skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Golden Parachutes: How the Bankers Went Down - CEO & Executive Compensation
the intro class would more or less cover the python tutorial. Inter would cover how to mix and match language features (classes and generators, C interop) to build more sophisticated projects. Advanced would be loosely defined personal projects external libs, alternate implementations etc.
I second icey. What do you need?
Sorting Elements with jQuery
But it's tough when State B is a place like New Hampshire, who are more than happy to keep taxes low at the expense of having relatively poor services. Two different states, two very different sets of priorities.
Yes, mirroring as I described will fall down when the throughput of writes into the network exceeds the ability of a single machine to just write, because you will never have the opportunity to "catch up."

However, that is a lot of data to be writing into your graph, especially with how crazy fast writable media and storage is getting these days. YAGNI.

Now, on the theoretical side of things.. "How would you create a linearly scalable graph database across machines?" I don't know how I would make it so that I could maintain the same kinds of speeds for interesting graph traversals.
The Voynich manuscript - A mysterious undeciphered text
Documents To Go for iPhone Nearing Completion
Well, MediaTemple have screwed my site. I'm sorry all...
1. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
2. you can't help but a learn a couple of things after three or four startups. :-)
I have some issues with this. First off, there are 13 root servers across a wide variety of networks, whereas (I checked) there are only two UUNet DNS servers, both of which are on the same network. You've just exchanged the load from 13 servers across the Inernet to two servers on a single network.

Also, there do exist DNS attacks to poison DNS resolvers, and if I suspect poisoned results, I can restart my own local DNS resolver, but I can't restart UUNet's.

There's also the issue of connectivity. There may be an issue with connectivity between your ISP and UUNet, but otherwise the rest of the Internet is accessible. If I can't get to sites, I now have to take the time to determine if it's a problem locally (ISP is down), or if there's a networking issue between me and UUNet. A locally run DNS server means I can troubleshoot that particular issue quicker.
I think you've got it right. There were people who were nobodies who we hired out of college and made into brands who jumped ship at the first sign of trouble. That sucked, but it's too be expected. There were many others who stayed and fought the good fight.

Imagine having a print magazine about the dotcom industry in 2000 that was 300 pages.... and then the dotcom crash happens and 98% of your revenue goes away while 90% of the companies you cover go away.

It was brutal to say the least.... but it made me into a killer. :-)
4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 have always worked great as DNS servers for me.
There's a big difference between understanding a job and being able to do it.
> only two UUNet DNS servers

I'm talking about their publicly accessible caching DNS servers, of which are there are far more than two. I'm not talking about the ones they register with the domain registrar to host their authoritative zone files. That's completely different.

> both of which are on the same network. You've just exchanged the load from 13 servers across the Inernet to two servers on a single network.

That's not how DNS works. Furthermore, that's the entire role of a cache server.
The witness sounds like an interesting guy in general:

“We have been married for 38 years. He proposed half an hour after we met and I said maybe. After a day, he had convinced me”, she said.
You should check with your attorney and HR person (or company), but employment in the United Stats is largely at will. This means you can change the terms at any time (unless you have a contract that can't be terminated or something).

There are a small number of obscure local laws around a "plant shutdown" that require that you give a certain amount of notice if you're going to a certain number of people. Priceline, if I remember correctly, got in trouble over this back in the dotcom days when they let go of like 100 people.

It's hard to cut salaries, but if your startup is going to die you might have no choice. One startup I remember essentially fired everyone had them reapply for their jobs in order to save the company.

It's hard times... i hope folks make it to the other side.

all the best, jason
"Data is the pollution of the information age. It's a natural byproduct of every computer-mediated interaction. It stays around forever, unless it's disposed of. It is valuable when reused, but it must be done carefully. Otherwise, its after effects are toxic."

I agree with this idea; that's why I prefer the regulation of data collection and storage, rather than use. Allowing companies and governments to collect massive amounts of data about people that they aren't allowed to use in certain ways today is a ticking time bomb. This data is attractive to criminals who aren't bound by laws anyway, and corporate mergers or changing laws can retroactively harm privacy based on data that was previously collected.
Probably it just depends on the dataset. The issue we have with our service (http://lloogg.com) is that you need to take the last N items of logs for every site. To ask for the latest M items should be fast. To push a new log line on the list should be fast. Every kind of MySQL configuration we tried was unable to reach the 10k writes/second we reach with Redis. Obviously. Even when you use MySQL as a btree implementation you get a lot of overhead. Starting from the protocol and the format of the statements, for example.

The idea to encode things with json or other formats in a blog text is just a ugly hack. People are using this because they are desperate, not because is good computer science. They started with mysql, know mysql, hacked with mysql. Clearly will try to fix their site with MySQL.

The json+blob can work as long as the data that's stored in this fields is trivial to serialize-deserialize. What about having a 10000 elements list in every blob and at every page view you need to append an element?

So: great hack, you found a way to work with the tools you have, but this does not mean in any way that fast key-value persistent DBs don't have something to say into the web-scale theater.
My reasons:

- Centralize DNS settings to one place for my mini-itx (that I take to coffeeshops with me and pipe through my laptop) and any VMs running on that machine or my laptop.

- Centralize ad-hoc and "rigged" hostname settings for all these things, my local /etc/hosts names are all propagated to anything using the server.

- Non multi-machine consideration: caching. There's almost zero overhead to setting up dnsmasq, may as well take advantage of a local dns cache (browser cache is only good for web browsing). I can tell the difference, especially on some networks.
> Also you need to eat vitamins

Since when did "vitamins" replace "fruit and vegetables"?
Ha ha. Nice theory, but sometimes in the real world you have no choice but to use a particular third-party interface even if it isn't perfectly suitable.
That's just like Herbert Kroemer's Conservation of Misery. PhD students in ECE at UCSB know all about that.
If it was a simple algorithm, yes. I believe you have missed the humour, so let me make this clear: I have absolutely no interest in your passwords.
The Death of Business-Method Patents
Malaysia.
Ask HN: Books That Gratify One's Intellectual Curiosity?
Books to Delight the Mind?

I searched Search YC and did a site-restricted search of HN on Google to look for previous threads on best books. New participants have joined since the last thread was active, so I'll ask here for suggestions of books that delight the mind, and I'll include some previous suggestions. I will intentionally omit books that don't purport to be nonfiction, just to emphasize the nonfiction titles that are so neglected by so many Web-based best book lists. All of your further suggestions are very welcome.

Mindset, by Carol Dweck. As one HN reader commented, "It'll change the way you think about the way you think." Highly recommended.

Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler.

Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte.

Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb.

E. W. Bovill's English Country Life 1780-1830 was recommended by pg a while ago.

My favorite so far this year is What Intelligence Tests Miss by Keith Stanovich (2009).

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/030012385X/

My favorite book I read in 2007 was What Is Intelligence by James R. Flynn, which is just about to come out in a new expanded edition (2009).

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Expanded-PB-Beyond/dp/0521741475/

My favorite book I read in 2008 was The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by R. Dale Guthrie (published 2006).

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp/0226311260/

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, by Roger Penrose.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Lots of HN readers suggest reading lots of Feynman, and I agree.

Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recommended by multiple HN readers in most threads like this.

Robert Pirsig's book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand.

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston.

Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell.

Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner.

Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein.

The art of war by Sun Tzu.

The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene.

The Design of Everyday Things (formerly The Psychology of Everyday Things) by Donald Norman.

Many HN readers recommend Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) and I heartily agree with that recommendation.

Code by Charles Petzold.

Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein (CLRS).

Code Complete by Steve McConnnell.

The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks is a very thoughtful book.

Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown by Roxy Peck, George Casella, George W. Cobb, and Roger Hoerl.

Introduction to the Practice of Statistics by David S. Moore and George P. McCabe.

Workshop Statistics: Discovery with Data by Allan J. Rossman and Beth Chance.
Mapping CraigsList Housing Ads
You of course can do it since all modern web search is graph-based. The real question, and one I don't have an answer to, is at what point do the additional performance of multiple nodes begin to trump the induced network latencies.

Splitting things is the relatively easy part -- it's building the consistency model for multi-node systems that's tricky.

For read-write partitioning it's pretty simple -- each item is largely independent; it has its columns of data and is handled by an index, so once you're just reading / writing / updating items, it's no problem to do the hashing from key to index then using that index to locate the appropriate node.

The devil is of course in the details. If we see that barrier approaching we'll plan ahead for scaling out this way.

However, just doing some quick calculations, looks like the English wikipedia gets 5.4 billion page views per month, which translates to about 2100 per second. On my MacBook I get an average query time on our profile dataset for wikipedia's graph of 2.5 ms per query -- meaning 400 requests per second, extrapolating from there, scaling that up to 6x that on a hefty server doesn't seem unreasonable, and that ignores the fact that we could go further in caching the results (since most of them would be duplicate requests) to push that number up even higher.

So, yeah, it's an issue that's in the back of our heads, but not one we're currently dreading.
The Debt/Consumption Sham
Piece is 5% editorial on American politics, 95% on building a sustainable lifestyle and how the author got out of corporate life by living ultra-frugal and started his own company that's never had debt. Really inspiring piece.
I hate to be a wet blanket, but didn't http://www.housingmaps.com/ do that like years ago?
For those interested in the project, I also wrote up a short blog post about it at: http://www.trailbehind.com/trips/view_report/115

Any feedback or bug reports you have are much appreciated.
Read my blog post above. I acknowledge them and talk about the improvements we made.

For example, HousingMaps.com maps a couple dozen cities, and we map all 326 US cities.
It's not jQuery, but I've been working on moving LangPop.com to Flotr:

http://solutoire.com/flotr/
Piece is 5% editorial on American politics, 95% on building a sustainable lifestyle and how the author got out of corporate life by living ultra-frugal and started his own company that's never had debt. Skip the brief part on politics and read on, how the author built his life is pretty inspiring.
is your hotmail password a typo? should it be m34m349?
I had recently written off Yahoo as dead. Today, I hardly use any of their products at all, except Flickr.

My Yahoo Mail is the old outdated version because their updated version seemed more designed to deliver ads than user experience and all it does is deliver spam.

Calendar, briefcase, mail, search, news, finance - I now do all of these on Google where the technology is faster and cleaner. Innovation appears to have died at Yahoo.

That said, her comments here made me rethink my writing them off. Semel and Yang really did a number on this company. Semel was a looter who never wanted to get his hands dirty with operations and Yang's head is in the clouds.

This letter is a good start, let's hope Yang has the wisdom and humility to not get in the way. I believe he's still on the board.
It is really excited to see how closely each YC company work together with each other.

off-topic: It was cool to see you in UIUC. I like what you said in the end of the event. We should keep more time on development of the product instead of attending those startup events.
On my MacBook I get an average query time on our profile dataset for wikipedia's graph of 2.5 ms per query

Is the dataset changing (being written to) while you make those queries?
Every time I read something by Schneier, I'm impressed with just how well he's able to put things. He's somehow able to impart the gravity of things without coming across like he's fear-mongering. I wonder how he's able to write so eloquently and accessibly on security, which is usually hard to do - I'd like to be able to write that well.
Is it true that Korean brands like Samsung don't sell at all?
Clearwire (WiMAX ISP) is hiring for engineering support in Las Vegas
The job is right between the NOC and various engineering groups. If you are looking to step up from a NOC role into the first parts of engineering, this is for you. WiMAX is up and coming, poised to change the broadband game. Come see what we are all about and work on the cutting edge of technology. Great group of self proclaimed geeks working on some pretty exciting new gear. The group troubleshoots and implements new technologies across the entirety of the network. We work hard and have fun doing it! Come join the team.
I'm kind of surprised that the comments here are so positive. What does this letter really say?

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure

OK, what is it?

the notorious silos are gone

To be replaced by....

I’m creating a new Customer Advocacy group ... Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.

(Yawn.)

Maybe I don't know enough about Yahoo to understand this post's significance. But it strikes me as a generic, "there's a new sheriff in town" kind of post, meant to rally the troops... meh.
Increasing the number of shards is similar to changing the backend infrastructure, but simpler. Downtime obviously isn't acceptable, so when switching from one system to the next, we have a period during which we write to both so that it is safe to read from either one. Other schemes could be used for resharding, but this is simple enough and also works for other changes, and in practice we've changed the schema more often than the number of shards.

Also, keep in mind that it is ok to have more shards than you really need (multiple shards can run on the same machine, for example), so resharding needn't be a common operation.
Personally, I use nano. This is not out of ignorance, mental damage, or a deep moral perversion as my friends that use emacs and vi insist. I want an editor which is small and quick to install. It must be available on all platforms and easy to install (if there's no Debian/Ubuntu package in the main repositories, forget it). I'm not going to mess around with configuring it.

Most sane people would use mg under these circumstances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mg_(editor)

But seriously, why optimize for such an uncommon case? 99% of the time you'll be programming at your own workstation, where you can install and reconfigure anything you want.

I am particularly excited about finally having an editor that's not written in C.

Hmm, I wonder if such a thing has existed since the early 80s? I think it starts with an E...

(Yes, Emacs has a little C, but so does Ruby. The important stuff that you will actually want to hack on is written in a high-level language, though.)

Finally, there is yi if you really want to ditch C:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi

It is quite impressive.
"The trouble is that every time you call a method that throws an exception, you create an immediate crisis: you break the build. Rather than conciously planning an error handling strategy, programmers do something, anything, to make the compiler shut up."

Now, granting that people like that are even paid to write code, do you think they're allowed to work on systems that ship widgets or cause money to change hands?

Frankly, we're having an absurd discussion because the assumption introduced by the original article is absurd. Nobody programs that way, or rather the few people who program that way can't be made productive through any means short of torture.
This is not quite as interesting as it sounds. Ie, they're not using Tipjoy as a way to have real-money prediction markets (which would be wonderful and, sadly, illegal in the US).

I wonder if an unspoken agreement could be reached among like-minded bettors that all debts in inkles get settled via tipjoy tips in dollars. If you could also tip people from your inkles balance then this might be easy enough to establish (even without Inkling officially condoning it).
First, cool. Next, can you share your crawler code?

Lastly, this violates craiglist's usage policy right? Did you research the implications and what did you find?
If I could, I would just Tipjoy Twitter so they finally create the grouping. I understand the big "message bus" idea they are selling and that they are focusing on the core, the scaling, the uptime, etc. But seriously, when will they release the groups themselves? Isn't this a core functionality?

I have friends, colleagues, family, local community, egos, randoms, etc. there. And it is quite a mess.
You make a large number of virtual shards. Each virtual shard is mapped to some machine. When you add a new machine, you move some shards to the new real machine.

Presumably consistent hashing is also helpful here.
Except with 4 official versions of Flash out in the wild, combined with the open source versions to support platforms Adobe neglects, there is no consistency that you can rely on.

Welcome to the web. If you want users to have a consistent experience, write a desktop app.
I saw that line in the article and wondered if that same persuasiveness made him effective in court.
I wonder where you are taking those figures from.
The article stated about 100 queries/sec on a MacBook without any write load (if I interpreted that correctly). If 5k/sec are sustainable on a single box, including writes, then yes, that will probably go a long way.

I'd venture the guess that you'd be talking quite a different budget than a bunch of pizzaboxes in a horizontal setup though. The SAN to handle 5k IOPS alone will set you back by an interesting amount (even more so when you consider mirroring, which you'd probably want to have at that scale). I'd also be worried about the network - GBit/s is probably not going to cut it at that rate anymore.

So, all in all this is precisely why I asked about horizontal scalability.
A setup of 5 machines that handle 1000 reqs/sec each is usually cheaper than a single machine to handle all of the 5000/sec.
This is great. I sketched out a similar design for the Delicious backend, but the team that built it went in a completely different and stupid direction. Oh well.

Mine also had:

- some way to do server locality (I don't think FF needs this)

- some way to do table locality (I don't think FF needs this either)

- per blob versioning and type

- a virtual shard layer, so new machines can be added inexpensively

Sorry for any inadvertent whining, incidentally.
I don't think executing long-running DDL with concurrent read/writes is that bad, especially if the DDL is additive and doesn't lock the whole table.

Concurrency - isn't that what a DB is supposed to do well?
You don't need protein? That's an odd statement to make.
How to restore a deleted program on XP
At least once in your computing history you’ve deleted a program from your PC and after a while you’ve realized you needed it again. Or at least once you made something inside your computer you didn’t like or it messed up something and you didn’t know how to return it back. There is no need to panic! You can easily recover these deleted programs under condition that you have activated the System Restore
That's what I read as well, but maybe I'm just jaded from watching the "silos" to "centralization" pendulum that the last company I worked for kept swinging on back and forth forever.
Everything and More, by David Foster Wallace (history of inifinity)

Lord of Light, by Zelazny (fiction, but transcendent)

The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone (makes the case that Socrates was a genuine threat to his society)

Any book by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Histories, by Herodotus

To Engineer is Human, by Petroski

A History of Knowledge, by Charles Van Doren
Your weight equilibrium is definitely not fixed. It depends almost entirely on your hormone levels. If they are brought in to balance, your weight equilibrium will fall somewhere in a healthy range of 14%-20%. The good thing is it will stay that way. You'll have to keep your blood sugar and other things like cortisol under control, but you won't have to count calories.
Two simple test cases:

http://pastie.org/402608 (read)

http://pastie.org/402607 (mmap)

Each opens a 10M file and accesses aligned pages. Depending on how many bytes in the page you ask the mmap() case to touch, mmap ranges from 10x faster to 10x slower for me. Reading straight through without seeking, it's no contest for me; read() wins. But you knew that.
First, I don't make a habit of reading ToS, so I don't know if I'm in violation or not :)

Second, I posted the code here. It's kind of a mess...
http://www.trailbehind.com/trips/view_report/116