skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
View all pages: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/11/google-spanner-...

Also:
> “We can commit data at two different locations — say the West Coast [of the United States] and Europe — and still have some agreed upon ordering between them,” Fikes says, “So, if the West Coast write happens first and then the one in Europe happens, the whole system knows that — and there’s no possibility of then being viewed in a different order.”

That's a large enough scale that you have to deal with relativity (light takes almost precisely 0.03 seconds to go from Palo Alto to Paris, eg). So in some sense there is no correct ordering. Anyone know how they deal with this? Have they just chosen some arbitrary point to make their reference frame, for purposes of ordering commits?
But time is running out! Unless we find a way to effectively create energy, or we find a way to upload onto a reversible computing substrate, or Dust Theory is real, or we learn how to do alpha-point/line computing, or something else that fixes the problem, our light cone of the universe is not going to be habitable for that much longer and every planck time step counts. While I can't speak for anyone else who wants to live well past 100 years, indeed well past a billion if physics permits it, at least for me it's quite the disturbing conclusion to believe "time isn't running out, just be happy and focus on the present mon!"

I reject the notion that "being happy" is a binary thing or some plateau of state of mind one achieves for some duration, though I think the concept of happiness as a fuzzy cluster of feelings that make one say "I feel happy" is a useful simplification. There are many forms of happiness of many durations, some quite complex and dependent on many variables or past states of mind. The chemical soup in a happy brain has many possible configurations. Even when I feel super-happy I still wonder if perhaps there's a higher form of happiness I could achieve, and then I wonder what sorts of happiness I'd experience with a different mind design (which is why I won't wirehead indefinitely even though wireheading would give all possible forms of human happiness).

To me this post really comes across not as championing "happiness is what matters", but rather the more depressing "be content with your lot in life." No sah! That's for religious folk and for people who just crossed Atheist River but haven't finished questioning all their religious indoctrination! A better message I think is simply "If you aren't feeling the way you want to feel, change something. You don't have to feel that way you know, even if changing is really hard and takes years." But that's not really profound...
Cool things you can do with Perl 5.14
With the second part of item 3 being the determinant factor.
Google and Facebook. Like it or not those two are already in the double-digit percentage.
Yes, but maybe the the internet rate is that low, because it is effectively being subsidized by the telephone revenue (with a hefty profit on the side of course). If telcos all of a sudden started making 10 cents instead of 500 euros then they wouldn't be in business for very long, and then who would manage the network?
An Interview with Ruby's Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
I know a number of people under 22 that have their pilot license. While not a huge percentage, not rare either. And the initial time is not that long at all.
Please someone tell me where you can buy an atomic clock :-?
Yeah, then you have them. And it's awesome and you wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
So far as I know, the PragProg discount is still valid[1]. I think it's valid all day today. Load up your cart, and as you go through the purchasing process, there's a button to apply coupons. Click there, and enter the word TURKEY (not sure if it's case sensitive; all caps works for me). That should get you a 40% discount. Enjoy.

[1] Yup, just confirmed. Here's the original blog post, which I'll submit to HN as well: http://pragprog.com/news/black-friday-cyber-monday-40-off-sa....
Can anyone comment on the quality of O'Reilly books these days? I used to read them long long ago but then their editing standards seemed to take a dive and companies like Apress and pragprog started producing much better quality.
I did this as well - it was pretty easy to for example modify the prices for towers of the tower defense game "Radiant Defense"

imo: Microsoft could have put more effort in this topic to make it a little bit safer
I recommend joining the mailing list too. There's one book on sale nearly every day, and a category (e.g. Python, Ruby, data mining, etc.) every few weeks. If you aren't in a rush to buy your books, keep a wishlist and pick them up as they go on sale.
Codersumo - Challenge your inner sumo coder.
I love kickstarter, I really do. There's a lot of issues with the way capital is currently generated that puts the small guy at a disadvantage.

However, I really think the kickstarter team needs to take a closer look at how things are going today. This is but one example. Out of the many kickstarters I've contributed to, only one has shipped and only one more appears to have had any progress in the past 6 months. My friends have had very similar experiences and all of us have said we probably won't be contributing as much for a while. It kind of ruins the idea if a very large percentage of the projects fail or are halted (e.g. trademark disputes).
[PragProg] Black Friday/Cyber Monday 40% off Sale
> The TLDR here is that the OP is a nihilist and all that really matters is your own happiness.

I wouldn't go that far. Sounds to me like the OP is telling those who are obsessed with altruistic life goals, to the point where it is paralyzing them with anxiety and endless self-judgment, to relax, chill out, and focus on their own happiness once in a while.

In any case, there's nothing wrong with being a nihilist. For all you know I'm a figment of your imagination.
I think it's more like if a programmer locked himself away for 14 years and then announced he'd written an OS before anyone else. Even if the whole thing is riddled with bugs (and let's not forget this programmer is more on the Bernstein end of things, precision and confidence are high) it's still some place potentially worth exploring.

But nobody would quite yet. Instead he announces one more thing, he's used this OS to control a rocket ship and send a satellite to Mars far before anyone else has even come close!

Now, assuming he didn't lie there, you really want to figure out what he invented because he just seems to be vastly more powerful than you.
Dart. You debug in Dart and it's (generally) considered a bug if the generated JS deviates in behavior. The JS is rather readable, if needed. It also runs server-side.
UX2012 en Argentina: Jornada de Experiencia de Usuario
UX2012 es el principal evento profesional en Argentina sobre Experiencia de Usuario, Usabilidad, Diseño de Interacción, Accesibilidad y temáticas relacionadas.

La jornada se realizará el día 28 de noviembre de 2012 de 9 a 19 hs. en el Centro Cultural General San Martín de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, en el marco del Día Mundial de la Usabilidad. Estará orientada a profesionales y estudiantes de diseño, comunicación y desarrollo, que busquen generar una buena experiencia de usuario en sus productos digitales.
What kind of accuracy exists between servers inside the same data center? I assume there are some internal delays (OS stacks, switches, etc) when synchronizing time inside a server group.

I mean, even if you had a picosecond accurate clock available for use inside a server farm, you would still need a way to query it with a known (not necessarily zero; just known) latency to synchronize several machines. Servers are not known latency machines (unless specialized hardware is involved).

How is that accomplished?

And what happens when two transactions happen below the system accuracy limit? (like two transactions pertaining to the same data, 20ns apart, in different servers; impossible to order).

Surely they have solved this, I just wonder how.
Here you go: http://www.thinksrs.com/products/PRS10.htm
Oh, wow, "Enterprisons." You're quite witty and original, I must say.
Oh, awesome thanks. Got myself confused on the expiry time.
I could use a good book on learning Javascript. Anyone have any recommendations?

Background: I'm not a programmer, I just do some things in my spare time. I did a little something with Django and Bootstrap over the weekend, but I could really only use Bootstrap for the CSS to make it look good without knowing how the Javascript end works. So I'm not completely new to programming though still really a beginner but would be completely new to Javascript.
75% Off Growth Hacking Course for #Startups on Udemy. ONE DAY ONLY
You get 60% off on orders over $100, so you've probably stocked up on ebooks :)
you're confusing finite speed of light and relativity - they're not really the same (although they are of course related). the relativistic sense of "no correct ordering" is irrelevant to the problem that google are solving (two observers, watching google's machines, from different, high-speed spaceships, may still disagree about the order of what happens in paris and the usa, or even in two machines in the same datacentre, but google doesn't care).

they've chosen gps time as a universal clock.
I can indeed confirm that only the first example is displayed in firefox (17.0 on Windows XP)
What I mean is: if you try, starting from nothing, to make up the definition of some new kind of object, and then start proving things about it, most of the time you find that you've defined a group or something that reduces to a group. I don't have a quantitative measure of this (I can't really define a probability distribution for "random objects you think up"), it's just personal experience. Put another way: I find it quite hard to think up a new object that doesn't turn out to just be a group.

Have you tried thinking up new mathematical objects? What do you tend to come up with? (Not snarky, I'm genuinely interested - maybe some people's creativity works differently to mine)
m( "Spanner" is the colloquial German word for voyeur. Not the best name for a database. :)
Did you read the article? This is probably a case of a headline chosen by the editor of the publication and not the author of the article.
Is this useful for someone with no knowledge of functional programming languages? I'm certainly interested in the topic.

I recently spent some time learning [ChucK](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu), and used it to generate sound effects for my game.
After several unsatisfactory crops with audacity and other tools (bfxr, etc), I found it to be a real pleasure to do the task with a text editor and terminal instead. I'm happy with the result, but I think I'd like to continue learning audio programming.
That's a really neat birthday present! Awesome.
I was just looking at this, seem to be 2-3x the price, and, in theory, last 6 times longer, so you win without the cost savings, which are about $1/(hour/day)/year/100W (incandescent equivalent, so 4 rooms with 100W lighting each on for 3 hours a day saves $12/year, compared to CFL, so worth replacing CFL with LED as the CFLs die.
They copied it a long time ago. The wiki has added many more compilers since then, including all the ones mentioned below.
Tired of estimations? Try the custom hack
I'm not trampling over anybody in a stampede to the iOS store, and also I'm staying at Win32 and ignoring WinRT platform completely precisely for that reason: lack of developer freedom.

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will drop entire WinRT thing someday, or there will be alternative Win32 implementation from other vendor. As for WinRT, they have invented a lot of similar toys last years, played them for some short time, and abandoned them.

In any case, Win32 code base and user base is too large, so this platform will be supported in some way for the next 50+ years.
> it’s taken for granted you can pay online and have goods delivered to your door. While this isn’t the case yet in many big markets in Asia

Just nitpicking here but I found this comment a bit strange. eCommerce is HUGE at least in China. Taobao for example generated 3 billions US$ in sales in 24 hours recently.
Or you have them and spend the next thirty years regretting it. Which almost no-one will publicly admit, due to the public stigma, and the obvious pain it would cause their children. This is I think the pain point of this article. I personally know two people who wish they had never had children, but they would never come out and say that publicly.
> I cannot think of a single product/thing/whatever that accomplished the goal you mentioned.

Really? Let's look at his goal again (my emphasis):

> make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient.

Hey, a union! That makes his claim a lot weaker and far easier to justify. Now we'll be generous and ask for 10%, the lowest double-digit percent, of the population. What's a candidate technology that immediately comes to my mind in the past? The microcomputer. Let's suppose the microcomputer revolution didn't begin until 1975. The world population in 1975 was about 4 billion, ten percent of that is 400 million, which is a little more than the current US population. Do you think that over the last 40 years, the microcomputer has not achieved an improvement in any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for just 400 million people? What planet are you living on? I'd say the microcomputer even satisfies the intersection of those improvements as well, but that was not the parent's claim for a goal.

Maybe it's hard to achieve the goal over a short timespan you say. Let's pick a more modern example, then. If you believe Facebook, they have over 800m active users worldwide, which satisfies the 10% barrier quite nicely for our bloated 7 billion world population, and they've been around for less than a decade. Are you going to say that Facebook doesn't improve any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for those active users? Come on. I don't particularly like Facebook myself but I wouldn't make such a negative claim.

Ed: looks like I was beat to the punch on the obvious example of Facebook.
try the other book I shared then, it will probably suit you better.
Many of those items are things that can be performed in plain sight because non-saboteurs could believably be doing them.

For example, if a developer at your organization complains they're held up because their PC has 1 gigabyte of RAM instead of 8, that might be 5.11.c.5 sabotage ('do poor work and blame your tools') or it might be because they legitimately need more RAM to run hefty modern IDEs.

Needless to say, treating requests for better equipment as sabotage when they're legitimate probably isn't going to help your organization. The same could probably be said for most of the activities listed in that section.
Tragically, the author suffers from a severe mental illness and has been banned from HN, Reddit and others.
Show HN: Instagram Slideshow with AngularJS and CSS
Thanks for the recomendation, I just bought the book. I am trying to learm more about visualizations (and D3). Any other recomendation?
Woah, wait a minute? Someone contacts Kickstarter and alleges that a paying customer of theirs is using the Kickstarter platform to violate the law and Kickstarter's only response is to contact the customer directly? This has to be some kind of joke, right?
Yes sorry about that - as a general rule for comments and emails, if I put f%%k in there, I really should rethink it.

opendna below suggests there is research that small (isolated) pools of labour fail to benefit from the intuitive supply/demand wage growth.

My antennea are wavering - this feels like a disruption happening. If I ever pick up my research MSc I think this will be the perfect subject.
You might be mistakenly projecting your own experience here. There a plenty of unwanted children.
I am on one of the teams in this documentary. They are catching some amazing footage of dynamics and challenges startsups face. Worth whatever you can afford to give on IndieGogo :-)
For what it's worth, most of the physicians I know presume that this was set up expressly to incentivize physicians to become hospital employess. The thought is that when the time comes to ratchet down reimbursements, the hospitals have no choice, while independent physicians vote with their feet by choosing not to participate. There are already a few internists I know who will not take new Medicare patients, even though that's not supposed to be charity reimbursement.
Social Q&A Network From Riga With 9 Million Daily Uniques - Ask.Fm
Almost everything means something unexpected in some language somewhere.
I would be wary of cutting out too much fiction as some great minds put down their thoughts and ideas through fiction. e.g. Hemmingway, Orwell or Steinbeck - there are probably many others. But yes be selective.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why all programmers, sysadmins and so on use a US keyboard layout.
For anyone reading this saying "That's not me" just remember... YOU ARE NOT A STATISTIC
You're probably correct about the subsidization, but the solution is to remove the monopolistic protections created by government regulations and infrastructure lock-in then let the telcos compete to see where that real price is.
Astrophysicists On The Verge Of Spotting Gravitational Waves
The article title is off--the article seems to focus more on a woman not wanting to be domestic as being totally normal, but doing or being so is not accepted in American society.

They miss the opposite stigma, which I've noticed--being a young mother who wants to be domestic is often pooh poohed on.
Looking at the paper it looks like instead of dealing with exact moments in time (eg timestamps) they have ranges (they call them intervals).

From the Spanner paper: "TrueTime explicitly represents time as a TTinterval, which is an interval with bounded time uncertainty (unlike standard time interfaces that give clients no notion of uncertainty)"

By representing time as intervals you can tell if one interval is definitely before or after another interval. If the intervals overlap however, then it means there's some uncertainty. I haven't quite got through the paper far enough to undersand how this kind of thing is handled. :-)

But I'm guessing that this kind of design means they're always consciously designing with error in mind. There's probably some acceptable amount of error in timing that they're able to carefully manage.

Edit: link to the paper for the lazy [pdf] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

Edit 2: It looks like the error typically ranges from 0 to 7ms averaging around 4ms. Outages can cause spikes in this error margin.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9686219/I-am-bitterly...
The only problem is that they're motivated to reduce your consumption to mask their price increases and reduce their costs to maximise their profits.

Just like petrol/gas, spend your money to buy fuel efficient cars, petrol costs more, no noticeable difference in the bank. Everyone has to get on the wagon or be priced out. It's like an armed robbery, but the gun is an increasing cost of living, with the threat of jail if you can't pay.
Winter ice helps to protect lake water from evaporation and keep water levels high. In recent years ice hasn't been as plentiful: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/31/455612/great-lak...

Keep in mind that 2012 was an very, very warm winter even compared to the years leading up to it.
Super Mario loves self-service SaaS too
Machine gun jetpack
Les cadeaux tendances pour les fêtes de fin d'année.
This is actually the exact opposite of what I thought. To me people with families will take less risk. Extra pressure and time constraints put by supporting the family will cause bad judgement (putting cash flow before long term success, focusing to consultancy to survive etc.)

Not to mention in my experience many geeks will fail under money pressure rather than flourish when it comes to developing a project.
i stopped reading when i saw "JVM".

i really dont get it why this is so popular...
maybe it makes your code faster yes but it comes with all the cluter that is the JVM.

The JVM is a big black box and I think its veryhard to see whats happening inside.

have someone tried to write a patch for the JVM? no? then try!
Having stayed in Melbourne for a while, I am honestly not surprised. Melbourne's climate is normally rather mild, but their short summer periods are brutal.
I don't know for you, but here in Canada companies like Bell, Telus, Cogeco and Videotron have very, very expensive services.

Indeed telcos wouldn't be in business with lowered revenues if they keep their current business model. The thing is this model is based on deception and manipulation rather than creating great products that speaks for themselves.

As for myself, I would much rather have a Telus booth that doesn't look like it's made of marble but rather sell cheap phones that just works. No salesmen with a sales quota trying to pressure me, no overpriced booth, no bullshit.

Telcos only win because most people can't live without their services so they'll buy into them even knowing they get ripped off, keeping the whole thing alive.
Unimaginably advanced? I'm not so sure. What unimaginable advances have happened to the jet engine in the last 30 years?

If you spend all day focusing on silicon chips, then it looks like "technology" moves very fast. But most technologies don't advance at anything near the rate at which integrated circuits have been improving. And even that rate appears to be slowing dramatically.
You should always check your bills to make sure that the estimated usage matches the actual usage. It's not uncommon for them to "estimate" based on the average for the neighborhood/city/state/country.
Not to mention the real issue of regrets isn't regrets for things you didn't do before you died. It's regrets for things you didn't do before you could no longer could do them. Those you have to live with for the rest of your life.
Start reading the spec, get to "For complex types (which we'll discuss later), a null pointer is used" under default initialization

wonderful.
You can't force someone to love the other. Even a child.
How One Startup Is Fixing The Modern Advertising Industry
I don't understand, what's hypocritical about wanting to put a dent in the universe?
"The HN illusion"

Rather, it is perhaps a filter in part created by a Silicon Valley mythology. It's reflection on HN is in large part based on YC's template for success, which in turn draws upon the arc of Graham's own experience.

HN is directed at a more specific species of entrepreneurship than that of the study. The exit strategy of a defense manufacturer is decidedly different than that of the companies YC tends to fund.
While I do think that this has merit, is it actually a viable project that could sustain itself after this initial period of development?

Smalltalk did bring some new ideas to industry back in the 1980s, when we were otherwise still using C, Fortran, COBOL, some Pascal variant, or assembly for most tasks.

These days, however, I'm not so sure that there are any compelling reasons to use it. There are many well-established languages today that offer essentially all of its most practical features, including ones that target the JVM. Its class library does appear outdated these days. Its development environment approach never really proved useful for real-world development in the past.

There are already existing Smalltalk environments of various types, including free and open source ones, but they never seem to get any significant traction, and we never really see them being used for any significant development. What would make this implementation's outcome be any different?