skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two things are slow. One is random rewriting of large file contents like a database does. It isn't that bad, but you wouldn't want to run something like MongoDB on btrfs, although I did so for a while. You may see similar issues with virtualization disk images, although that will depend on how much writing you do. I still do this, but don't do much writing and performance is acceptable.

The other part is fsync calls. Doing a package install on Debian/Ubuntu is an absolute blizzard of fsync calls, several per file. Kernel 3.5 is better than 3.2 and supposedly 3.7 will be even better again. There is also the 'eatmydata' LD_PRELOAD wrapper which nulls out the fsync calls. It was worthwhile using on 3.2, and with 3.5 I don't bother.

That is write issues. I have no noticeable difference in read speeds, and they are limited to the speed of the underlying media, which is pretty much the case for any filesystem. In theory using compression will help for compressible files.
Personally, I'm looking foward to a future where the display of my phone does not get scratched by the keys in my pocket. It will happen, and it will be a good thing. Admittedly, getting rid of my phone would solve the problem equally well.
Get big fast. Amazon is still getting bigger, and accelerating the pace recently.

The "low margin retailer" comments about AWS are funny too. AWS is effectively a billion dollar company, eligible for HUGE subsidies (from retail), under effectively no pressure for revenue/profits, and is ok with 3% margins. That sounds like a nightmare to compete with.
Asia is simply home to most of the world's population. I suspect you will see the same everywhere that's not a 1st world country (which happen to mostly be in North America & Europe).

South America, Africa, (non-EU) Eastern Europe all suffer from this kind of corruption.
I bought jump when it was only $7.99. It worked like magic and I never opened SplashTop since. For anyone reading this, this app is amazing and works both on iPad and iPhone. Since you can get it for free from the developer, then you can't lose. Definitely gonna try it when I upgrade my windows machine. So far it works great to access my mbp
If you see the comments here, there are still a LOT of doubters. Which surprises me a lot, this product is genius. With so much skepticism, if Lockitron was a stock, I would buy it.
高级黑 LOL
Frances says Oui to Innovation, while startups say Non to France
IPad Mini Pricing & Segmentation
Ext4 Data Corruption Bug - Theo Tso: "people shouldn't panic"
Apple would get a huge benefit from integrating their UI code bases, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. I and a lot of other developers dream about the day Apple will deliver a modern and saner Cocoa implemented with CALayers.

If that happens they'd have the resources needed to properly fix these issues that haunt us all.
The design is that there really isn't a "desktop mode". the desktop is a feature/surface of the system, it's not something you switch your whole computer into.
$2,000 is better but even that's rough. Consider you have $7 commission. With each $1,000 purchase, you have to earn 0.70% just to earn back that $7. If you sell that $1,000 purchase, it'll cost another 0.70%, totaling 1.4% in fees.

Based on your strategy you're probably incrementally purchasing and the selling in bulk so the sell commission isn't as damaging but losing 0.70% of an investment right off the bat makes it hard to be profitable. Even half that amount, if you increase your lots to $2,000, is painful.
Do you think these bugs could be fixed in parallel? i.e. Apple is rich, just throw more devs at it? Or are there interactions, so that adding more developers would make it later?
The simple pattern is a popular myth. For ex, you didn't list Longhorn (after XP) that was such a fiasco that after 3 years of development it was completely scrapped. This was an overly ambitious release with a new relational db filesystem (winfs), new graphics stack (avalon), and new networking stack (indigo). It didn't converge. The team forked Windows Server 2003 and rushed out Vista with as much of the intention (but not code) as it could from previous development. I was on the windows team from 98-11.
This is the next stage of Google's Interview Process, post riddles on the Internet, hire the people who solve it.
> Without, conformance tests different interpretations of a spec lead to divergent behavior.

I think you mean either:

> Without conformance tests incorrect interpretations of a spec lead to divergent behavior

Or

> Without conformance tests different interpretations of an ambiguous spec lead to divergent behavior.

Conformance tests should test specific behavior defined in the spec. Tests will never (or rarely) prove spec conformance but spec conformance should always prove test conformance.
Sorry, What I meant to really say is specs are not sufficient. Sure specs are important. But even with specs, without comprehensive conformance tests implementations will diverge.

I work on the WebGL spec and tests based off the OpenGL ES spec and tests. Even though the OpenGL ES spec is long and detailed, every edge case for which there is no test is broken or different in one driver or another.
Run for the hills!
It would be interesting to see numbers from some less beefy
OOO cpu (like pentium pro or cortex a9). The tested
processors take the OOO to extreme lengths.

edit: there's a graph in http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~sudeep/teaching/ppt_554/lectu... that shows ARM A8->A9 speedup around 20% on most SPECint benchmarks, and part of that is from other improvements besides the OOO.
Keep telling yourself that :-).
I'm just wondering whether a better solution to this is a polite warning in the UI... Did you mean []() instead of ()[]?
I think we make Facebook to me more than they really are - After using them for 5+ years, and accumulating the regular collection of 500+ friends and 40 or so family members, I finally got a little weirded out over how detailed the timeline was regarding my life. So, one day, I deleted my facebook account.

I'm happy to report not a single thing changed in my life. No fewer parties, snowboarding events, burning man engagements, or family connections. Everyone who was my friend (Defined as "People who will come and help me move or visit me in hospital") remained my friend and keep in pretty much the same amount of contact.
Fixed Gear Wheel
Totally agree. Once again, I may read too much sci-fi, but I think the end game (as it should be) to technological progress is the elimination of labor, completely. This probably won't happen in my lifetime, but assuming civilization can survive long enough, I believe it is inevitable. I can't even imagine what a society would look like under these conditions..., a post-scarcity economy would be a good starting point, I suppose.

I will definitely put that book on my 'to read' list. Very rarely have I been disappointed by an HN recommendation.
The birth of Skynet?
Creating A Big Data Talent Market
Why I Threw Away My Ferrari Gear
On conference goodies
I'm pretty sure that the history of Suharto's fall is wrapped up in fallings out with various powerful US interests, including those with large holdings in resource mining.
4 French Investment funds are leaving France due to tax code changes
I like the wikipedia syntax better for this [url text]. It's much easier to remember.
If I was the Chinese - I'd just give him a codename like the CIA does with their assets.

Then just change it every so often.
Ha, no I was the agent developer who put the GC instrumentation in for 1.9 :) back in 'the day'
Man with that 20/20 hindsight you'd be a perfect historian. Can't say it does you much credit as a stock analyst though.
Stupid idea?
Initial goal of desktop linux was to provide a 'free as in free speech' desktop. It was not a stupid idea and has worked out just fine.

It was so damn successful on that goal that at some point (early 2000's) we thought we could reach world domination without any heavy investment.

I have a very functional, good looking, modern 'free' desktop.

Disclaimer: Im a KDE contributor.
Ive noticed that there is too much spam concerning PS3 on the internet, perhaps Sony itself or a contractor has the mission to pollute search-phrases like "ps3 hack, ps3 custom firmware" and so on. Before these where leaked the first 3 pages on google for anything relating to hacking the ps3, custom brew etc, where links to really sketchy forums with really sketchy downloads - all leading to similar archives of "custom" firmware for 4.10 for example, the size of ~250MiB which was password locked and you where told to fill out a form on several sites to get the password, basically just a huge time waste.

It makes sense, to combat piracy by using spam/scam techniques. That will keep the pirates or would-be pirates out.
and I, for my sins, am writing some Pick Basic

http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BasicSource
Marissa Meyer. Not a bad start. A lot of work to be done.
There are degrees of protection. No protection is perfect, but you're a lot less likely to be totally wiped out with a diversified portfolio. 100% of my wealth is in company A, and it goes bankrupt, I have nothing. If I have it in two companies, unless they are perfectly interdependent, I lower my likelihood of being completely wiped out from 100% to <100%. Concentrating wealth in a single company increases the variance in your outcome, which is something most people consider bad in financial planning. It also requires active management, because even most temporarily successful companies do eventually go bankrupt.

This is basic personal finance. TBH, I'm really surprised your comments aren't all at the lightest shade of gray already.
> The price is much lower than for previous versions of Windows, this makes me suspect that we should start expecting new releases of Windows much more frequently, similar to how Apple does it.

I absolutely don't think so at all. I think the lower price is because they want people using the metro app store, because they want an app ecosystem to make them money the way Google / Amazon / Apple do right now. They dind't backport Metro so Metro apps are Windows 8 only, so it is in their best interests to get as many people on the platform as fast as possible to maximize app development and maximize profits from app sales.
And just like how many people are running Mate and XFCE now (gtk2 based) many people will be running Windows 7 (me) for the forseeable future!
Popular is the new good - and that's ok
I assume this with any kind of nexus between politics and business - doesn't matter which country.

I've always found it funny that we pay those who control the budgets of trillion dollar economies so little as compared to their private sector counterparts. I mean - what would you pay the CEO of a trillion dollar corporation?

Paying public servants so little makes it relatively easy to either buy their favour or have their favor bestowed upon you with insignificant sums of money. Give ~1% of yearly profits to campaign finance - get a $10 billion dollar defense contract, or relaxed loans or a stronger monopoly.

It's just legalised bribery.
The camera that recorded the video of the computers had to be shielded.
Oh man! I lost a bunch on OCZ too. :\
What I really miss in Gruber's markdown is a way to hint syntax highlighting. For example, on Github:

```javascript
alert('woohoo');
```
The part about the "others" isn't really true. Paul and Robert had founded two companies together and Paul had been the CEO of a medium sized startup and taken it through the acquisition process.

Also, at least in the earlier YC batches before there were more folks helping out, Jessica definitely felt like the operations person; like she was the one that actually made things happen.
If you have a small computer or electronics that need sheilding you can just place them inside a microwave (obviously not one turned on) as by design they are faraday cages designed to sheild against microwaves leaking out. They also work to sheild microwaves getting in. Cheap, simple solution.

There again most milatary equipment and the like are generaly made to counter EMP type exposures so I do wonder what this new toy's feild of play will actualy be.
Reclip.It
Integrating into Visual Studio settings
http://www.quantified-mind.com/tests/sorting/practice/practi... - input via numeric keys doesn't work here, but asdf keys does.
I'd respectfully submit that if your wife is writing a novel with actual line break characters at the end of each visual line, rather than only at the end of paragraphs, she's kind of an edge case. "Normal people" who have been using word processors since the late 70s have had it drilled into their head that you only hit return at the end of a paragraph.

It's my suspicion that Markdown was written the way it was solely to handle the case of blockquotes having ">" characters at the start of each line, and the reason that mattered is because BBEdit and Mailsmith had commands to wrap text that way, chiefly for quoting mail messages. This happens to fit in very nicely with the way Vim and Emacs wrap paragraphs, and I know there are people who've written novels in both. But I assure you that the vast majority of fiction writers are used to word processors, and for that matter, so are the vast majority of users typing things into text boxes. And if those users wrote a little poem

That had lines
Which looked like this
And failed to rhyme
Because they weren't really poets

...the chances are they would just hit return at the end of every line, because that is the way every program they have used in their entire lives works. This is why GitHub and StackOverflow made that change: because Markdown is not like HTML to most people. It's like plain text. In plain text, when you press return it means "end of paragraph." The way Markdown does it -- and the way Hacker News does it, I just discovered! -- violates the principle of least surprise. I am not writing HTML, I am writing text, and I expect it to act like text.

(For what it's worth, I've written a collection of short stories in Markdown and created the EPUB from that using my own Python scripts to do so. I am an edge case. Anyone who is writing fiction in a text editor instead of a word processor is also an edge case. Sorry, but it's the truth.)
Or why not simplify the syntax by using the same delimiter for both text and URL:

[something][http://whatever.com]

As far as I know, this should be mostly backwards-compatible with current Markdown.
>The question was posed under the assumption that I already do know the languages and am a competent programmer.

In that sense I would say you can learn the framework fast and start using it. so go for it.
>What do you suggest?
Thats not something I can tell. It really depends on you.
FWIW, Tom Preston-Werner is Cofounder & CEO at GitHub

Edit: His LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tom-preston-werner/4/122/382
It's rare to see successive and extensive news coverage of corruption among major Chinese Communist Party leaders, and there's been 3 this year already: Bo Xilai in March, Xi Jinping in June, and now Wen Jiabao.

This year's unusual because 7 major members of the Politburo Standing Committee are stepping down and their replacements will be selected at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This is the reason the dueling political factions are aggressively ousting eachother, or else stories about corruption would never have made it to major media outlets.

The Congress was originally scheduled to commence November 4th (or sometime just before the US presidential elections) but was suddenly changed to November 8th. I don't think there's been official commentary on the last minute date change, but it's pretty obvious the Chinese party leaders want to know who's going to be the next US president first so they could "adjust" the makeup of of the Chinese political body accordingly.

I'm impressed by Bloomberg's and NYT's coverage. There's so much stuff that gets suppressed, even when tidbits of stories go viral on Weibo, the entire story almost never makes it over to this side of the Atlantic in one piece.
I don't understand what you mean.

Ubuntu has so far lead the charge with the Linux desktop and even back in 2005 the user experience was atrocious (no fault of their own).

The open source community should've just given up and transferred resources to FireFox, servers and the Linux kernel - because so far net investment in desktop Linux has had negative ROI.

Just look at the example of Plan9 to see why.
I've been playing with btrfs under the 3.7 prerelease kernel on an arch kvm with a virtio disks, and with lzo compression btrfs is kicking some serious read / write butt vs every other major filesystem I can think of. Given sufficient hardware, of course. Haven't tried it on an ssd though, only on 7200rpm turnstables.
Regarding your first point, I don't have an answer. But, for a more ironic take on the issue, please read 'Player Piano' by Vonnegut.

Regarding your second point, I addressed this in the other post, but post-scarcity economics seems to be the best 'thought experiment' as to what a future society would look like. I truly believe that we are entering an age where human labor will become obsolete. It may take a while but, its going to happen.
3G Phones for Dummies
How Technology Is Muscling In On Our Sleep
Here are my bite-sized reactions to each talk:
http://blog.squarepoet.com/post/34350209686/startup-school-2...

I felt a recurring theme was "don't give up"... so I'll really try to remember that lesson when I hit future roadblocks.

I enjoyed attending and meeting some of you in person. Definitely looking forward to next year's edition!
> but if you have a useless PS3 with the latest official firmware and want to put it to a better use (XMBC, linux, whatever) there's nothing for you.

I dont think thats correct. With these keys you can sign whatever you like and have it run on the PS3.
"Just?" That's $9000/month for standard storage on S3 - $7000 for reduced redundancy. Each download would cost them about $4000 in bandwidth fees.

They already know how to store massive amounts of data, and how to send it over the network. Assuming $100/TB for their own media means it would only cost them about $4000 to store it themselves.

Assuming you have 1Gb/s connection rate, that would take you over 7 days to download. It's probably both cheaper and faster to write the data to disk and ship the disk then to an S3 download.

It reads more like they don't know if or how people want to use this. (The "are interested in exploring how others might be able to interact with or learn from this content if we make it available in bulk.") Simply making the data available doesn't give them feedback.

For example, is it sufficiently worthwhile for them to go through the effort of providing the data on S3, given the costs?
NYTimes is blocked in Tianjin. I was able to get the article about half an hour ago but now the entire site is blocked.
Yes I too do wonder what this is aimed at as for years and years milatary equipment as been made to counter against EMP. Digital rights managment may get interesting one day with this :).
What the anti corruption crusaders are likely to unearth might be a very tiny fraction of tiny fractions of illegitimate wealth. They can do nothing as activists themselves. The financial and other powers these people are too powerful to bring them down. The only other way is to go the political route which Arvind Kejriwal is doing now, but we already know to do anything big in politics you will likely not be able to do it, unless you are corrupt yourself and allow donations from other shady sources.
Indeed. For example: I'm a big fan of Yammer which is a great name in English.

Introducing it to my Dutch colleagues is hilarious, though, because the name effectively means "that sucks" in Dutch ('Jammer' is pronounced the same).
If it's legal for me to carve a smiley face onto my garden gnome shouldn't the garden-gnome seller be oblige[sic] to provide an official way to do it? Why should I need to figure out how to use a chisel? What if the gnome is very fragile so I can't do it without breaking it?

Just as carving a garden-gnome is not intended, manufactured, or expected behavior, there's absolutely NO reason for a phone manufacturer to go out of their way to offer jailbreaking tools. Your statement is completely illogical. Just because it is legal for a user to do something does not mean a company should have to do it. Even if it is legal for a user to do something doesn't mean that they must be able to reasonably do it, it just means if they do there won't be legal ramifications. Your post reeks of self-entitlement and a deep misunderstanding of the actual issue in question.

Another ridiculous example to round it out: Since it is legal for me, as a user, to attempt to install visopsys (an operating system made by one man which is obviously incompatible with everything) on my macbook apple provide drivers and support for installing this OS even though supporting it would likely take thousands of developer hours and gain Apple nothing. Users likely won't be able to install it on their own and developing drivers for it is probably near impossible.

See how your argument is exactly the same as the above? Jailbreaking, just like that OS, is the product of users and as such need only be supported by users. If a company wants to support jailbreaking, such as google allowing chromebook unlocking, that's their prerogative, but there is NO reason to expect or insinuate that a company should actually provide support for some random operation a user has come up with that in fact is to the company's detriment.

Honestly, considering the quality of your argument, I question your ability to function in society. If you're not underage (on the order of 7 or so) I highly encourage you to check yourself into the nearest mental facility due to an obvious mental disability manifesting itself as borderline retardation. At the very least I encourage you to GET THE FUCK OFF HACKER NEWS FOREVER because reading your idiotic statements, opinions, and retard-spew is roughly as pleasant, and just as enlightening, as self castration while gargling shit. Save us all the pain of dealing with you and deal with yourself, fatally if necessary.
There are problems but it's not all bad. Sure, some of Apple's technology pushes have turned out to be half-baked, especially those which seem to be more marketing or management driven, such as iCloud syncing, and of course the subject of this article, Game Center. On the other hand, Apple has added some nice incremental improvements recently which will no doubt make life considerably easier once everything is running on iOS 6 as the minimum. Examples include the UIView "auto-layout" system, NSAttributedString support throughout UIKit, UICollectionView, and so on.

Things aren't all that different from the OS X days, where there was often a mixture of good and bad. Letting Apple know when things aren't working right is the first step to improvement.
You could have compared to iTunes instead of Hulu, though. Using that analogy, one company is distributing the vast catalogs of well-established creators, while another is building a studio from the ground up.
I'm sure there are easier ways to take out blackberry messanger. Though the prospect of hoodies out of tinfoil could provide for some comedy moments.
If someone is posting something on a public discussion forum and you don't like some or parts of it, just ignore the post? Or give your opinion?

This news was posted here to generate discussion and that's what happened. Are you not OK with that?

And I second the parent's sentiment: the prize has no value at all. "Karma points" or SO reputation have probably more value to the target population than that.
It'd be a HELL of a lot cheaper and a MUCH faster transfer rate to mail a few really large capacity hard drives full of the data instead of hosting it on S3.

edit: Just saw dalke's response. Great minds think alike!
UK Surface Pre-orders not getting tablets on the 26th