skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the article he asks why does less need a history file. Who says it does? It's an option. It can be disabled turned off. The question of why it's on by default is another matter.

Manpage extract:

LESSHISTFILE

Name of the history file used to remember search
commands and shell commands between invocations of less. If set to "-" or "/dev/null", a history file is not used. The default is "$HOME/.lesshst" on Unix systems, "$HOME/_lesshst" on DOS and Windows systems, or "$HOME/lesshst.ini" or "$INIT/lesshst.ini" on OS/2 systems.

Then the author complains about applications that write too much to disk. He has my sympathies.

Has he ever heard of a ramdisk? mfs? tmpfs?

This is the easy solution to the problem of braindead applications writing needlessly to disk.

The simple rule is: If you don't want disk writes then don't use the disk. Mount your directories in RAM. Is this perfect solution with zero overhead? No. Is the cost very small? Is is exponentially faster than using the HDD? Try it and answer these questions for yourself.

There are also the countless bloggers who write about installing an OS to a USB stick or SD card. They usually mention the issue of disk writes and how this impacts flash memory, but they almost always proceed to instruct their readers to "untar" several thousand files in the course of an install anyway. This is not very helpful.

Did it ever occur to them that they could make an image of a
filesystem and transfer that to the media - requiring only a single write? Can you mount root read-only and other dirs like /var and /etc read-write? Yes, of course.

How do tech support people in corporations deploy countless Windows installations? They use imaging. It is not rocket science.

One commenter says you can't extract a single member from a tarball without reading the entire file. What version of tar is he using?

Manpage extract:

-q, --fast-read

Select the first archive member that matches each pattern operand. No more than one archive member is matched for each pattern. When members of type directory are matched, the file hierarchy rooted at that directory is also matched.

This means the entire archive is not read, unless the member to be extracted is at the very end. Similar to sed /pattern/q or grep -m1 pattern.

Anyway pax is better than tar.

Another commenter claims you cannot "stream download and decompress" tar.gz files "on-the-fly". What exactly does that mean?

What if you do this:
(BSD/OSX only; Linux ftp is not the same)

ftp -o"|gzip -dc" http://host.tld/file.tar.gz

Or this

{ echo GET /file.tar.gz HTTP/1.0 ;echo ;} |nc -vv http://host.tld 80 | gzip -dc

Then try the same with a .zip file and using unzip -c instead of gzip -d -c
> I moved back to my parents house and saved all my money so I could bootstrap my startup for over a year.

That's easier to do when your parents live in a metropolitan area rather than Podunk, Flyover State. Just saying.
> Protip: if you want to have a good place to work, and your employees to have a good life, don't have 12-16 hour days

QFT!
That's exactly my point. Single point of failure means single point of responsibility, which means that single point of failure must do a damn good job maintaining it.

That's why a "non-profit" approach will never work.
It's the free market at work.

If people have a choice of providers of a service, then the resulting competition creates bottom-up innovation.
I believe the reason is whenever you remember something specific, the neurological pathway to that piece of information gets stronger. For example I was taught parts of the Quran between the ages of 8-14. I still know the verses because I use them daily (22-16 years later). The pathways are strong.

It may also simply be that your brain learned to simply retain what seems important at one stage and disregard everything that looks alike. Example: in your eighties you can easily remember the time you had your first kiss if you only kissed 3 guys/gals in your lifetime, but if you kissed every last person at the party every Saturday night, then you probably will forget.
Unless your one of the unlucky people that bought into Motorola dual-core devices too early. My Droid X2, a solid dual-core Android phone, is stuck on Gingerbread and will never get official ICS or an unlocked bootloader. The community has managed to port ICS, but it's buggy and lacks a fully compatible kernel.
"A large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well."

My theory, which is logically consistent with yours, is that as we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience. This is partly because as we get older we tend to immediately place things we experience into categories and then move onto processing these abstractions rather than continuously observing reality directly and unfiltered. So the other part of the theory would be that when we think in terms of abstractions, time goes by much faster than when we focus on direct sensory experience. It's likely that novelty also plays a role here as a mediating variable, in that we tend to pay more sustained attention to novel phenomena rather than immediately placing them into conceptual buckets and moving onto the next thing.

I also like this theory because it's consistent with how drugs that alter our sensory perceptions and make us focus more on our perceptions also tend to subjectively slow down time. Anyway I have no idea whether this is correct, but IMHO it's a much better theory than the original, which isn't especially logical and doesn't even really make sense.
Do you consider women idiots who can't decide for themselves whether they want to accept such job or not? Respecting women is about respecting their decisions, not about treating them like children that you need to protect from themselves.

And no, I don't enjoy or watch cam porn.
I wish Google was doing this under their own label and for all major manufacturers, the whole process is just silly.
No.

Keep in mind that the 2.6.x -> 3.0 transition was largely just in the version numbers...in terms of the code there was no major overhaul or change.

ref: http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/5/29/204/
Good idea, just follow through w/ monthly postings and it should take off. It's up to you. Go for it.
Account Settings > How You Connect > Who can look you up using the email address or phone number you provided?
It used to be the default way of finding your friends, before they introduced the whole 'give us your email account info to login and get all your contacts' feature. I use it all the time as well to check people from craigslist or other coldcalls. In fact, it's just about the only thing I still have an FB login for.

With all the discussions about privacy in the last couple years I am a little surprised at how many common sense approaches people seem to overlook or at least not implement. i.e. always have an email address for business, one personal/social (maybe these are separate), etc. and use them accordingly. The rest is up to you as far as how much access you allow to your profile, how willing you are to give up your real name to the service, and similar problems. Seems to me people have much more to fear from big data than someone who already has your email address being able to see your name and public profile pic.
As a PostgreSQL user here, I tend to have a slightly different perspective.

Once Oracle bought MySQL, I saw a lot of the anti-MySQL comments in the PostgreSQL community die off pretty fast. The types of comments changed as well. Instead of the message that "we are much better technically than MySQL" (which is still hands-down true btw), the message was "if anyone asks, PostgreSQL cannot be acquired because there is no commercial entity to acquire." The shift was very much to let concern for Oracle start the conversation and simply explain why this cannot happen with PostgreSQL.

The very basic point is that anything PostgreSQL users can say here is redundant and really only belongs when answering people's concerns about the future. "Can this happen to PostgreSQL?" gets asked and most of us wait for that question before saying "no."

>MySQL and PostgreSQL represent two very different implementation philosophies, and being able to choose between them according to taste and merits is a good thing.

I guess you could say that. I would sum it up as "PostgreSQL is what you get when database hackers set about building a database to explore new concepts in. MySQL is what you get when you get application hackers building a bottom tier for their applications." MySQL's paradigm is fatally app-centric, however and I have a hard time seeing that as a good thing. I'd be happier if the app-centric db chosen was SQLite or Firebird DB.

The other thing to keep in mind is that MySQL really has been becoming less interesting as a competitor over time, and the Oracle acquisition has helped that along as well. Really, there's no point to bringing up PostgreSQL at this point. It just feels tasteless, like a victory dance on someone's grave (premature to be exactly equivalent but you get the picture). I'd rather see PostgreSQL targetting MS SQL and Oracle than MySQL. There is no honor in beating the weak. If we are going to go after someone might as well pick the strong :-D

Hence, sensational and petulant "RIP $PRODUCTNAME" articles are unnecessary. There is no threat to existing projects based on MySQL or any other successful open source project for that matter. Not only will this stuff be free forever, it will also continue to grow and be developed on its own.

Agreed on this point. But at the same time, corporate-sponsored open source projects (like MySQL) are uniquely vulnerable when compared to multi-vendor ones. The hard news to break to the HN crowd is that multi-vendor projects (like PostgreSQL), despite the fact that they are fundamentally more difficult to monetize, will eventually out-compete the single vendor ones which are more friendly to the start-up model.
Please begin though, since I will never know why you disagree with me if you don't begin.

"Protocols are for when there's no good centralized way of getting things done" is actually not as crazy statement as you think, since it also means "If there's a good decentralized of way of doing something via protocols, you don't need a centralized approach".

What I meant by "getting things done" was efficiency. Decentralized and centralized systems each have their pros and cons, and efficiency is definitely not one of the pros of decentralized systems.

I do apologize for the incoherency in the post but I still don't think I didn't make any incorrect points. I think it would be if you could provide a counter example to my statements.
Take Time to Develop Fast
What perverted ideas?
Yes, I agree - it's related to memory. NPR had a good podcast on it a couple of years ago:

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/02/01/122322542/why-d...

Time seems to go slower when we have tons of things to remember, when we are adding many memories in short periods.
Air Jordans for Sale - Cheap Air Jordan Shoes
This is a procedural function, which is a pain in the butt, and slow.

MERGE support has been a want-to-have for a long time. Unfortunately Postgres is stuck between the complex but useful behavior of implementing MERGE (without destroying concurrency) and the simpler and still-useful MySQL extension "OR REPLACE".

Although it seems like some people have floated the idea of going with the simpler non-standard option without being shot down, it seems like the people interested in doing the work are most interested in implementing the complex and more featureful standardized option, and it's rather difficult, so there is no MERGE yet.
I've benchmarked all three and it seemed like the vast majority of the performance improvement on SSDs was due to the XtraDB engine which is included with MariaDB.
Here is my take. When you experience something new, your brain works overtime to learn new things. Thats why in a familiar setting time flies by. I guess thats why some people are adventure seeker and travelers. At old age most of the things become routine. Here it is argued that the whole life of a person is counted. I simply think, life is divided in various threads. You do something new and a new thread is created. Its along a single thread that you may measure your perception of longevity. If you do something routine then it seems to be fast to you as it becomes routine.

Also I remember a link on HN that explained how time virtually stopped for Near Death Experiences.
Hey Jarek, Using last.fm is a great idea! We'll add that as an option for users signing up without Facebook and use it to pre-populate the artists you follow based on your most scrobbled artists on Last.fm.

Other ways to sign up are coming very soon, we just wanted to get this out the door as soon as it was usable.
> we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience.

This would explain why vacation makes time slow down, yet go fast at the same time. The slow down for the new experiences, environment. The fast - for the lookahead-cache driven feeling of sometimes anxiety/dread of going back to the daily routine.
"many" as in "many forms". i'll work on clarifying the language
In a decentralized system like email or jabber there is responsibility, @example.com is responsible for delivering messages to its users, and for the necessary communication with other servers.

And of course you'll want to use push messages for communication between servers. It really doesn't have to add all that much latency, a few roundtrips is perfectly doable. That's a very small price to pay for the benefit of being independent of the whims (or unreliability) of a single entity.

That said, it's probably not going to happen soon, but not because of technical issues. I think it's just a matter of inertia among users, just like people are still using MSN messenger or skype instead of jabber.
Why do you get that impression? I do have a clear understanding of realtime in the sense you are implying. That kind of "realtime" system is actually closer to the point I'm trying to make. Generally centralized architecture is better for building robust and reliable systems than decentralized.

In fact it would be great if you could share some counter examples.
It makes sense if you read it as "[server to server] protocols are for when there’s no good centralized way of getting things done,"

But then it's tautological.
i'll make you a deal: if you can find a bug caused by me not using semicolons in any of my github repos from the last year i will add a section into jsforcats about using semicolons
But Holy Skeet, youngsters, I'm now off to the "Why time appears to speed up with age" thread!

No time to lose!
Sure, but who in his right mind would live in Denver?
> Detractors argue they drain finance from public schools and “privatise” education.

Why do detractors say this is a bad thing?

If a private school is doing such a good job that, given the choice, parents are willing to send their kids there rather than public school, how is it a bad outcome if people can send their kids there, at no cost to taxpayers above and beyond what public schooling would cost?

> Another concern is that vouchers can be used at religious schools and therefore erode the barrier between church and state.

This is sort of like saying that tax exemptions for religious nonprofit organizations erode the barrier between church and state. They would -- if those exemptions were provided exclusively to religious institutions the state wished to promote. But in fact, the nonprofit tax exemptions apply to organizations of any religion or no religion at all. Since the IRS treats every organization on an equal basis, regardless of religious footing, they definitely are in the spirit of "separation of church and state."

Likewise, the education vouchers presumably are usable at schools of any religion or no religion. Since the vouchers treat every organization on an equal basis, regardless of religious footing, they definitely are in the spirit of "separation of church and state."
Web-scale Lost-n-Found
if you cannot accept result of a democratic election then you should not be making statements about Constitution and the law.

Nah, it's exactly the other way around. I see you did not address this at all:

Putin violated Russia's own laws including the Constitution, when he ran for the 3rd time, and he should not be the president, no matter how big you think his popularity is.
efficiency is definitely not one of the pros of decentralized systems

The economy is a simple example of a system where decentralized == efficiency and centralized == inefficiency.
Would that actually be that hard? A MySQL compatibility mode for PostgeSQL would be awesome!

It's not even that much to do - support INSERT IGNORE, ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, INSERT REPLACE, and make a "relaxed" mode where too long strings are truncated and NULLs inserted into NOT NULL turn into 0 or the empty string and you are virtually all the way there.
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't this harm MySQL forks as well? Since the test cases are unavailable from now on, say for example they wanted to reimplement a certain feature, isn't it much harder for them to validate that their implementation works correctly?
Yes and no. Sometimes they mean "hell no", sometimes they mean..."I am shy, let me see if you really are interested."

That's what happened with me & my wife.

We went to a co-ed camp, and she was one of (if not) the 'hottest' girls at camp. Being pursued by many potential suitors and I had a leg up. One of her new 'girlfriends' was a long time 'girl friend' of mine. So my friend was telling me that she thinks she likes me, even though she would ask her and she would say 'No'.

She (my wife) was giving me subtle signals here and there - but she was giving everyone else no signals at all.

She was telling everyone that she didn't like me though, and many other girls actually tried to actively discourage me from pursuing her.

I was 15, and relatively innocent at the time - so I wasn't pressuring her from a sexual perspective. It was all innocent.

Suffice it to say, after coming back from that weeklong camp, we started dating about a week later.

As of tomorrow, we will be married for 7 years and together for 13 years, with 2 kids and 1 on the way...and we're both still happy.

So, in short...know when to hold them, know when to fold em.
Can't connect from the US. Tried port 80 and 8080 (the linked port).
Perhaps in places like Iran and Pakistan. For the last few years we've been using old Russian warheads as fuel here in the US, which is the opposite situation.
Patents:

http://bfi.org/about-bucky/resources/bibliographic/r-buckmin...

Books:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?field-author=R....

Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Gold Medal, American Institute of Architects

Presidential Medal of Freedom

Many other awards and honors.
coughs

http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtradb/
In fact, "Twitter is just hosted, proprietary pub/sub" is exactly the type of thinking that I was criticizing in the post. Sure the technology is not difficult to implement, but the point I was trying to make was Twitter's value is not in the technology but the realtime delivery network it created.
>...but the history since then appears to indicate that the extreme concern over Fukushima radiation is depressingly justified.

If you're living in the reactor containment vessel.
It depends I think how much money, how often and in exchange for what. If you are paying out big amounts in exchange for "labor" (e.g. paying freelancers who do work for other users), checks, ACH, and wire are the only serious solutions unfortunately. For smaller amounts and gift/bonus type payments, you might be able to use electronic gift cards (e.g. Amazon)-- if I recall, you only need an email address and possibly name to send a "gift card" this way.
Left column, all the way at the bottom, "All Files: (HTTPS)"
I understand your interpretation; I just don't see how is it supported by the article, particularly by the points you've quoted.
And who are you when you're at home?
You wouldn't get the graphite fly ash that turned Chernobyl from a localized problem into an international headache, so no, it wouldn't have been as bad as Chernobyl. But it could have been much worse than it was.
Look at the amazing things that came from Bell Labs. The transistor, laser, cell phone (in the 40's!), UNIX......
Can I call my friend and have him bring me some beer? What if I pay him a bit extra to cover the hassle? Now what if it's my personal assistant, or butler?
I believe that would be WebRTC, which is currently available in stable Chrome builds (chrome://flags and look for "PeerConnection"), and no idea what other browsers. Probably Firefox, though I don't know for sure / what version.
Ruby:

[free] http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/toc/
[free] http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/
[free] http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/

[$$$] The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Rails:

[free] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
Great point! I agree, once a system becomes really huge it becomes hard to maintain and centralized system which used to be efficient becomes inefficient. However when the system CAN be maintained they are generally more efficient IMO. For example many developing countries go through a stage where the government makes a centralized plans. Even the U.S. went through this until the point where the scale itself brought forward inefficiency. However when it comes to an internet service like Twitter which CAN be maintained in a centralized manner--at least so far--I don't think decentralized approach has any benefit in terms of efficiency :)
I think the evidence on that point is incontrovertible. On the other hand it would have been politically impossible to refuse to evacuate people in the area.
It's down, probably for everyone. I tend to use http://isup.me to verify.
That's a great idea. I think the act of sending paper mail feels rather tedious to those accustomed to using emails, IMs often. People are more likely to use a tool like this if it meant attention to issues. From the perspective of the senators, seeing a stack of 10,000 paper letters is much more tangible than say, 10,000 emails or petitions on a webpage.
Now someone needs to make it :)
> Considering the fact that this is a Catholic school, I also wonder about what students might be alienated or rejected due to religious prejudice.

The key here is student choice.

Since the students themselves (and their families) select the school to go to, presumably if the students end up being alienated due to cultural factors at a specific school, the parents can pull them out and send them to another school.

But under the existing system, if a kid was socially isolated at a public school for whatever reason, and his/her parents thought that starting over at another school would be the best, their only options would be to move, or pay out-of-pocket for a private school.
Honey, I Introduced Agile In My Company
"Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel)".

That is true, since say a 5 minutes traffic jam seems like eternity compared to say 25 minutes of driving. Wonder if we can apply this principle to any situation. For example customer perception of progress in a consulting project is much better when you are hitting all kinds of milestones while developing a feature such as design, prototyping, development, testing, deployment. Ironically if we say we are doing all of those in parallel, it doesn't work very well.