single logical database. The principle of sharding is that each database has a subset of the data and you place some logic in front of it to direct the query to the right place. Now if I'd been able to buy kitchenware but not garden tools one day, then I might say their product database was sharded. But Amazon is smarter than that.
I don't think dilanj is suggesting that no biologically driven differences exist. I think that the argument is that at MIT there's a preselected, science focused group of women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.

And by the way, on color?

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because it was the more masculine and decided color while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink
2009: The Year of the Cramdown
Is there some kind of startup association that startups could join to negotiate better healthcare insurance plans as a collective?

Seems to me like it would provide many startups a large cost savings if one were to join.
From their whitepapers you get the sense that much of the point of Amazon Dynamo, Google Protocol Buffers and BigTable, YAHOO PNUTS and UDB, Facebook Thrift objects, etc is to release big systems from the tyranny of the SQL schema.

When you can run multiple versions of code against the same dataset, upgrading the application layer one bit at a time becomes much easier.
For a moderate-sized upgrade, the description given by gaius is pretty accurate. Working at Yahoo, I've been around for a couple pretty huge property changes, and then the deployment process is very different.

Basically, hardware is much cheaper than downtime, and very big web companies have lots more money. So we don't swap out old servers gradually: instead we buy and set up an entirely new set of servers, deploy to them several weeks in advance of the planned launch, and run QA against these production-level boxes. Then, when we are ready to "launch", all we're really doing is a relatively low-risk DNS change: all the potentially tricky deployment issues having been ironed out beforehand.

After a couple of weeks/months of operation on the new hardware, if there have been no major problems, the old boxes are decommissioned -- either re-imaged and put back into service to expand capacity, or more often taken out of service entirely (I've no idea what we do with old boxes when we stop using them, funnily enough).
I agree that the basic kind of school system everyone uses is broken (though the quality of pre-university education is low in the US), but the US exported that? I think it predates the US.

I live in Switzerland. No government involvement is not realistic, but in Switzerland you are required to have your own health insurance (changing jobs has no effect on it). The government gets involved by putting a cap on how much insurance companies can make, which makes it less useful for them to use sleazy tricks to try and maximize profits.

As far as the UK being basically the same thing, what system would you suggest? I personally like the Swiss system the best of everything I've seen, but it could be argued that it is just a variation of what the UK has. That is, we all must have insurance, therefor we all must pay for it and the major expenses that people I don't know end up costing me more money. The only real difference is that the insurance isn't government owned and there is some competition in it.

But I can't imagine a system that could work better then these. The only other thing you could do is simply not cover some percentage of the people, but the US is a pretty solid example case that this doesn't work well. I believe that the reason employers are paying insurance is because the plans are already quite expensive and the employers can get a major group discount.
I work for a company in this space. Our product tracks and describes things of interest (faces, text, moving objects), and allows the user to search for similar items at other times and on other cameras. It doesn't make security guards obsolete by any stretch, but it can make reviewing past footage much less tedious.

The whole "intelligent video" industry is in its infancy. An interesting point, though, is as these analytics improve, so does our ability to limit the scope of video that can be watched. Irrelevant footage can be made off-limits, faces or license plates obscured, etc.

It's not going to happen overnight, but the trend is clear: surveillance video is going to become more structured as time goes on. But this can be used to uphold personal rights as easily as it can be used to bypass them. Laws will just have to adapt in the face of technology.
Right idea, wrong technology, this is done in hardware.

The "secret sauce" is an invisible layer in front of the webservers. The client's connection terminates in this layer, and the loadbalancers establish new sessions with the web servers - the client never actually touches the server. This extra layer lets you do all sorts of clever stuff that was unimaginable back in the day when all we had was Squid and round-robin DNS.
But the lack of users is a sign that they don't have acceptable results. I found the results to be horrible and like 99% of other people who tried it out won't be back.
Are you still arguing that I said Amazon sharded their database? Because I've re-read what I said, and what you said like 4 times and I can't see where I said they shard.
Agreed. The idea that Cuil wanted nothing less than world domination and the death of Google is a naive assumption. None of the founders is going to go home hungry. You can be sure that the $33 million of VC will get put to good use - new swimming pools, private jets, etc.
>“If the money for the next aluminum smelters would go into supporting these businesses, we would be in a much better position in Iceland in five years’ time, both economically and also just image-wise or dignity-wise,”

I won't comment on the image and dignity aspects of this statement, that's not my specialty. However, the idea that green tech will be an economic winner is still magical thinking, a largely unproven assumption. Most green tech is still a money pit, and near 100% of it would be if not for massive government subsidies. And if you're not eligible for US or European subsidies, then you're probably not going to make money in green tech.
Alternative description ...

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

I'm trying to work out if this is a clever version of simulated annealing or randomised ballistic hill-climbing. It's not clear if it really is something different underneath.

But it's making a splash - it seems to be solving problems that people had trouble with.
Most values for quantum variables have multiple values at any point in space-time.

That said, even if we assume that the universe had no state prior to the big bang, we can postulate that state to be arbitrary, because it may be 0, it may be 1, or it may be both 0 and 1 at the same time.
Very nice tutorial! Nice and easy to read.
Also because it increases adoption of their product. Then, when those people go to work, they say "I know and need Photoshop/Illustrator/whatever". Businesses are easier to enforce piracy with, and will pay more.
Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star
You have quite the positive outlook, I'll give you that much. But in my world taking $33 million is a big responsibility. The goal isn't to give yourself a nice salary and update your resume with an entry about the now-defunct search engine Cuil, it's to make your investors money.

Using your logic it would be almost impossible to fail. Sure they lost millions, solved no problems and wasted dozens of labor years, but some staffers got to network and get a new job out of it!
"I agree that the basic kind of school system everyone uses is broken, but the US exported that? I think it predates the US." - it's... complicated. The ideas originated in Europe, but took hold here strongest, then spread with the industrial revolution (later phase, not early phase). That's the short-short version.

"what system would you suggest?" - The Swiss system you describe is what I would suggest. Perhaps not in every detail, because I'm sure you don't capture the full complexity in two sentences :).

The way in which it is not the same lies in the individuals ability to punish their provider, thus closing the feedback loop that markets critically depend on. (Where there is no feedback loop, there is no market, period. Another example: Monopolies are bad because they destroy the feedback loop, because there is no "elsewhere" to take your business.) When the health-care provider is your government, it basically has no reason to care whether you are being served well. (Odds are, the health-care providing part is not even elected so even the only feedback loop a government has is not in play.) It has no competition. In the US, there is only ever so slightly more feedback; technically, if enough of the company complained to HR, they might consider changing the plans they offer, but that's still a very diffuse feedback loop with a central point of failure (HR, easily bribed, or even just overloaded to the point where they can't afford to look at alternatives).

If you're buying insurance individually, and you have the ability to change it as easily as changing my car insurance would be, then you have a market feedback loop, even if you've got the government fiddling around the edges. (I'm only a little-l libertarian, so I'm not necessarily opposed to that, even as I think the US and UK systems are grossly flawed.) For all the rhetoric about the coldness of the capitalist system, you generally get more caring and concern from an entity you can abandon at will than one that gets your money regardless of what you think and has no real incentive to care.

(I also observe this doesn't fix every problem. But what I think it would do is get things moving in the right direction, and create forces that could help resolve the rest. Right now, the dominant forces tend to make things worse and worse over time, instead, as we continually move farther and farther towards guessing what will work... and politicians guessing, no less... instead of actually having the information necessary to figure it out.)
To be fair, most men aren't pursuing careers in mathematics either. The population of professional mathematicians is a puny subset of the population at large. Even a tiny effects of cumulative cultural mores, when working on people subject to a threshold so far out they're so far out on the bell curve, can have an exponentially disproportionate effect.

Many of the women physicists I've become friends with spoke fondly of the first time they encountered a female scientist, either on screen, in print, or in person. They said it was the first time they realized that one could be a woman, and a scientist. It sounds absurd, but remember, this happened when they were kids. No imagine it happened just two years later. A few year's head start on knowing what you want to be can make the difference on what becomes your professional identity, and what you explore and do, ie: your training.

I was only speaking last night about this with my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She placed the turning point on when she heard about Jane Goodall, who wasn't just 'in' science, but revolutionizing it. I encountered science (and a notion of utilitarianism) through Marie Curie, what she discovered, what a revolution she sparked, and how it lead to her death. It was difficult emotionally, but I decided that to discover something so valuable, and so important, paying with one's life would have been worth it.
They're an optimistic and resourceful people. They'll be over this before we in the UK are (as we are neither these days).

I'd love to emigrate to Iceland. They have the great policy of requiring immigrants to take on Icelandic names, I've wasted considerable time looking at the list and wondering what mine would be :-)

I think it's more likely they'll get loans from a coalition of Scandinavian nations and perhaps forfeit some political/economic independence rather than allow the predators in.
Mildly off-topic, but nice typography.
Reykjavik runs on geothermal power. Green tech is very real in Iceland. Of course, it may not work so well where the geology isn't so suitable...
Fast and 'free' beats steady and paid on MySQL
Why? I already know about Wikipedia and Yahoo.
I could not get it to work in ff3 on os x, BUT from reading the site it seems to be a way of describing gradius esque bullet patterns like you get on those sort of scrolling shooter games?
If you read the article, that 2.2% in the table was an early estimate - actual results are being described as down significantly (i.e. negative year over year).
I don't have the best eyesight in the world, my whole family basically consists of mole people, so that site freaked me out. I thought something was going wrong with me.
You've excluded external factors (society/tradition/etc...). What's left? - Some sort of intrinsic motivation (meaning in-born). So you are basically saying that women are genetically less than men predisposed to math (and to explain actual data (male/female ratio in math) you must assume they are much much less predisposed.

It is more likely that society/tradition/etc... do matter after all.

My point taken to an extreme is:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, it is their social existence which determines consciousness." - Karl Marx
>"So the problem has to lie in social conditioning. Cultural expectation and etiquette has always been the most powerful destroyer of potential in both men and women. Tradition is THE enemy."

And then we have one generation of childless hedonistic professionals, call Western civilization a wrap, and hand over the landmasses to the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Muslims (many of whom are very intelligent and successful scientists and engineers!) who did not view tradition as the enemy.

Indian culture interests me. I see a lot of Indian women in Grad school, but from my interaction with them they seem to respect cultural traditions and family values. I don't know how they manage to find time in their lives to be Mathematicians and wives and mothers, maybe the ones I know are just far to the right on the bell curve. But maybe the problem isn't with culture and tradition, maybe it's just the culture and tradition we've inherited needs tweaking.
I find it fascinating that people need to come so close to death, sometimes repeatedly, before they decide to make important changes.