skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say altruism, more like an anarchist's expectation. It seems some people would've liked there to be no observation just to 'shake things up' and then have to move to a new model. Hawking does mention in the video that the greatest discoveries come from unexpected results. The Higgs Boson has been expected for decades.
The text, anyway, I don't think a dump including the images has been available for quite some time. And that's not just due to the size -- though that's also a concern, I imagine -- but mostly due to copyright concerns. Text submitted to Wikipedia is for the most part under a copyleft license, images often are not.
Acunote is a customer of tarsnap and so am I personally. The professionalism and transparency that you can see in this RFO are a big reason why I use it and recommend it. The quality of the product/solution is the bigger reason.

What's not mentioned is that throughout the outage the customers were getting timely emails from Colin letting us know what's going on. We didn't have to go to a blog, twitter, facebook or some other ungodly place to find out what's happening. This is how it should be done.
When predictions come up as expected, it's no fun!
Pff...this command line doesn't even know 'ls' :)
Thank you.

That's a nice post-portem and reinforces my trust in tarsnap.
Exactly! :)

A good satire about all the "git is super simple" tutorials.
They are, a bit. There are also poorly made hammers in this analogy as well.

The big difference is you don't have people in professional carpentry forums arguing that hammers are better or just as good as nailguns and if you disagree then you are an anti-hammer elitist. But our professional is a young one in more than one way.
Nothing wrong with being a monopoly so long as you don't use that monopoly to restrict competition.
With this system, you're giving your location, real social graph and financial transaction data to a single company. I think I'd pass.
Great for what? The US has the largest population of private gun owners, and it has a far bigger problem with hamburger-related deaths and car-related injuries than gun-related crime. This just seems like a political or CYA move for Google.
Agreed, also on the count that writing idiomatic code is, in my opinion, much more beneficial than having to refer to a third party style-guide to grok a non-idiomatic flavour of it.

The obvious benefit is that knowledge can then be applied to any other project using the language idiomatically, and not as if it were 30 years old. Conversely, code to the third party style guide, and struggle to understand the many things that don't adhere to it.
For those of us who aren't really aware of who this is or what is happening (like me), Peter Sunde is one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. He was sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay ~US$3 mil in restitution.[1] I believe his appeals were recently exhausted so he's going to have to serve his sentence.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde#The_Pirate_Bay_Tria...
It seems a lot of people here were a bit taken aback by Heuer's comment at the end. Both teams spent weeks vetting the results and prsentation, and the decision not to claim discovery was taken very seriously.
There is still a lot of work to do to polish up the statistics. Note how the different physics channels each have their own significance and weights, as discussed pretty clearly in the CMS presentation. Combining the overall significance from all channels is not a trivial task.

To answer your question: we have not shown that it is a higgs boson. Essentially today's result is simply that we observed a lot of objects decaying from a mass 125GeV. More than we expect from the Standard Model (w/out higgs).
Great description and I have to say I really liked the broader context of the outage. The severity of the storm was something I had been curious about but hadn't looked up myself yet, and so I appreciated the extra education!
I love reading about Tarsnap. This is the sort of post that exemplifies someone who has a deep knowledge of his craft, a responsibility to his customers, and probably most noteworthy, a measured perspective and appreciation for life outside of just the business and web service he runs.
It's a bit too early to worry about 10k forks for a single page, isn't it? The typical use cases -- certainly the early ones, when it's not widespread -- might involve numbers of forks that aren't too different from GitHub.
Mining bitcoins is useless work to exactly the same extent that mining gold is useless work.

> which means that the electricity used up by the Bitcoin network would be much larger on any reasonable measure than what you need to maintain other currencies

This is only true if the other currencies are fiat money. For a non-fiat currency, it is necessary that either (i) it is hard to make (or people will just make enormous amounts and its value will go away), or (ii) it has intrinsic value.
Wanted this so much to make sense to a layman. Has anyone found a resource that doesn't require a Phd?
Standard Model of Particle Physics
As something I read the other day stated (I think it was that Stratfor monograph that was posted here, but I'm not very sure), it looks like the US is using its patent system as a means to protect their global interests against foreign companies/countries.

So, "if it's not here, you can still patent it" is a way to protect their interests, and then use that new patents all over the world.

But as this case proves, maybe that strategy works against smaller adversaries, but the ones with big pockets can still prove it wrong.

> So, an international company can just see what is developed in another market, copy it and patent it in their own country?

Multinational companies are global when things go nice, (moving money around the world, minimizing taxes, and so on), but then they remember their homeland when they can take advantage from that.
Striving for renaissance
i actually returned a macbook pro retina yesterday over this. i know it's insignificant to apple's bottom line, but their tactics against competitors seem to be growing increasingly unsavory.

i think in many tech patent cases if someone were found in violation, as the nexus apparently is, the normal strategy would be for the violator to pay the holder of the patent some licensing fees. maybe it doesn't always work out this way...

but even if licensing were an option and google and/or samsung were willing to pay to license the technology, with apple's very publicly stated goal of destroying android, i don't think they'd ever go along with it.

so this is basically bad for non-apple consumers and good for apple. i mean, it's rational that they'd try to maintain their competitive advantage, and even though multi-source search has existed in android as far back as donut and longer than that as a programming/computational task, i guess apple planted their flag first with this [IMO, obvious] patent

regarding the X1 carbon, ... i'm very excited about it myself. i currently have a T420 and thinkpads have great support for linux, which is my primary operating system. i'm just hoping they give the X1 carbon a decent display. the one on the T420 is pretty lousy.
It doesn't matter so much how big of a fish you are in the pond, if the pond is really small. Nokia was the biggest fish in the Symbian and Meego pond as well.

If WP7 was a runaway success, other manufacturers would flock around it in no time.

Do you really think Microsoft is a loyal, dependable long-time partner, based on their previous track record?
Google changes URL for Analytics Privacy Overview, breaks 2K backlinks
It has been good for many things so far, it just doesn't get reported usually.

And if the Constitution Treaty hadn't been rejected by popular vote some years ago, the EP would actually have much more influence over the Commission.
I do not know if you have noticed but Nokia is also bleeding red ink. This whole idea of the Android market being too competitive is wrong, because it mistakenly segregates the Android market from the WP one.

There is no such separation. At least not on the WP side. In the real world, in almost every wireless store in America there is a stand with a bunch of phones where Android phones sit next to Windows Phones, Blackberry's and sometimes iPhones. A shopper comes in and looks at them all and decides which one he wants. So Android are in the same market as the Windows Phone and the iPhone.

Yes there is high competition in Android. Which means that there is high competition in smart phones period. Nokia are feeling and will feel the competition and the pressure for low margins regardless of whether they make Windows Phones or Android phones.
This isn't just slightly wrong—it's totally wrong. All you have to do is look at a tear down to see that there are far more than 9 microlenses (which do not correspond to different focal lengths). I highly recommend that you read Ren's dissertation again before you speak authoritatively on the subject again. I'm not sure how you could read it and come to the conclusions in this post.

Also, I'm the person in the video you posted. Please let me how I "tripped up."
Would you mind if your goverment ban something like "al-Qaeda's official website"? When somebody is talking about killing citizens of your country, it has nothing to do with freedom.
My power just came back on today. Amazing levels of damage from the storm here in Virginia. Some homes are expected to be without power for another week or more. To add to that, every day the temps are in the mid 90s with 50% humidity. It's been miserable but a good learning experience. I need to build an outdoor camp shower and a latrine. Believe it or not, having those would have been a great luxury.
Hilary Mason has a longer introduction to machine learning video using web data, however, it isn't free.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920017493.do
Was I the only one avoiding this article because they thought it's about Kanye West?

This trend of third world countries taking a technology and running with it doesn't surprise me one bit. It's much more difficult to disrupt an established industry with new technology than to adapt a mature technology to create new industries.
Had a listen to some channels. The pop ones. Is there any quality control? Half the tracks were horribly produced, mixes were completely off, vocals bleh. Who exactly is Earbits aimed at? There must be a pretty specific niche of people who actually like this stuff. Not the general mainstream fan for sure.
Honest opinion, how do you feel about http://www.pandora.com/ auto playing?
June 2012 North American derecho
I guess it feels that way because tablets until the iPad were an insignificant stagnated market, whereas we did have markets for computers, phones, music players, etc.

So, I'd argue it's still a huge improvement over an existing product area, with the added bonus that it created a market. Products existed, but no significant market for them was available.

The iPhone's improvements over Blackberries and the like of the time were as impressive as the iPad's improvements over Windows tablets, for example, but one doesn't feel the iPhone a new product area.
In a sentence, the Higgs boson is how matter attains mass.

None of the other sub-particles could explain mass until this was proven to exist.
> FWIW, I had about a 50% response rate to a letter to 7 MEPs on this subject, although I don't think I should count the one whose letter basically repeated each of my points verbatim but with the words "I understand that..." at the start of each sentence!

3.5 MEPs answered?
4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle
Count by party not by country. EPP of course.
Seems to me that keeping an EC2 instance spun up and idle might become a sensible approach for people who run downtime-sensitive apps with a single AWS region architecture. A lot of recent outages have been exacerbated for many people by the flood of control plane traffic and contention for new instances - at some stage paying for enough idle instances (which might be just one) spread over availability zones to allow you to at least have some chance of surviving an entire datacenter going dark has to be at least worth running the numbers on.

I also predict the control plane contention problem is going to get worse - I'm sure I'm not the only one working on a system to spin up and grab a few extra instances as soon as my monitoring detects the beginnings of a problem. It seems to be "the right thing" to do is start spinning up and configuring replacement instances immediately you suspect a problem - even if it turns out not to be a problem most of the time, when it _is_ a problem at least you're well ahead in the queue of the people who chose to wait 5 or 10 mins on the assumption that perhaps it's only a temporary network glitch.

(And there's a weird negative incentive for Amazon here. If they fail to address the poor heavy load performance of the control plane/management console/provisioning api, they may end up with more money in their pockets from people keeping spare idle instances or provisioning additional instances speculatively at the first sign of trouble.)
I think he can criticize because he knows exactly what the problem is.

But besides that, Apple wasn't in a downward spiral in 1990.
BeOS got bought and basically took over Palm, Palm got bought by HP. (And if not for Apotheker killing it, WebOS could very well have been lauded as HPs savior now that Microsoft has stabbed its OEMs in the back).
Eh, the logo also looks like the bit of the blade you snap off on a utility knife. Not sure that's a good image to convey. :p

"If you don't buy our products, someone from Microsoft will cut you."

http://image.made-in-china.com/4f0j00veRTkBUralbh/Utility-Kn...
Eliezer Yudkowsky (AI researcher) also lost his bet it seems (http://lesswrong.com/lw/1dt/open_thread_november_2009/17xb).
This thread started with the claim that "the chance that the results occurred by chance" was different from "the chance that randomness could produce [the result]".

But you're saying that in your example both are 31%. So again, I ask, are we talking about two separate things? And if so, can you give an example where the two things have different values?
> Irreparable harm seems to imply that this could hurt Apple in a major way

Yes, this is what bothers me most about it. Litigating bogus patents is one thing, but this grandstanding about the impact of tiny features is sickening. Especially after we had the ruling from Posner that it has to be the specific feature in question that is causing the "irreparable" harm. It seems to me that the irreparable harm is drastically tilted in Google's direction here, as they are unable to market the latest version of their operating system, potentially for months until iOS6 is released. Compare that to the tiny (non-existent?) lost sales on Apple's side - supposedly due to customers saying "hey, since Google's phone can search for apps and contacts on the same screen, I'm buying that one!" - of their nearly obsolete iPhone4s, it seems ridiculously unfair to me.
The first step is simply to merge my temporary-hack fixes (e.g., removing the I/O rate limiting during recovery operations) into the main Tarsnap server codebase. I lost about 3 hours to those.

The second step is to change the order of S3 GETs and adjust the parallelization of those; I think I can easily cut that from the ~20 hours it took down to ~5 hours.

The third step is to parallelize the third (replaying of log entries on a machine-specific basis) stage; that should cut from ~10 hours down to ~1 hour given a sufficiently hefty EC2 instance.

After that it's a question of profiling and experimenting. I'm sure the second stage can be sped up considerably, but I don't know exactly where the bottleneck is right now. I know the first stage can be sped up by pre-emptively "rebundling" the metadata from each S3 object so that I need fewer S3 GETs, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily the best option.

In the longer term, I'm reworking the entire back-end metadata store, so some of the above won't be relevant any more.
Higgs boson - Non-technical overview
Cool. I agree with you. There isn't very strong pressure to play nice in the current system...what pressure there is comes from judges, who often have been practicing lawyers and may be again in the future (or they may be hired by the bar association itself), so they may be inclined to keep the status quo if it is economically beneficial to them. Competition probably wouldn't put any additional pressure on this, though it might, if the higher standards led to some sort of better economic outcome for the membership. But, I don't see how that would necessarily come to pass given the incentives to play dirty.
Scary o_O
A Tale Of Open Source
The source code is very nice too. For people who want to see an example of simple, high quality C source code, I highly recommend reading Tarsnap. It's small too, so it's very easy to get all the way through it.
Please, for the love god, you and all people who think like this - take one second please to actually look at a Galaxy Nexus. It is so ridiculously unlike an iPhone. Samsung did do a pretty straight ripoff of the iPhone with the original Galaxy S. Since then their designs have deviated in major ways and really look completely different.
I have used (and continue to use) both of these libraries. The testing library works fine but it doesn't include much other than the bare minimum. A more batteries-included library could include some assertion methods to test for value equality/inequality and provide some pre-canned error messages.

As for the flag package, it's fine for simple command-line flags but doesn't have anything to deal with specifying positional arguments. Sure you can get them from the Args() method but you have to basically write another layer of argument handling to deal with them. I like Python's argparse module's approach and flexibility there.
EuroPython 2012 Conference Videos
Why "Helvetica Neue"?
I'm noticing increasing use of Helvetica Neue as the preferred choice of web font. I find it quite difficult to read and often have to read things twice to read it correctly. See attached image for how it displays in Chrome - i looks like l and c looks like o.

Why is it popular? I find lots of good blogs written in bad fonts and don't want to keep reading, because I don't have time to read things twice.
> 'dance to pay' gesture

Strippers already have prior art on that one.
Yes, true, Apple was the first one to put touch optimized, scaled down UIs on these tablets. But wasn't that exactly the original argument? Again, this is Apple taking an existing technology and polishing it to make create a great product.
... and if you find anything wrong in the source code, you can win bug bounties too!
Here's Why It Really Sucks To Be An App Reviewer For Apple
Think of it this way.

What does Stephen Hawking get if he is wrong?

-$100 dollars

+Media coverage saying that he was wrong which promotes physics.

What does Stephen Hawking get if he is right?

+$100 dollars

+Media coverage saying that Stephen Hawking is right which promotes physics.

This is not altruism this is intelligent promotion of a topic that you want children and young adults to be educated in.

It is a paid advertisement for physics by a celebrity. Similar to athletes who get paid endorsements. It encourages people to challenge him. Using his celebrity status can inspire people into doing Physics, Math or Engineering. We need more scientists and engineers. Professor Hawking knows Physics but even better he knows how the play the media.
Try It Quiet (A Brave Way to Give A Tech 'Talk')
I love the idea but I don't see how you'll get around Craigslist blocking you the same way they did Pad Mapper and Carsabi. Do you have plans for this?
Love seeing data, MrFoof! Thank you. To me those numbers establish Tarn Adams as a successful example of personal funding.

I want to see a culture of people funding each other. I want Tarn Adams to have been ahead of the curve.
Would it be feasible to store snapshots of the metadata periodically as well, so you only have to replay mutations performed after the last snapshot in an emergency?
ThriftyDeque - Indexed Access, Sub-Linear Time Middle Insertion, Optimal Space
The following kits might be of interest to you. Scale to as many people/days as you are interested in. (Be careful, though, campingsurvival.com can be _very_ addictive)

http://campingsurvival.com/porcamtoil.html,
http://campingsurvival.com/redodopl.html,
http://campingsurvival.com/hottaptrsh6.html
Unlike with trademarks, patent holders get a lot of leeway about whom to sue and when without immediately endangering their patents through estoppel. I don't know what makes waiting more effective and evil, but that's why they have the option.
Yes, that's also something I'm looking into. But I want to have a decent "worst case scenario" recovery mechanism too.
Why refer to CoffeeScript as a buzzword in this context? Coffeescript has gained popularity recently because it addresses some of the concerns about writing javascript raised in the post.

Coffeescript is not a buzzword, it's a relevant technology. Just because it's popular doesn't mean you should dismiss it, it's popular for a reason.
This post makes me want to do business with them. :-)
Just like with everything else. Someone somewhere will disobey the general rule. As moores law stays true, technology will continue to upgrade until it becomes itself an entity no different or better then humans.

The data will be wrapped, packaged, and transported so well that Cisco's bullshit wouldn't know what was coming through the pipe. With the generation of IPV6 addresses, and completely distributed & decentralized network architectures, as well as mobile web-servers, there is absolutely NO way it will stop.

EVER.
The Techcrunch link was posted 3 days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4184320
First photo of shadow of single atom
His smile at the end of the video is priceless.
I really admire how well written this outage report is, and how transparent the whole process is. +1
How is "single dad" relevant? Genuinely curious.
There are lots of people who feel it (CoffeeScript) does indeed solve more problems then it creates.

If it actually does create more problems then it solves then a lot of people are just plain making a mistake by using it :) which I don't think is the case.

Plenty of programmers I know had a similar knee jerk reaction to the idea of CoffeeScript and have since decided it is a worth-while trade off.

You never know, you might be one of them!
Well, you're only getting the correct version in terms of Wikipedia's processes. This relates to both a horizontal axis of what narratives (for lack of a better abstraction) are being represented and a vertical axis relating to the depth to which a narrative is mentioned, if at all.

Both of these are, famously, super disputed on Wikipedia itself: people fight about the contents of articles about controversial issues (→ NPOV), and people fight about the extent to which certain things are covered (→ notability).

I think there's room for multiple, equally "correct" versions of an article on both of these dimensions; but particularly regarding the notability criteria.
The talent who made it ended up managing the creation and development of the iPod though.
And people like Ken Thompson.

Accusing the author of this article of being "inexperienced" is also very amusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Graham-Cumming

And even Java and C++ luminaries like Bruce Eckel have come out in support of Go's error handling and against exceptions.
What do people think about Toshiba z930? Haven't done much research, just saw it (or the z830 - predecessor, not sure) in a shop and liked the look and feel (apparently lightest Ultrabook).
Great work going on at tarsnap. I've known about it for a while; should start using it.
Indian Navy investigates cyber attack on military PCs
No Flash, No Problem
Dubai's Burj Khalifa Is A Complete Flop With Buyers