skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vast majority of open source "big-data" infrastructure is in Java (Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Solr, Elastic Search etc). It works pretty well.

I'm not sure what your question is, but I've experimented with loading netflow data in Solr and I'm averaging sub-2 second query times. That's on a laptop, with a couple of minutes of netflow (around 10Gb).

With proper indexing your search response time shouldn't increase lineally with your data size.
Hey, thanks for chiming in with this. Since you're an expert (or at least way more than I am): did I say anything batshit here?
So, I'm a scientist. And I'm skeptical of the utility of a good portion of philosophy for science. But this is a... really ignorant post. It's not even wrong. Just... incoherent, and clearly unfamiliar with the subject it discusses.

He seems to be attacking something called "philosophy", first of all, but the targets are some kind of randomly thrown set of darts. Some analytic philosophers discussing probability in a way he doesn't like. The famous Sokal hoax, which trolled a French-influenced American social-theory journal (which incidentally lived in literature departments more than philosophy departments, and was intensely disliked by American philosophers). Just some general rambling. Why is this interesting? It feels like something an undergrad would cobble together off Wikipedia, an "understand and then denounce philosophy in 90 minutes" essay.

Does he realize that Alan Sokal, who he seems to like, is actually in favor of philosophy, but is against one particular current in philosophy, which his intervention is intended to diminish? He seems to group Sokal in with both the people Sokal opposes, and the people he supports! How does this make any sense at all? Heck, Sokal likes more philosophers, too: Marx, for example, is on his good list (Sokal is a leftist, fighting something of a civil war in favor of 'Old Left' economics/materialist-focused leftism, against cultural-theory/identity leftism).
That's a fair call, though it's pretty easy to check if "facebook" is in the submitted string and then check if it's a page slug if it's not.
We already know what art is, it's paintings of horses.
How Hipster Are You? test
This is a hilarious test! If you or a friend drinks too much PBR, take a few minutes and check this out.
I have a couple questions about this; could you email me at mail at [my-username] dot com? I'm just really interested in the local web media industry.
The freeness of tv is a relic of the broadcast era when it was impossible to charge for TV usage. People now pay for cable, and people long paid for print. People also pay for iphone apps. I think the freeness of the web is due to an accident/stupidity of the web browser creators in not building an easy, automatic payment system into the web browser itself, thus creating a considerable penny-gap problem.
Splunk licenses may be perpetual, but there is much less up-front cost with a yearly license. The license model is fair, though.

(Another happy Splunk user here)
"The Hum" [1] is the most interesting to me, because my dad claims he used to hear the exact same kind of sound -- like a diesel engine starting up -- in the mornings when he lived in an older house with my mother.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
"What are we doing to make sure that the ones working to disrupt Mozilla’s products is Mozilla itself"

Stop. Just stop it. All my users are sick of re-learning an app they've been using for years already. Every time they face relearning the FF interface means it's just that much easier to try something else -- and they do. Huge exodus to chrome(ium).
When was the last time Microsoft had control of the image of any of its products?
I can't imagine how typing the name of the app you want to open is a design failure. I use Windows 7 and OS X Lion about equally and Alfred on OS X and the Start search box on Windows 7 are the only way that I find apps that I want to open. It's largely the same way with finding files I want. It's my preferred way navigate the operating system.
Where to start with this one?

I wouldn't expect philosophy of science to be of much practical value to working scientists. Non-scientists, on the other hand, can benefit a great deal from rigorous analysis of the tools, methods and procedures of the sciences, if for no other reason than to dissolve some of the film of invincibility that attaches to them.

Of course there are as many quacks doing philosophy of science as there are doing science proper, so choice of texts is important. You can't condemn all philosophy of science based on a handful of publications (note the selection bias in the article) any more than you can condemn all science based on, say, the MMR vaccine controversy[1].

1. And while we're on the subject of hoaxes, let's just put the whole Sokal affair to bed, shall we? Social Text was an insignificant and unrefereed journal, but even if Sokal had managed to place something in The Philosophical Review, that wouldn't have, as the author put it, "exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud if [sic] postmodernism." Unless the significant number of even more damaging hoaxes perpetrated on science journals have exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud of science?
All the bugs happen in implementation.
I disagree that he missed the point. People use Windows because they already use Windows. If a new version of Windows is as hard to learn as OS X or Linux, then there's not much point in continuing to use Windows. (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)
Please be sure to submit to HN when you have a new respin ready. Pretty sure there are a lot of potential new SmartOS users on here who'd like to use KVM with AMD. Got my eye on a N40L-based Microserver myself.
⊥ exists because you can't easily write a program that doesn't have it. If Haskell didn't provide an "error" or "undefined" function, you could just write "undefined = undefined" and use that. Short of guaranteeing termination (which you can't do in a fully general language), you can't eliminate ⊥ from the language.

That said, I often wish that Haskell would learn something from the Java world and require all functions intentionally throwing an exception to have an explicit "throws" specification as part of the type. Then, you could use the type system to require catching exceptions, and treat any unexpected exception as cause for an immediate abort.
Not 0, but vastly less than the cost of discovering and getting approval for a new drug. The vast majority of medical compounds are not particularly difficult to synthesize, meaning that the value of the process patent is relatively small. Once you release the drug, you will only have a very brief period before a competitor is able to come to market. In particular, they will not need to undergo clinical trials, which are very long (multiple years) and expensive (often hundreds of millions of dollars).
Last Kings Snapback Hat Tyga
I love my ReadyNAS. I got a NV (not NV+) from back in 2005 that is still going strong. And they have issued regular updates (last release was earlier this year). So the price premium that you pay over a QNAP or Synology is worth it IMO.

That said, there are some cons too. In my limited testing, ReadyNAS is not the fastest device out there so if you are looking the absolute fastest, they are probably not it.

The older Sparc based NAS devices do not get as much firmware love as the newer ones. So probably no IPv6 and GPT. Also, the older devices support only ext3 not ext4.

I found out last year that my particular NAS was due for a recall on the power supply. Unfortunately, this recall had been issued several years earlier and I just had not noticed it. TL:DR, ReadyNAS replaced it gratis even though the recall notice had expired several years prior.

Other than what I listed above, I can wholeheartedly recommend the ReadyNAS. Remember, this is your data we are talking about and it is sufficiently important to me that I'm okay spending a bit more money to make sure it is well protected.
1 in a (million/billion/trillion) I guess.

That'll make for a great horror story to tell though.
PROTIP: not everything you find in a gallery labeled as "art" is necessarily GOOD art.

PROTIP: Your idea of what makes for "good" art may not coincide with someone else's.

I just came home from the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival. I hung out and listened to this year's judges talking about their decision process. Some pieces were unanimous decisions, some were the subject of arguments, some went in the show because everyone had a strongly REVOLTED reaction to them. Art's a complicated thing.
Can anyone comment on the code quality in Haiku? From the FAQ it appears most of the code is new and little was carried over from BeOS. Also, will it include the GNU toolchain and standard libraries such as SDL? How difficult will it be to maintain cross-platform applications?
Dammit, this is going to lead to a whole new set of questions from confused family members.

"How do I get to Start > Programs > [Some app which was made for usage on Windows XP]? I can't find the Start button, this new Windows is no good. grumble"
Explosive book for a new teacher generation
The difference with the Sokal Hoax is that it cuts to the core of what philosophers do: Whereas science has practical, tangible results to show, such as the polio vaccine, all philosophy has is thoughts and ideas, which the Sokal Hoax assaults very directly.
Once the new form factors come out I think Windows 8 will do very, very well.

But we'll see!
Most of the volume of data that Facebook collects is just logging the "Like" buttons on other sites. Most people have no idea that info is being collected.
Note that bottom is a theoretical concept. If you actually evaluate (1/0) in the haskell interpreter, you get an error message

*** Exception: Ratio.%: zero denominator

Similarly, if you run an infinite loop in the interpreter, it just loops forever. (Well, in certain special cases it can figure that out and throw an exception). The implementation never creates an actual "bottom" value that has to be handled by e.g. arithmetic operators.

The issue of bottom comes up when you try to define precisely what the meaning of a program is (in the jargon, when you give a denotational semantic). It is clear that the expression (1+1) should "mean" 2, but what is the meaning of an infinite loop? Answer: a special "error value" which we call bottom.

You may wonder why most traditional mathematics doesn't make a fuss about bottom values, and just get away with saying "this is a partial function". This is because most everyday mathematical functions are defined by e.g. simple structural recursion, so issues of termination are seldom very complicated. Once you have general recursion, you need to be more careful.
Most of their written stuff I came across was some rather shallow critiques with a few f-bombs here and there, like they pretend they don't care but makes it look like they care too much.

I liked their 'Vice guide to...' travel documentaries though.
Urban Photographer of the Year Competition 2012
> Why is this interesting?

Because it's an opportunity to explain, in accessible terms in an accessible forum (that is, as opposed to an article that costs five figures per year and uses words like "hermeneutics" without defining them), what value philosophy brings to science and understanding the real world.
Isn't the moral of the story, "Check your backups"? There was a defective fan in one generator (sounds like it was findable via a test run?) and a misconfigured circuit breaker (sounds like it was findable by a test run).

Redundancy is only helpful if the redundant systems are actually functional.
> Art's a complicated thing.

No it's not. There are only 2 kinds of art: the one you like and the one you don't.
Double your prices
A strategy game from 1st time dev is #1 at the App Store
Doesn't matter. Even if the cable companies simply exchange your money for one dollar bills and burn them, you're still giving them money. So it stands to reason that if you can get people used to paying for individual online services (like they do for HBO on their cable), then it is not required that things be ad supported anymore.

I think the reason things are ad supported is because making money from advertising is really simply. You need one person at your organization to call an advertiser, and a day of his work can give you millions in instant cash. Customers, on the other hand, require a lot more maintenance and generate less money per individual, so scaling up a business based on customers paying money is very difficult. (Even Microsoft, a huge company that sells software, prefers to get OEMs to buy you a Windows license. One deal with one OEM equals millions of dollars. One deal with you equals $39.)
Your Office point kind of loses traction since I'd say the Office 2007 was a bigger change from Office 2003 than Windows 8 is to Windows 7.

Honestly Windows 8 doesn't change how people use computers that much. Most people use the start menu to ~search~ for a program. I.E. they hit start and begin typing. You can do the same exact thing with the Start screen.

Aside from the start screen, Windows continues to work in basically the same way it always has.
"Those customers with affected instances or volumes that were running in multi-Availability Zone configurations avoided meaningful disruption to their applications"

"Meaningful disruption" is a bit of a weasel word; Amazon's own EBS API was down for almost two hours[1] despite being designed to use multiple AZs

[1] "the EBS-related EC2 API calls were impaired from 8:57PM PDT until 10:40PM PDT ... The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores"

Guess the moral of the story is, if you require high availability then you must test your system in the face of an availability zone outage.
Just get Splunk.

I'm a pretty experienced Solr developer, and I've played with Elastic Search etc, and I've been using Splunk for about a year.

The thing people miss about Splunk unless they know it is how good the search interface is. For example, the search language roughly comparable to Lucene/Solr/Elastic Search, but also includes the ability to parse input files, and present results graphically. No open source solution integrates all that.

If you want to compete with Splunk (something I've thought about a few times) then you need to match that. I'd estimate 2 developer for a year to build out those features on top of Solr or ES.
How many people install software on their microwaves?
People use Windows because it comes installed with the computers they buy.
The customer market for Windows is already slowly transitioning away from Windows. I think it's logically to say that if the consumer market goes, the corporate market will fall soon after that. Microsoft could have either ignore this, as Apple continues to sell more and more Macs and iPads or they respond with something to take on what Apple see's as the future of their consumer facing business: the iPad. Microsoft chose the action that might have a chance to actually turn this trend around… Time will tell if it works.
The RSS link was quite amusing. My Chrome instance downloaded the RSS file without displaying it. Then I clicked it to open, and it opened Firefox. Firefox showed its file download box, suggesting I open the RSS with Google Chrome.

Deadlock detected.
Art, especially modern art is very contextual. Warhol's grocery carton sculptures were created during the golden era of advertising and globalization of trade, for example.

Art is also very subjective. Some like simplicity, some like complexity. Some like clarity, some like stories and implicit context. Some like subdued colors, some like saturated hues.

This makes art very complicated. That is why art history exist.
Show HN: Redesigned Super Trunking Scanner site
Hi HN. 270 days ago, I shared a link to my online scanner site which runs from a software defined radio (SDR) backend.

It worked but it was never really beautiful. This weekend, my project was to rework it to make it easier on the eyes. I think I've succeeded and would like to share it. It shows how even a non-UI-centric person like me can succeed given the right tools (Bootstrap, in this case) and input from a friend who "gets" this stuff.

My improved site: http://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/

Previous HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3021756
1. Don't make your backup server accessible on the public internet.
2. Don't allow shell access from any server that does have access to the public internet. When your web server gets hacked, you don't want your assailant to have the ability to shell around in your network.
3. If you need shell access from outside the network, have a host specifically for this purpose and disallow password authentication (.ssh/authorized_keys indeed)
4. Backup server is write-only. I don't have a hard-and-fast method for enforcing this, but a process (or kernel module?) that watches for incoming backups, moves them immediately, and prevents overwriting existing files seems simple enough.

EDIT: lists on HN- doin it rong
> We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable

I'm ok with that, I'd prefer to get thinner hardware than hardware that I can upgrade, many of us have never upgraded a laptop anyways, and that's OK.
There is a meme going around groups aligned with the rationality movement, asserting that there's a hierarchy of worth in academic disciplines. Basically, the hard sciences are worth more, and the harder the science, the more it's worth.

Philosophy is near the bottom of this hierarchy, though some of the products of philosophy are deemed to be valuable. (Basically it's an evaluation of Signal to Noise ratios, more than a declaration of absolute worth across the discipline.)
PROTIP: Tracey Emin is a Professor at the Royal Academy. It's art that a lot of the art world considers "good art".

This Emin person has gained tons of attention by displays so ridiculous that people thought they must be brilliant since no one had thought of doing something so utterly devoid of talent before.

From the Wikipedia article:

"In 1999 she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed — an installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear."

And engineers are supposed to be the scruffy, smelly disgusting masses of humanity.
Yes, I read the article. What is your point? Sponsoring the Rose Bowl is very expensive so they definitely have an advertising budget.

Also, these laptops, as opposed to the TVs, are not the low cost option. So they will have to have another strategy for selling them. For premium laptops that will definitely involve advertising.
But what stops you from re-arranging and placing the most often used application shortcuts on your desktop in Windows 95? And indeed, most users do just that. The reviewer correctly points out that this new UI doesn't really add anything, only takes things away. Shortcuts+search have been around for a while.

Actually I have no opinion on Windows 8 because I have not seen it myself, but this review fits both Gnome Shell and Unity very well: it's like they all suddenly joined the iphone-as-a-desktop cult.

Typing the application titles does not work for me. Because for frequently used apps I already have hotkeys or sidebar icons, but I never remember the names of rarely used apps: should I be typing "Monitor settings" or "Display" or "Desktop" or whatever, if I need to change the background or a screen resolution?

Lastly, is that really the biggest problem with the modern desktops: finding apps? Seriously, of all things that could possibly be made better, why are they all trying to re-invent how we're launching applications?
Philosophy most certainly does have tangible results to show, for instance: modern democracy, the scientific establishment itself, the various international bodies that enforce civil rights, and the modern field of psychology. If you go far enough back, philosophy gave birth to all intellectual forms of knowledge, which in turn greatly influence all aspects of our society.
I have heard it argued that the fact he was in favor of realism in art had the opposite effect on the rest of the world who wanted to create as much distance as possible. Which is possibly the strongest invocation of Godwin's law to date...

PS: A few artists and art historians have mentioned that with the decline of the patronage system few people would pay for art that took a log time to create. And with the invention of photo's artists needed to create a steady stream of original works with minimal effort. Thus, modern art with a focus on emotions that side steps the need for a lot of time on any one piece.
Did Neandertals Paint Early Cave Art?
You don't want manpower for file system stuff.

All my prepare and forget servers runs openbsd just because they have less people adding features (and bugs) and the few people there have awesome attention to quality (not just security) to the point of trading documentation bugs as well, bugs.

Granted it will move slower. And you may not have zfs...
By what mechanism did you conclude that random controlled trials are more trustworthy than observational studies? Does that mechanism more closely resemble an observational study or a random controlled trial?
I'm no Windows fan (I can't imagine ever going back to Windows), but you've got to be kidding me if you think people only use it because they already use it. How about because it's far easier to use and less fiddly than Linux? How about because the software selection is vastly superior to both Linux and OS X? How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it, while if you want to run OS X, you'll have to buy an expensive machine from Apple, and if you want to run Linux, you better pray there's decent driver support for your peripherals.

The situation has gotten a lot better over the last decade for OS X and Linux users (though Windows has also improved a lot), but we're a FAR cry from a world in which the only valid reason to use Windows is momentum.

I won't even bother trying to list all the reasons to use Word and Excel (especially Excel) over Libre and Google Docs. Google Docs is a child's toy compared to Excel.
Ha, I'm aware this is a well populated space! I made this mostly as a learning experience for myself - I'm trying to improve my skills with Rails and I wanted to make something useful for my apartment and this is the result! I'm not trying to beat out any existing services by any means, just wanted to share my take on it.
>Most people use the start menu to ~search~ for a program.

Is this true? I mean it might be but it seems like something MS would have numbers on.
It sounds to me like he loves windows 8, but doesn't like the metro UI. Literally, despite how he repeatedly said "Windows 8 is a totally failure", his only complaint was with the ribbons. Everything else was about metro.

What does he even do in metro? Why does he keep returning to it? I've been working in windows 8 for months, and I'm only on the start screen after my computer boots up.

I can't help but wonder if he actually hates windows 8 as much as he sounds like he does, or if he's using link bait for page views.

The only noteworthy comment he made was this one:

> The biggest problem with Windows 8 is that it wasn’t born out of a need or demand.

Too bad that has little to do with what the rest of the article is actually about.
Typo fixed.

Trust is a challenge, I might just open source it. Although that doesn't guarantee that people will trust the website.

Separate links since they're for different purposes

I like the domain as well!