skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) no contest, but then again it is pretty obvious.

2) that may be true, but how many of those fall in the 'hot spare' or backup server category ? I would guess quite a few of them, I only run 19 servers, but 3 of those are stand-by with databases replicated in real time and 1 is a backup server. Conceivably I could power cycle the backup server and only have it powered up when it is doing a backup but past experience has led me to believe that frequently power cycling machines is an excellent way to shorten their life spans.

3) Fair enough, virtualization can reduce your power consumption. A 65% reduction in server count through virtualization is mentioned, I've seen numbers between 20% and 90% in other articles on virtualization, it only is relevant if you are currently not using your servers to full capacity, and some things can not be virtualized effectively. You'll have to do some measuring before you can compute the impact this will have in your particular situation.

4) true, an even better way is to use a heatpump instead of regular AC.

6) DC supplies are more efficient, but in an existing datacenter the cost of running a complete new supply grid to save some energy is usually not worth it. If you're going to create a new datacenter from scratch and you have some control over the equipment that will be housed there then you should definitely look at this as an option. Beware though, you'll need two powergrids because not all gear is available with a DC supply option. I don't know what 'active current' is, where I'm from we call it 'alternating current'.

8 nice fact, it would be neat to get more information on this and on what sets google datacenters apart from the standard. We have google datacenter less than 10 kilometers from where I'm sitting, maybe I'll apply for a tour :)

11) I'm expecting the coming flash revolution to completely reverse that trend, and to end up with the CPUs as the biggest consumers, not the storage devices.

14) that may be true, but the trend is towards 'always on' technology. We'll have to find some median between being online 24/7 and power usage, a machine that throttles itself down aggressively when not in use would be ideal for the home.

15) depends very much on your price per KWh, where I live it would actually be more (assuming 100 watts of continuous consumption for your PC and screen it would cost you several 100 dollars per year to keep such a machine running all the time).

19 & 20) simply don't print stuff!! I've stopped printing stuff 10 years ago and if it wasn't for some of my customers still demanding printed invoices even our bookkeeping would no longer have a printer.

21) this is mostly an issue for the employers, and a matter of trust. The 'office' is still reckoned to be the most effective way to employ people, and until there is a giant change of attitude this will remain a problem.
Blogging the Origin
The Sins of Warren
Not surprised...Dubai has sounded way too good to be true for a long time. I doubt you really get cockroaches coming out of the plumbing, but I would believe that the palm island is sinking. I wonder if it was really a con (which implies intent from the beginning) or if they just got carried away and were then in denial that they were seriously overextended.

“Before, so many of us were living a good life here,” Mr. Thiab said. “Now we cannot pay our loans. We are all just sleeping, smoking, drinking coffee and having headaches because of the situation.”

Dare I suggest that all the coffee and smoking may be responsible for the headaches?
Thoughts on Yahoo BOSS Monetization (from Duck Duck Go Founder)
Because the banks are insolvent, Obama's TARP will also fail
The problem with this is that non-technical people have no idea who can implement their brilliant idea for them. They don't know how to tell good programmers from bad ones, so they'll just hire somebody with an impressive resume, with varying results.

I'm not saying that a 28 year old MBA who has never written a line of code should spend 2 years becoming a semi-competent hacker instead of hiring somebody, but they probably would have been better off spending some time on it in high school instead of pursuing straight As or doing application-polishing ECs.
Nassim Taleb Says Nationalize the Banks
When God intervened is not a meaningful question: God is outside time. It is rather like asking when an author intervened in the events of a book, in terms of the books time-line.

As a God is the creator of everything, the big bang and time and space are all part of God's creation.
This is meaningless without telling us what the sample size was.
I didn't find I should've known much of this but there was the odd tidbit that was interesting; Such as the ~30% of servers in a study which were running at less than 3% load.
We heart it / Visual bookmark for everyone
God's in the cosmic rays, the replication errors, and everything else. Monotheism means there's nobody else to blame.

If I read in the news about Joe Shmoe winning the lottery, I might say that God "guided" the lottery balls in a way that caused Joe's number to come up. But I wouldn't deny the scientific truth of Newton's laws of motion, or deny that from a human observer's point of view, the selection of lottery numbers is random.
Wikipedia is the content stored in wikipedia and an editorial process. The first is here to stay, with caveats to its quality, the second can - and probably will - be fixed.

This article is grandly exaggerating the problems wikipedia is facing, I think we should be surprised how well it worked and fix the few problems that are there rather than to start predicting its demise. That content will certainly outlast everybody who claims it will die soon.
Actually one of the most interesting things in plant evolution is that they evolved into fruit producers to protect themselves from large herbivores. Primates likely served as an ample defense against skittish herbivores. There's trees that host nests of ants that will drive away a giraffe, and what do the ants get in return? Fruit of course.

Even if Dinosaurs hadn't been killed in a mass extinction, trees had already begun evolving their countermeasure and it's the fruit production which is directly attributed to the spread of primates. So we would have likely evolved in some form even if dinosaurs were still around.

I mean there's some extremely weird things in the world that give an insight into what would have happened in a world with dinosaurs. The most common thing we think of is snakes, crocodiles and alligators eating large pray animals and being rather successful. However the smallest mammals seem able to defend their territory from reptiles. I've heard of adult rabbits killing snakes, which is rather contrary to what you'd think. I've seen a Hare eating a grass snake before. Meerkats will chase off puff adders (that can kill humans), baboons will torments and kill crocodiles.

The thing that really illustrates what primates would have done against the predominantly land based dinosaurs is that a gibbons will defend their territory from tigers. I saw it on National Geographic IIRC, and it's quite amusing to watch because the gibbon will grab at the ears, pull on the tail and just outright kick and slap the tiger while swinging from the trees. If it's nothing for a gibbon to fight off a tiger, then imagine what it would be like for any dinosaurs that are ambush predators.
Strictly speaking, Vegas does have open container laws. You aren't allowed to carry a beverage within 100 feet of an establishment with an off-sale license. Of course, enforcement of that ordinance is another question.
_why's Bloopsaphone - Make Atari-like bloopy sounds
can:

- without getting really tortuous, but a little bit rethinking your problem should be fine
- without sacrificing a large amount of speed or functionality
- without compromising your design goals
Dubai's "seedy" side is that it seems like a theme park for a modern city more than a modern city.

""There is also another side to Dubai’s booming market. Most large hotels are little more than dens of prostitution."

http://secretdubai.blogspot.com/

"It was difficult at the time to get any sense of realism from the city. You’d try to apply for credit cards, and find that nobody at the banks were really interested in giving you one — they had bigger fish to catch...

It was that way with houses and apartments you wanted to rent. The landlords never bothered to follow up on whether you wanted it, if you thought it was a reasonable price. If you had a problem with it — with handing over US$50 000 in one cheque, for example (they have a practice of paying for yearly rental in one or two cheques at a go), then it was your fault, and you had suck it up if you didn’t like it.. It felt unreal...

Nothing about this city is sustainable. The property boom, led by the multi-million dollar apartments along Sheikh Zayed Road, are perhaps doable in the upturn. They were built for investment, not for living."

http://popagandhi.com/932/dubai-redux/
I think that entry should have read 'http only presumes a reliable connection based transport'.

It would be pretty hard to make http work over something that guarantees transport of a packet but is not connection oriented.
See I can believe that 'God' could have arranged everything in the universe to play out in the right order and set the big bang to make everything happen. Determinism is actually expressly stated as being true by Jesus in the bible, so I always found it laughable that there was the whole 'intervention' thing like Intelligent Design. I mean god's supposed to be omniscient, he knows all so why would he have to intervene because he had the ability to know exactly what would happen and could arrange it all before creating the universe.

You make a good comparison to an author, the story is already written by the time you or I read it. I mean you don't get Stephen King walking into your house and going "Hold up! I need to change something on page 241, I made a mistake." I don't see why God should need to do so.
"Targeted posts" -- how I wish Posterous worked
My initial reaction would be "of course not". When the rest of the economy is in a tailspin, why would tech somehow be different?

But here's the thing - we (the tech world) took a brutal recession in the early 2000s to shake off the excesses of the dot com bubble. Many people believe that Fed managed to avoid the dot com bubble reckoning by creating a new, and even more dangerous, bubble in housing.

It did seem that way. While hundreds of thousands of people (including good programmers) lost their jobs, housing prices kept climbing, and consumer spending kept humming along, even increasing.

So in some ways, I wonder if maybe the rest of the economy is experiencing the reckoning that tech has already been through.

I have trouble believing that high tech won't be negatively affected by the economic troubles, but it may be much better off than other sectors of the economy.
I think the intended point is it's scary how many people are this dumb, not that we should agree with them.

I don't think it's quite as bad as it sounds. I bet half the people polled were hearing the question, "Are you a good Christian?" and that is what they answered.
Just do everything over 9p
HTTP isn't perfect, and there are plenty of times when a custom protocol makes sense. However, I think the author is arguing against the "everything needs its own custom protocol" mindset which is all to prevalent in the corporate world. In my work for USPS, I've encountered numerous custom protocols, most of which are far inferior to vanilla HTTP and which cause endless headaches due to poor documentation, debuggability, extensibility, bugginess, etc.

So I agree with the author and my own approach to protocols is to start off with the assumption that I'm using HTTP and only use something else if there's a good reason why HTTP isn't appropriate (performance being the most common dealbreaker).
Yeah, I tend to spend all my days in code and thus don't have a clear idea of how the video game industry is doing, but I haven't heard anything about people lifting their hiring freezes, and it seems like there's a new studio that shuts down or cuts jobs every few weeks.
The world has gotten better. For example, the number of people who believe in capitalism has gone from zero to millions. And the number of scientists has gone from zero to millions.
Buffering. . .
"Gone are the days when entrepreneurs boasted at cocktail parties"

Surely there is at least some negative correlation between "Good Ideas" and "Things Boasted at Cocktail Parties." The mythical (and hypothetical) cocktail party that pops up in everyone's mind once and a while is always a block on logical thinking.
great post. Where are the competitors in this market? Could duckduckgo have been made with Google tools?
... a typical single-term search takes 0.003 seconds in Xappy, while Whoosh takes 0.01 seconds. The Whoosh index was less than 4 MB, while the Xappy/Xapian index was 30 MB on disk.

I should hope it's fast with an index of 4MB.

That aside, it's more like a lookup engine rather than search engine. Search refers to calculating multi-dimensional relevance in real time. Here's a quick, two-dimensional example:

A search for "fender" could be configured to have related keywords: "music", "gisbon", and "automobile", "ford". The strength of the relation should also be configurable as it's used to create a score for the weight of each keyword. Then expand each keyword: fender, fenders, music, musical, etc... These expansions are given slightly lower scores than the keywords. Then we consider what fields in the data set to look for these values. Each field has a score. We determine which records to include by making a two-dimensional calculation between the keywords and fields. Now we sort the result set based on the same or other additional criteria and return.

There are many possible dimensions include misspellings, synonyms, wildcards, user history, brands. Basically anything. And the data-set get much larger. That's why search is so difficult.

I'm not criticizing Whoosh specifically because other open source "search engine" libraries have the same weaknesses. But it is important to understand the difference between search and lookup.
V3 Not Charging Problem
You make it sound, as the author does, like HTTP is applicable to anything. It's not.

It's a very specific request/response protocol, which suits some specific purposes.

>> "start off with the assumption that I'm using HTTP"

That's ridiculous. So if you're writing a multiplayer real-time game, you'd assume you're going to use HTTP?
The problem with this is that non-technical people have no idea who can implement their brilliant idea for them

That's why you need to build your network.

I'm an electrical engineer: I have no idea how to identify a brilliant biochemist. But if I need to hire one for my new alternative energy startup, hopefully I'll already know someone who has expertise in that field and can either recommend one to me, or help in the hiring process.
Atwood's not SOLID
Evolution produced God. God didn't produce evolution.

Religion and belief in God are brain noise. Its people seeing patterns in random disconnected events where there are no patterns. This has a very likely natural selection basis.

If you see a predator that isn't there, its much less costly than not seeing a predator that is there. So also, if you see food that isn't there, its much less costly than not seeing food that is there. Hence, natural selection will be in favor of the individual/population who overreacts to noise in the environment. This overreaction results in religions and belief in gods.
Not under their current terms because Google won't let you change the look, content, or order of the results, or let you omit some--all of which I am doing with Yahoo's feed.
Foxtons founder makes another pile of money
'"I think Wikipedia is great," he said when wrapping up his talk, and he wants to see it succeed, but he has trouble seeing how that can happen as the project continues to grow.'

If someone had explained Wikipedia to you ten years ago, would you have thought it had a chance? I'll be honest, I doubt I would have.

I think of the success of Wikipedia as similar to evolution. We're just not good at grasping the scale at which either work, so our intuition betrays us.
You are technically right, but if it takes to be a "tatus-obsessed WP dork" to become a WP administrator - then it is a problem in itself, isn't it?
Windows and Linux on the Same Laptop from Dell
My understanding is that when the NSA redacts a document, the process is to print a copy, black it out with a marker, and scan it back in to a new document.
It would be great if you can warn the users it is NSFW in the title itself, when you post such links.
Since I'm no cryptography specialist, I always use the only really secure method (sure it can't be applied everywhere):

My keys are unique and of the same length as the data.
The major junk problem is in LEO. Basically everything in geo is equatorial, so you don't have orbits intersecting at large angles, so you don't have the problem where a stray paint chip in an oblique orbit craters your sensor. Also, getting stuff to geo is way expensive, so there's less up there.
That's an entire discussion of its own. My point was that they're not all just lucky.
Is it just me or did that blog post not really say much? Maybe I'm just missing something.
A Story on Digg with over 4 Billion diggs
Wikipedia never claimed to be 100 per cent accurate and is rarely quoted as a source by an authority wanting to prove a 'fact' - but that doesn't mean it isn't brilliant or successful.

It is a useful website for many reasons, all of which come together to prove its worthiness, and it's success.
TCP checksums are fairly simple; a TCP stack basically just sums up the 16-bit words in a packet and stores the result in the checksum field; this will not detect 16-bit words being swapped around.

My guess is that the load balancer tried to invalidate the header while preserving the TCP checksum.
That money never existed in the first place. The "value" of the assets were based on people's confidence in it continuing to rise. Once that confidence evaporated, so did the "value".

The problem is how connected the financial system became to these bubble assets.
Take a look at the posts on my blog. Most of them revolve around doing just that.

I grant that there are plenty ASP.NET developers using drag and drop "design", SqlDataSources in the presentation layer, bloated UpdatePanels for AJAX, and worse.

At the same time, there are many of us who don't use those parts of the tooling or framework though. More than you might imagine.
Bootstrapping is always sexy.

Revenue and profits are becoming sexy again. Hopefully dividends too.
How to Get Funded in the Recession: The Frugal Mechanic Story
Really! The orbit of a satellite is not perfectly stable because of the effects of the solar wind, the gravitational lumpiness of the earth, etc. IIRC the slot for a satellite is about 300 mi. wide. There are preferred slots such as over Europe or the east coast of the US with lots of countries contending for them, and slots allocated to countries that don't yet have satellites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit
Chile is more Laissez-Faire and it's doing awesome.
What about sites like WhiteHouse.gov, which dispel all of those generalizations?
App Store Lessons: the tao of running contests
I think that's a great theory.

You don't even have to assume that past expressions permanently effect facial contour (though that's probably true). Whenever a person is being evaluated -- and taking a mugshot for a study certainly counts -- they adopt a pose/expression. They are almost certainly sending a message about themselves with their choice of expression, and that choice is biased by what's worked in that person's past interactions with others. Unless they're deeply dishonest, they'll send a generally-true message about their personality.

You could start to test this by seeing if the accuracy of third-party estimations holds up when people evaluate photos of sleeping/anesthesized faces.

On the other hand, a bleaker interpretation is also possible. Maybe you are born with a certain kind of face, and will always be judged that way no matter how you behave. So over time, only by playing-to-type do you get positive feedback, and the facial stereotype becomes destiny.
The research was done by Pew and was cooberated by similar surveys conducted by Gallup and Fox News. While I couldn't find anything on Pew's site, I'm sure all three work with the de facto 95% confidence level.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1107/polling-evolution-creationi...
On the other hand, you're giving up extremely well designed integration with almost every language and runtime on the planet. Why use your own custom protocol, when you could use HTTP? The argument isn't that HTTP is always better, but rather that it should be the default choice.
While in the hindsight Dubai turned out to not make sense as a "global" city, it still might make sense for its vast "region".

I mean for the 2.1 billion living between Europe and South East Asia, (with a combined economy worth $1.8 trillion in terms of GDP, growing until recently at an annual rate of 5 per cent.) namely: North and Eastern Africa, the Levant, the Caspian, the Indian Subcontinent and the GCC States.

Dubai is not Las Vegas/Miami/New York, but for these 2.1 billion, a tuned-down version of these, even blended chaotically in a small city-state, would still completely make sense.

I am long Dubai.
I am not so sure it's news.

This "controversy" has been in the news for how many years now?

When the Kansas board of education originally decided to teach creationism that was news.

I think at this point in time pretty much everyone knows about this.

Maybe not everyone knows the exact percentage but how is that numbers news?
It might be if it was whoppingly higher or lower then expected, but it's not.

And while you and I might not debate this here, others won't be able to help themselves.

They'll have to debate it, because gosh darn it lots of people are wrong on the internet!

And debates like that tend to get linked to at places, forums, etc, that love to debate these things.

Then more people come here to debate Darwinism.
Of course, you also want to use a decent "data access" layer that uses a DAO or ActiveRecord pattern, if needed and your favorite view templating engine, to leverage the MVC framework completely.
Wikipedia's not perfect, but it's as solid as print encyclopedias, which are made by humans and subject to error-- not tomes of platonic truth.

Obviously, the danger of untruths virally propagating is there and should be taken seriously. One would hope that few people are using Wikipedia for scholarly citations.

Also, if you encounter mention of a college tradition on Wikipedia, you should be extremely suspicious, because most of those are apocryphal. That was one of my vandalisms that tended to "make it", since the existence of a college tradition is nearly impossible to refute. Some of them are still extant, despite being made in 2003-04.
It's Potosí for the new millenium. Super ghost town.

If they knew their history, they'd know that having beautiful architecture can't save you if there's nothing to do.
Is Mixx The New Pownce?
Can Mixx find the traffic that will keep it alive?
There's some (unofficial) theories that you can judge a person's MBTI type by looking at their facial features.

http://www.socionics.com/advan/vi/vi.htm

I don't think there's hard evidence of it though - just one's own experiences.

I can guess the P/J split (J types have a serious look) and the F/T split (F types usually indicate to you their mood with their expressions) with a quick glance at the face, but haven't done anything in a controlled setting.