skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd really like to see x86_64 servers that use direct memory-mapped IO to the SSD. Some add-in PCI cards already do (can't find the link right now). It would really take Intel jumping on board for it to become the standard though.

More particularly, right now, assuming the app wants something from memory-mapped file, the process is:

1. app attempts to read some bytes
2. CPU page fault triggers a read by the kernel to get them from disk
3. kernel block layer locates bytes on disk
4. block read request submitted to storage subsystem
5. read request (probably merged with others, e.g. readahead) submitted to SATA controller
6. ATA command decoded by SSD
7. bytes sent back up the chain
(skipping the return trip up the chain for brevity)

Some PCI SSDs already make it possible for the kind of improvement that looks like this:

1. app opens a file
blocks mapped into app address space as read-only
Thanks for the kind words, Itay.

For reference, here's the link that talks about the Splunk + Leftronic integration:
http://dev.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAADSR
Ask HN: Internship project idea?
In about 3 weeks 2 CS students will begin a 2 months internship program on Java. I need to come up with some idea for the project they will work on. Both of them have basic knowledge of Java and JDK. The project needs to be web related and it should be doable in these 2 months.

Can you help me with some interesting ideas?
Popular jQuery Plugins of May 2012
Why are you linking this terrible article? Link the pastebin: http://pastebin.com/TrNZC349
Post-Facebook IPO market frozen
On #2, this is also including all levels of government, while the comment you're replying to links a Wikipedia article on the federal budget. The U.S. federal government budget has not been declining, but state and local budgets have been declining sharply, so you get pretty different results depending on what levels you look at.
The study, "Power and the Consumption of Resources", by Ward and Keltner, is an unpublished manuscript. There's no link I can find to the actual study online, but everyone talking about social power quotes from it.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2011/01/05/the-poison-of-pow...
I'd phrase this differently. Once you implement Mongo in Postgres, what you have isn't a relational database.

What you are taking advantage of is the incredibly solid underlying infrastructure of Pg, which provides reliability, scalability, transactions, replication, etc.

But the data model itself is no longer relational from the application's perspective.
Predictive Analytics: NeuralNet, Bayesian, SVM, KNN
Ok, now this is getting interesting. You raise some interesting points that make me question the deeper meaning of what wealth really is. Perhaps we simply disagree about the definition of wealth. From Wikipedia:

the meaning of wealth is context-dependent and there is no universally agreed upon definition. At the most general level, economists may define wealth as "anything of value" which captures both the subjective nature of the idea and the idea that it is not a fixed or static concept.

So it seems a lot of the discussion in this thread revolves around semantics, mainly about what defines wealth.

So what exactly is your definition of wealth? I don't understand the logical basic behind your arguments.

For example: Actually, the bartender would be richer in this case. I bought money, that action alone increased my wealth the same way buying a car increases my wealth. I have something now that I didn't have before. What I do with that money is really irrelevant, in the same way that how fast I drive the car is irrelevant.

You exchanged your money for a car. You could now be wealthier in the sense that the car brings you happiness or functionality that you didn't have before, enabling you to be more productive. But what if you already owned a car and were simply indulging yourself? What if this was your 5th car that you didn't need? So you could keep on buying cars forever, and you'd be continually increasing your wealth?
I don't understand why buying the car automatically makes you wealthier. If you give a hobo $10,000 to buy an hour of him walking in circles, you've increased your wealth of entertainment perhaps, but it is a stretch by any definition of wealth to say you've created it.

If I physically burned the money, sure. But the same is true if I physically burn my house down. Of course this too adds to the economy."

Assuming your house was functioning and adequate then the economy is poorer without your house. That is wealth destruction not creation. For now you have to pay for a new house. Someone has to use the materials and labor to build that house. You pay him your money to do so. Now you have less. Wealth was not created here. It was shifted around from your pocket to the construction company's.
Valve Says "Yes" To Steam Linux This Year
Giving away stuff for free till the VC money runs out. Startup lottery.
PouchDB: A browser database that syncs with CouchDB
This was the first thing I thought about when I read the OP. There's room for a ton of differences in the telescope design, like what wavelengths the sensors are looking for. And how the scopes can be maneuvered and aimed.

There's no reason to think that these would be NASA's dream telescopes, even if by some definitions they are more advanced instruments.
Well, to give an explicit example (sorry, non-specialists!), consider the nonlinear sigma model action for superstring theory in an arbitrary background geometry (that is, arbitrary spacetime metric G and NS-NS B-field; we'll ignore the dilaton). The coefficient of the 4-fermion term is the Riemann tensor. But if you construct that Riemann tensor just from the metric (as one does in general relativity without torsion), you'll omit essential pieces: you also need to include terms in the Riemann tensor resulting from a non-zero torsion tensor T=-dB (in differential form notation). A similar situation holds for the covariant derivatives in the fermion kinetic terms.

Now, it's entirely up to you whether you write that 4-fermion term coefficient as "Riemann tensor (including torsion)" or as "Riemann tensor (torsion free) + (lots of weird, arbitrary-looking interaction terms involving derivatives of B)". So on some level, there's no reason that you must use a connection with non-vanishing torsion. But I would claim that the equations are much more elegant (and give deeper insight) when expressed with torsion "built-in". [Fun fact: So does Polchinski, but he's not talkative about it. If you look up "torsion" in the index of Vol. 2, the first reference is to the page with the equations I've referenced above... but the word "torsion" doesn't appear anywhere in the text of the page!]

Aside: If anyone out there is interested in how this torsion stuff fits into the mathematics of Relativity, you might have a look at my notes on how it would be incorporated into Bob Wald's textbook: http://www.slimy.com/~steuard/teaching/tutorials/GRtorsion.p...
I didn't say I picked consecutive words. You'd be right otherwise, though.
Not good news. I do hope Google leaves the Meebo name intact so it's easy to block their garbage with Adblock.

I assume shortly we'll be seeing new postings from Google on what new personal information they'll be adding to the Google brain from Meebo.
>Ironically though, in order to receive the ESPN offering, a subscription to cable is required, which sort of dimisses the appeal.

Get a car with the purchase of a horse and buggy.
As someone who continues to watch Groupon I find this sort of headline a bit disingenuous. It is impossible to know the state of an alternate universe, one where things are so radically different.

Looking at the shenanigans around raising a billion dollars and then giving most of that money directly to a few of the insiders, certainly suggested to me and others that Groupon turned down the $6B bid by Google not because they didn't think the company was worth it, but rather that the rules in place regarding selling the company would not have compensated those same insiders the way they wanted to be compensated. Between the payoff and the fact that most of those preferential clauses, and common vs preferred shares, vanish once the company IPOs, a simple explanation of the sequence of events was that they were a way to structure the payout.

That said, Google would have brought a tremendous chunk of value to the Groupon party. They have lots of infrastructure at scale to handle distribution, a huge inventory of businesses who advertise with them, and a world wide sales team. Given that a lot of Groupon's early issues stemmed in part from the way they compensated their sales team, it seems that Google would have had the option of basically firing everyone to reset all those relationships, and then launching with a completely different cost structure.

But we cannot know and speculation, well its fun and all but what do we learn from it?
buying a user base + migrating them to another platform is a very slippery slope (privacy and PR wise). think it's mostly about developers.
We are looking at using it here at Viralheat.
Django Class Based Generic Views (The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly)
Amateur project to send rockets into space
Why do you write this crap Cian
No we haven't. What do we really have now that we didn't 30 years ago? A web browser is just an IBM 3270 at the end of the day. The boost in productivity is an illusion hidden behind ever more elaborate bells and whistles.

The boost in productivity will come when we stop reinventing the wheel every few years.
Why London's Police Just Set a Horrifying Precedent on Mobile Privacy
There were five cookies, not four. The fifth cookie was left untouched, just as the norms dictate. It's the fourth cookie that the "leaders" went for. The study was done in 1998 and the original paper hasn't been published, but the researchers describe it in a later paper (2000, pdf):
http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/rp1669.pd...
In "Made to Stick", they profile a newspaper called "The Daily Record" in Dunn, North Carolina. Their penetration into their local area is 112%. Quote from the owner:

"The fact is, a local newspaper can never get enough local names. I'd happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition of each paper if we had the names to fill them up."

Look at the front page

http://www.mydailyrecord.com

All local stories (and a pay wall -- perhaps the future of Berkshire owned papers)
I'll add a few things (I've done a lot of SSD testing lately) as SSD performance is highly dependent on factors that don't influence hard disks:

0) Sequential performance is easy. If that's what you want, SSDs work pretty well and you can skip this post. The below points are for random IO.

1) Almost all SSDs are significantly slower at mixed read/write workloads (as a database would do) that either just reads or just writes. Sometimes as much as 1/4 the speed!

2) Random I/O throughput, especially for writes, is highly dependent on how full the disk is (assuming TRIM). For example, a 50% full is usually pretty fast, an 80% full disk is getting slower, and a 95% full disk is dog slow.

3) I have seen SSD controller and firmware version drastically impact performance. A recent firmware "upgrade" halved IOps on 100 of our SSDs (glad we tested that one...)

4) Time dependence! Many of my heavy I/O tests took 8+ hours to stabilize (often with very odd transition modes in between). Don't run a 30 second test and assume that's how fast the disk will stay.

5) Lastly, have many outstanding IOs in the queue if you want good IOps throughput. Think 32+.

My recommendation overall: Test your actual application workload for 24 hours. Use a Vertex 4 with firmware 1.4 less than 75% full for your mixed read/write workload needs!
Its not so much an exception as a predictable response. Admitting something is luck is a display of weakness (in pretty much any culture, I'd imagine). You're far more likely to encounter such displays by those who can withstand it. Buffet has nothing to fear, he's proven more than anyone that he's among the best ever in his field, even if it's luck that he's #1 vs #100 on the wealthiest list. Every supermodel seems to claim that they were ugly or a tomboy in high school and they were just lucky that some photographer noticed them. Rookies talk about how hard they've worked to get to the pros, while retiring athletes talk about how lucky they've been.
Anything is only worth what someone will pay for it. There's no other meaningful definition. If Google was willing to buy the whole thing for 6 billion, it was worth 6 billion. It only gets questionable when you start buying and selling shares rather than the whole thing.
The post-IPO lockup period ended today. Insiders (private equity, founders) typically have to wait 6 months after an IPO before they can sell their shares.

In GRPN's case, you can see on http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=GRPN that 45% of their shares are held by insiders. Their sales are probably causing a temporary supply/demand imbalance.

EDIT: sorry, that was Friday (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/as-lock-up-expires-gr...) but the effect of lockup expiration lasts longer than one day.
4) less accurate, 5) less consistent, 6) less predictable

but my view is skewed as i'm a programmer.
I remember RethinkDB was tackling this... if I recall correctly, they had been developing a new MySQL engine specifically designed for SSD's, but looking at their site now it seems they gave that up and changed it to a memcache protocol to focus on NoSQL?

Has anybody ever used it, or know of other companies working on similar ideas?
___
// 7
(_,_/\
\ \
\ \
_\ \__
( \ )
\___\___/
Oh, I see. You're interested in having an argument about the semantics of a straight forward sentence.

>"the conference organizers should not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party from the conference."

Not much to "interpret" there. I've been wrong before, but I'll bet he meant exactly what he said; this individual should have been removed from the conference immediately. That's all well and good for a discussion on an internet message board, but in reality it could be extremely harmful to reputations, both of the accused and the conference.

Now, if jnoller meant what you are implying he meant, he could have easily written:

the conference organizers should not have blinked before [taking action/investigating/speaking with/questioning etc] the [accused] party.

or even:

the conference organizers should have investigated, then not have blinked before ejecting the responsible party from the conference if determined to be guilty.

And that's something I could support. I think the conference representative's reaction to such a major accusation was reprehensible. But that isn't what he wrote. And I really don't think that's what he meant, either. Note the language. Responsible? At what point was that determined?

And by the way: jumping to conclusions about a sexual harassment charge is dangerous, and not at all analogous to doing the same with regards to a sentence on HackerNews.
RSS-Motor v0.0.4 ~ new rubygem speeding up your RSS usage
This got me thinking...

When TLS, cookies or same origin policy are not a concern, why not resolve resource domains on the server side and output for example <img src="hxxp://10.0.0.1/picture.jpg"> to avoid that extra client side DNS request completely?
You are right, of course. Perhaps I momentarily forgot the context. I am reading his words on HN, not listening to them at a commencement. Big difference.

I confess I have not read Moneyball. I mistook it as the work of a baseball fan and not a metaphor for something more than an appreciation for baseball. My mistake.

It's time for me to read it.
There isn't a fully functional flight spare of Hubble sitting in bubble wrap waiting to fly.
There is a mockup of the Hubble structure and there were flight spares for SOME optical components and some parts of instruments. The mockup is to train astronauts on instrument swap outs. Many of the instruments and the current solar panels aren't even Nasa builds

The "better than hubble" telescopes are old keyhole era spy sats, this is the design Hubble was originaly based on. It's also partly the reason for the original Hubble screw-up.

The contracts for Hubble went to companies that had experience building 2.4m mirror space telescopes (nod+wink). But security walls in the suppliers meant that the people who had build these spy sats didn't work on Hubble or pass on their knowledge - then oversight of the Hubble build process was hampered by security concerns that meant NASA QC engineers never got to see the mirror being built.

A few other points.

The cost of the Hubble 'airframe' was a small part of the space telescope cost, compared to the launch and service missions, the building of the STSci and the 1000 of professors, postdocs, researchers and students that it funded. Just the cost of storing it in a clean room for 3years after Challenger was estimated at more than raw commercial build cost.

The JWST isn't just a better Hubble it's a completely different concept - actually designed as a scientific instrument rather than compromised by being a spy sat design built to justify the Shuttle launch - as HST was.
SoFi http://sofi.com/ is fixing Student Loans with better rates, alumni investment, and great social integration. We're looking for Engineers, QA, and DevOps to come work with an experienced startup engineering team and build great products. Located in the beautiful Presidio with free shuttle to downtown. Contact me at rseymour@sofi.com for more information.
Creating native-like user experiences in PhoneGap with App-UI
DDR4 Memory scheduled for 2014
he main information on the DDR4 is that it will need patience! According to several specialized sites, we must await the arrival of the generation of Intel Haswell processors , scheduled after the Ivy Bridge.
FB replaces Chrome for Opera
1 - there's very little money in chat, meebo's original product;

2 - meebo has been trying to make money via their behavioral targeting dataset: they see browsing activity of users via sites that embed their javascript and also through the plugins they get people to install in their browsers. It's a similar dataset to clearspring, which also does bt stuff. In 2011, Meebo bought mindset media which does psychometrics (eg [1]), and I'd bet the play is to marry psychometric targeting with meebo's bt dataset.

2a - the above may be meebo's value to google: experience building, selling, and a client list for psychometric targeting. This is another targeting layer that would be sold in Google+ alongside dems targeting.

3 - for the sake of the employees, I hope meebo's VCs didn't have preferred participation; that will cut up the $30mm even further. Though I bet Google will take care of the employees.

[1] http://www.mindset-media.com/marketers/profile/
This is actually quite fascinating. The lengths the Chrome team is going to, in the name of page-rendering speed, is really astonishing.
I'd really like to see x86_64 servers that use direct memory-mapped IO to the SSD.

It's not clear whether this is as good an idea as people think. Flash is fast, but the difference between ~20 us and ~50 ns is still huge. You could end up wasting a lot of cycles while the processor is stalled. Also, there's no way for memory to report errors short of a machine check that (if you're lucky) kills the process.

Fusion io is working on an intermediate approach that bypasses the OS but doesn't try to treat flash as memory.
Is this substantially different than GeckoBoard?

http://www.geckoboard.com/
How long until we see NFC on the iPhone? Omar says it's when, not if.
There's probably whiskey involved.
Makes sense. Thanks to both of you for taking the time to clarify.
If you're trying to avoid anti-intellectualism, I'd avoid using the term "politically [in]correct"; in the discourse of modern American politics, these words are little more than a red herring used by conservatives to snidely insinuate that a progressive opponent cares more about controlling language than about real-world oppression and bigotry.

People don't downvote you because what you're saying is "politically incorrect", whatever you take that to mean, they do it because they disagree with what you're saying[0]. Don't confuse those.

[0] Which is a practice I don't support, for the record.
That's great to hear! Please send an email to rajiv at leftronic or support at leftronic if there's any way I can assist you in the process!
I hope the founders have cached something out of this, or are getting an earn out. When you raise $70, and sell for $100, the founders shares are worthless.
What else could you possibly need? :)
Long story short:

Studies said the glass was 40% full.
Hype led people to think it was close to 100% full.
New re-analysis of the data leads to the conclusion that the glass is really 30% full.
The hype train responds by deciding that the glass must really be 100% empty.

The moral of the story is that we should listen to Flavor Flav: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK8sxngSWaU
Brand value is based on reputation. At a bad enough reputation, brands are abandoned. ClearWire and USWest are good examples. If Groupon's reputation with merchants is as bad as rumored, they have no basis for expansion based on brand. They do have the sales force, but if I'm a local business and a salesman screwed me on a daily deal, I won't take his calls for a POS system either.
Strategic exit I'm guessing. I think they have been struggling to find a core product for a while now. The meebo bar was essentially a pivot after popularity of meebo messenger started to decline.
It won't happen.
The essence of programming is having a vague description of a problem and figuring it out a way to solve it very, very precisely. This is just not a thing that can be done using AI. Any progress that has been made in AI is just the opposite: Put in a very precise question or description of the problem and you may get a vague answer.

Heck, if, even two decades from now we have some form of AI that just barely understands _existing_ code so that it can have at least a simple discussion with the programmer, I would be very surprised.
Pics or it didn't happen.

BTW, happiness is getting beaten at SC2 by a girl. ;-)
It's described as "2-dimensional" - I guess that means you set your calculation up as a spreadsheet, then it generates native code to run it at full speed.
Evolution of Cloud Computing: Time to take it apart
I'm not sure that's the right question to ask.

More important, in my view, is the reverse side of that luck equation: if you assume that input A leads deterministically to outcome B, then if you didn't get outcome B, obviously you didn't put in input A. Replace "A" with "hard work" and B with "economic success" and you have a nice justification for killing the social safety net, for example: obviously people who aren't successful must not be working hard enough.

So accepting that luck plays a role in success doesn't just affect your view of someone's success, it affects your view of other people's potential lack of success, which is an even more important thing to have if you want to have empathy for your fellow human beings.

Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance being what it is, a desire to attribute your own personal success to hard work rather than to luck makes it harder to attribute other people's failures to bad luck, and inclines you to assume that they must "deserve" their situation in life.

So I think it's less important to play the "what if" game there with specific situations, and more important to realize that people who haven't been successful might have been unlucky (or less lucky), rather than to try to decide whether someone successful was lucky or not.
I agree with you, but I believe it is different with experience. If you are new then you might think aobut the UI level because it is easier to visualize what the web program is going to do. If you have been making web programs forever, I find it easier to think at the database level and create all of the tables/fields. Then I think about how the interface visually is going to handle the data.