skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FoundationDB co-founder here.

As other posters have already guessed, we don't support long-running transactions (we only keep multi-version information for a short time). So if you keep a transaction open for a long time it will not commit (after a while reads will start to fail, too).

It's not architecturally impossible for us to support long-running read snapshots, but it is expensive for our storage servers to keep snapshots alive for a long time. So our backup solution instead works by backing up transaction logs while doing a non-isolated read of the database. At restore time we will replay the logs to get back a consistent point-in-time snapshot.

The reason that we see higher burst than steady state performance has nothing to do with transactions. We have to do reads from SSD as the application requests them, and we have to make writes durable by logging them right away, but as you surmise we can defer the hard work of doing random writes to our btrees for a while. Even a workload that is 90% reads benefits a lot from deferring writes because writes have to be 3x replicated and because consumer SSDs are comparatively slow at mixed read/write workloads. Read only workloads will not see any initial burst (and might see a ramp-up time from cold cache effects).
I don't care about the code. Collapsing is a significant change in UX.
Ticketed: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/195
Google had a Desktop search tool to do a slightly similar job.
Permission escalation vulnerability in Egnyte reveals user credentials
Yeah, for habitual reasons I usually use -R. No idea why.
>"and anyone who isn't pissing their pants with joy about receiving an offer, even if they're not going to accept it, has a seriously deficiency in their Oh Shit Is This Really Happening receptors."

Of course you piss your pants with joy. But its more of a, "no matter what happens we're going to be okay" thing. There are many examples of that investment vaporizing, either in the startup stage or when they unleash the business on the public. It's happening with Zynga as we speak.

So, I can understand being happy about it, but calling it a business "success" is a stretch.
I don't know any Ruby beyond absolute basics, and definitely didn't need to use it to get started.

If you're using OS X or Linux, just run these 3 commands in a Terminal:

sudo gem install af
af login
af update [appname]

to upload your app.

See here for more details
http://blog.appfog.com/getting-started-with-appfogs-command-...

But you can get started with things like Wordpress or Drupal without touching the appfog client, see here for a list of "jumpstarts"

http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/jumpstarts
Here's the main ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14

Basically I'm open to it if the bitcoin are transparently converted to dollars.

Code talks. ;-)
What nessfile does?
I hate it when people decide to slap a blog section on their website and it is completely disjointed from the rest of the site.

Usually this seems to happen because they have used some customised system to build their website and then just slapped wordpress or something on to use as the blog.

So as mentioned in the article you hit the blog page and "home" now takes you back to the home of the blog even though the site looks like the rest of the site.

Even worse when it's a tumblr or something and you have now ended up in a completely seperate Silo.

I can't imagine this is good for SEO purposes either.

The number of time this sin is committed by companies selling design services boggles the mind.
It will be interesting. Agree about USPTO track record but I do wonder if there is more prior art in this area, I seem to remember Symbian having some form of notifications which may at least limit the scope of the Google patent.

I'm not familiar with the details of how patent protection is handled before grant. I would guess that licensing fees are not due for the period before grant but that as soon as it is issued you should work around it or pay licensing fees.

Assuming it is granted and no cross license is in place by then I assume Apple would try to work around it pretty quickly. I don't see Google offering it for a fair price as they are more interested in market share and leverage than cash too.
That's correct, and there doesn't seem to be that many emacs people here. What gives?
That's so far from a like for like comparison that I can only think you've not read what AppFog is offering...
From the CC-BY-SA license[1]: "Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one." The GPL is probably considered sufficiently dissimilar as to make relicensing under it illegal, but IANAL either, so who knows.

[1]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
"...I'd estimate [that] 9/10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder."

You pulled that out of your backside; I decided to use real data. My employer has extraordinarily loose security: our main file server has no access restrictions on any user's working directory. So, I am able to get a quick look at the filing practices of just under 200 people. Of these, 15 didn't use their personal folders at all, presumably preferring to store everything on their desktops. Everyone else had at least one level of folders in their directories. Roughly half of the company are developers, the other half are non-technologists, like sales, administrators, and trainers.

I asked my wife (MD of a mid-sized media company with over 500 staff) what her lot did. Every one of the middle managers she directly looks after have complex filing schemes of their own. She recently went through a big process with IT to create a centralised repository for project work so she is intimately familiar with how her team run their workflow. This is not a technology company; these are sales managers, marketers, operations people, creatives and so on.

9/10? No, not at all. 1/10 perhaps.

"...users can't be bothered to come up with hierarchies...folders are an anachronism..."

This is simply untrue. Neither the data nor my personal experience bear that out: My mother, a retired luddite who never used a computer in her working life and someone who has sent precisely six emails in her entire life, has a hierarchy of folders on the first gen Mac Mini I bought her a decade ago.

"...they just want..."

Assumption is incredibly dangerous. Be careful, especially if you are designing things for people to use. Moving away from hard numbers and into psychology, your thinking is simplistic in the extreme. Human beings absolutely love to organise things. Scrapbooking, Pinterest, stamp collecting. Hobbies that are basically just organising stuff. We love categorising the world: genre-ordered record collections, the Dewey decimal system, Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species, Felony Murder 2, Captain-Commander-Lieutenant, Category Theory in mathematics, the Standard Model... People are a lot smarter and a lot more organised than you understand. Have you ever seen a toddler carefully sorting their toys? It's deep inside us.
Here's the change and it's justification:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/?id=c6e3ea6...

Change -r to follow only command-line symlinks, and by default to read only devices named on the command line. This is a simple way to get a more-useful behavior when searching random directories; the idea is to use 'find' if you want something fancy. -R acts as before and gets a new alias --dereference-recursive.

Personally I think breaking compatibility for this change was a poor decision.
I am pretty sure you have seen these two links, they are currently on HN frontpage - if not they might be helpful:

- http://daveaddey.com/?p=893
- http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2011/09/28/results-ios-g...
More like an Iron Man...
Thanks for feeding back. I'll try to do better next time.
I've worked on standards committees off and on for many years, and his experience seems typical of the issues that crop up. There are many problems with standards groups and the way that they work.

One major one is that, often, the participants come from different areas with different perspectives and visions of the outcome. Since participants rarely go to work with a firm set of agreed upon requirements or use cases, it leaves each member room to craft their own understandings of the goals. I've seen way too many working groups attempt to create a 'master' spec that takes into account all possibilities. Or, alternatively, clusters of people form from similar problem domains, and powerful clusters can take the work off course.

A second major problem is that there often is a lack of real user participants. Standards work is as close to the dullest engineering work one can get. Worse, it seems to attract certain types of engineers that love building specifications. Because of this, usually the real users flee immediately. This usually leaves a body of over-educated, overly-technical people to argue a lot over sometimes irrelevant details. Those types of people are definitely necessary for the standard to work in the end. But, because the real users flee, their influence is usually unchecked.

A third reason is that working groups rarely seem to use iterative and incremental life cycles. There's rarely any working code, often little V&V, and participants and users often can't experiment with their ideas. As we know, what's good in theory, sometimes doesn't work well in practice.

I think there are systematic reasons much standards work fails. The 'design-by-committee' outcomes arise from 1) lack of firm use cases to bound the work, 2) dissimilarity between participants, 3) lack of real user participants, 4) lack of iterative / incremental cycles.
How  to Revitalize Your Stagnant Business
Smart ContactBook startup Kwaga(FR) purchases BoxCar(US) • The Rude Baguette
The cause is a core infrastructure failure I believe

edit: It was a change to talk, not sure what it was that failed yet.

edit 2: Google Talk has been restored for some users and should be resolved for all in near future.
Oops. Should be working a little better now.
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>I know doctors who have absolutely no clue as to where their stuff is stored and have zero interest in investing fifteen minutes to learn the basics of directory structures and file management. Zero.

I'm betting this also applies to their physical files.
When I read the first post in the chain, I thought "well, it has to be a bug". Then I read the second post... wow, it was intentional. I've used -r and -R both in the same script to do the same thing, just depending on how I was feeling that day. Now I'm afraid to update.

I don't think distros should be afraid to break compatibility with main if main is making a change that makes no sense. Breaking essential and classic *nix functions defeats the purpose of CLI utilities.
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Thanks for pushing through. I'll be more careful next time.
“don't take too much financing” is a recognition that Digg v4's failure (and you should look at Alexa graphs to see how significant that was) was due to ignoring the community to give investors the site they thought they wanted.
Could be some truth to this, especially after raising the minimum.
>Installing a database-backed clothing management system like you would find at a dry cleaner in my house solves my organizational problem, but introduces alot of complexity and overhead.

This would be complex to implement, but would greatly simplify things for the user.

Imagine I had a big box I could throw all my stuff into, and when I wanted, say, my shoes, I could just say "Computer, retrieve winter boots" and my personal robot would pulled it out of the box for me. This would be awesome. Sure it would be complicated to implement a physical system like this, but storing an retrieving files in this way is easy. OS X's Spotlight gets us most of the way there. Now we just need tags.
AppFog handle things like software updates, scaling beyond one machine, DDoS attacks, all those kind of things.

You ask them to deploy a (for example) MongoDB service, they do it, and they are responsible for the operation of it.

The idea is to reduce the amount of day to day (or more likely month to month) work involved in doing things like security patches, upgrading infrastructure, etc, that suck up a lot of time, especially for people who don't have experience in building load balancers and so on.
I agree with most of the article, but the "The Ubuntu Unity failure" was only a temporary one.

The author says it got better, but in reality Unity already overtook Windows' UI and it will overtake Apples UI with one of its next iterations.

As a younger (though not that young) developer I have to agree that using MS developer tools is the wrong way of doing things for most new software, not all of them though, it sure has its uses. But I am strongly against proprietary software that only runs on one OS as that will only lose you business. Even the game platform Steam seems to have gotten to that point, a Linux port is on its way.
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What I mean is that a sufficiently powerful tag system can be used to emulate a directory-based system. For example, with simply a means to view files without tags, you can recover a single-level directory system (à la CP/M) by merely tagging files with at most one tag.

If you also incorporate a notion of hierarchical tags (where for every tag X, there exists a set of tags Y which act as the conjunction of X and Y) and extend the above ability to allowing viewing files tagged with X but not tagged with any child tags of X, you can recover the familiar multi-level file system again by tagging files with at most one tag.

GMail almost gets this right, as it has a hierarchical tag system, but (AFAIK) it has no means for viewing e-mails tagged with a given tag but not any child tags.
Transfer Google+ connections between accounts
Yeah, this sounds really misguided. If they change/add functionality, why not move that to a new option? Those who want the new way can use the new feature, and scripts won't act differently depending on which version is installed.

New features should get new options; they should not move old features to new flags and put the new features on the old flags. Nuts.
The senate will not pass it, because it is owned by the banks. I doubt it will even be voted on.

If, by some miracle, the senate did vote on it and pass it, Obama (or Romney) would not sign it, they would most likely pocket veto it so he didn't have to answer questions about it. This is because the presidency is also owned by the banks.
About time, too. They had been promising this for nearly a year, now: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.nl/2011/10/google-is-now-av...
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html...

This section relies on TCO. I realize that it could be translated, but I do not feel that this could be done without heavy modification. Besides that, basically the section's goal is to explain TCO.
It's not in itself a VPS no, it's an "application environment", that's self contained and runs inside the Linux operating system. You can have multiple applications running over multiple instances, and Appfog handle all the deployment, scaling, and back-end management.

Those Linux instances are hosted on one of multiple providers (your choice), for example Amazon, Rackspace, HP Cloud, etc.
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I was very eagerly anticipating BankSimple, err, Simple, since it was announced. Problem was, the world caught up. I recently got my Simple account set up, and as a result decided that ING Direct + Mint offers me everything I need, and more (Joint Accounts, savings account, real checkbook, no overdraft penalties). Unfortunately, Simple feels like too little too late, and it doesn't seem that they delivered (yet) on some of the cooler things I was anticipating (API, Savings Goals, Mobile Support on more than just iPhone).

I hope they do well, as I think online banking needs something to shake it up, but first impressions are incredibly underwhelming.
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If you have no designer in your team, it's quite useful to learn to become a bit of a designer yourself (good skill to acquire). Truth is, first impression matters, and no matter how good your algorithm or service is, if the site doesn't look attractive customers might never get to even try it.

So while some design polishing sounds like "chores" with low ROI, they can actually increase convergence rates with subtle touches (e.g. rounding corners) resulting in a great overall ROI.
Indeed. That should have been communicated more clearly.
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Slovakia: Members of Parliament will lose their criminal immunity
While I do agree that the product link should be obvious on the blog page, I don't think it should be overly pervasive. A logo on the sidebar is more then enough. The main purpose of the blog is to write engaging content that correlates with your product. Startups should stop trying to use the blogs just to increase SEO rankings, rather focus on creating conversations and build relationships with potential customers and users.
I am a one man indie shop. My freelance work supports the time and design expense that I use for my side-projects which make peanuts.
In POSIX -R is the recursion flag for ls, cp, rm, etc. So if you want to recurse, -R is probably a safer bet than -r. (ls -r just lists in reverse.)
I don't know how widespread this is or what the impact is. I have a couple of services running in West Europe haven't noticed any issues.
Having written client code for multiple OAuth2 implementations, I can tell you: it's a total clusterf$%k, and for exactly the reasons Eran outlines: the oauth spec is a giant ball of design-by-committee compromise and feels exactly like the disaster that is XML web services and it's technologies.

We would be better far off it a single company/dictator (like, shudder, facebook) came up with a simple, competently designed one page authentication mechanism, provided some libraries in the popular languages and we all just went with that.
The pile analogy implies that all interaction with the computer takes place using a visual metaphor, rummaging through the pile.

I like folders just fine (exactly because they let me pile arbitrary things together however I feel like), but not having some facility to search for things is just as bad as not having folders.

One nice thing about database style systems is that they don't actually have to own the canonical version of some information in order to be able to index that information. So let's keep our folders, but let's also have nice search facilities that let the user drill through the filesystem analogy and find their data using some other criteria.
Facebook, Google, eBay and Amazon form pro-internet lobby group
If you believe that Google's management and board is willing to consider the public interest in day-to-day business decisions, there's no reason you can't believe they will consider it in a management succession plan.
Is this particular different to what would be achieved by running Emscripten[1] on the normal C PHP interpreter?

[1]: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
Jim Gray solved it in the 80s, but then we forgot about it.
Interesting, but strangely written:

> The reason to close these cafes was obviously to save the physical and mental health of the teens in Beijing.

I don't see why that's so obvious, is this sarcasm?
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I guess the historical phrase "Sick man of Asia" still applies to China after all this time.
Hey guys, I like units on the Y axis of graphs.
"Albums from oldest to youngest? No problem. Artists alphabetically? Sure thing. Artists alphabetically and their albums in chronological order? No problem."

from the "to each his own" file: i have never understood why anyone would care about sorting their music in any of these ways. To me, none of these are ways to "view my music that make sense for music." On the other hand, I find a directory structure for albums and everything else chucked into a giant directory to work just fine, as it supports the sort order I do sometimes care about, mtime. Normal search tools like locate work pretty well too.

In previous comments on related articles on HN, I have pointed out that files, and to a lesser extent directories, are good because they serve as a universal protocol-of-sorts for dealing w/ blobs of data. That allows you to use the system that works for you, and me to use the system that works for me, and yet we can still share files and move between systems etc. with little headache.

I am actually sympathetic to moving to a tag-like system that supports hierarchical tags (gmail style), so that multiple organizational structures can be imposed onto a mess of files. I also find it funny that that's more or less how unix file systems work under the hood.
> I don't see why that's so obvious, is this sarcasm?

Yes, I read it as sarcasm.
that's probably it
How will this be any different than the shared photo albums built-in to iOS6? Granted, I have not had the pleasure of using Flock or iOS6 - so this is not a rhetorical question.
Everything seems fine here in Russia.
Woah, this totally reminded me of the time when i ate a brufen tablet when i was little thinking that it was candy. It even had the sugar coating. So basically kids are usually dumb and prone to random acts of craziness .
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Windows Azure outage hits Europe
I'll bet it wasn't the concept of directories that those secretaries of yours had trouble with. I'll bet that they simply weren't told that they existed and the computer offered no hints and that when they were told, they understood it readily.

My mom frequently has trouble with directories but it's not the concept she has trouble with. It's the fact that the filesystem is so huge that it's hard to manage and there is no way she keep where everything is in her head. The fact that operating system files, application files, and user created files are mixed rather indiscriminately is probably the biggest problem. Also photo-managing applications trying to make things simple by saving files but not telling her where they put them leads to a lot of confusion. But the idea of files and folders she has not trouble with; it's the difficulty of navigating an impossibly huge and insufficiently mapped directory structure that she has trouble with.

The concept of folders is pretty straightforward: "Everything has its place and there's a place for everything." People naturally organize things through place and directories create a semblance of 'place' for abstract pieces of data. (Place is actually such a powerful concept in the human mind, that the Jesuits used to memorize complicated arguments and passages by going for walks and assigning concepts to different locations on the way.) Tagging and search based systems while technically more powerful, I think would actually be more confusing not less because the concept is not as intuitive.
I have one of those 1% apps (barely). What the survey didn't ask me was how much I spent on the thing. I spent over 50k on marketing and maybe 10k total on other stuff like graphics. It also took 3 yrs to pull in that money so way below typical wage in a western country.