skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"B-tree traversal in real world cases is virtually always going to be I/O or memory bandwidth bound."

I am not an expert on file systems, but have you thought about the following:

- using file names in disk blocks rather than file name hashes means fewer entries per disk block. That, in turn, changes the constant of your B-tree traversal.

- with variable-length keys, keeping your B-trees balanced is tricky, if not practically impossible.

EDIT: disadvantage of using hashes would be that you need to read the filename proper (with small hashes, you cannot ignore hash collisions). That would be an extra I/O. So I guess this would not be beneficial for small directories. Maybe you could start out by having in-block hashes amd filenames and only move the names to a separate block when you need a second block?
"shiny stuff that doesn't work"

Give me a break. Name an international company with 100% success in user happiness and usability with their product(s). Go ahead, try it.

Also, don't act like Android hasn't had faults and failings on their own. Or Windows.

Things aren't ever perfect. The only time there is a real binary system is CS. The world is gray, and Apple has been consistently better than bad. They've been good for me for the most part, with some minor annoyances sure, but to say that their software is "shiny stuff that doesn't work" just shows that you aren't really well versed in the domain that the hyperbole is supposed to explain.
For anything handwritten (cheques, dates on signatures etc.), I use YYYY-Mmm-DD (e.g. 2012-Jan-10), as I can't imagine anyone confusing the meaning of it. I avoid DD-MM-YYYY and MM-DD-YYYY, as I usually end up having to check what I meant. No one has commented on it yet.

Typed, I use YYYY-MM-DD (e.g. 2012-01-10), mainly for its sortability.
Could you say a bit more about this? I currently live in Nashville, TN and thinking of making the 10ish~ hour drive up.
Or you could phone me and then visit me in Paris.
"An oxygen powered jet did not travel the world in 4 hours" - TRUE, as I know of no aircraft that can carry a human at mach 9.

But without an oxidizer combustion is not possible. I don't know of any airplane (jet or propeller) that uses anything but oxygen as it's oxidizer.
The description makes it sound like he was visiting the supposed location of the Ark in Ethiopia (to me, at least):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Our_Lady_Mary_of_Zion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ark_of_the_Covenant#Ethiopia
NASDAQ Welcomes SolarCity to the NASDAQ Global Market
> The sad thing is that actually reading primary sources and not buying into the Alex Jones take on any given policy question does in fact make me a turbonationalist right winger on HN.

Saying the US doesn't detain people without charges makes you a turbonationalist right winger. And ignorant of history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment
Why does Linux enforce a minimum MTU of 552?
I like Authy, but more importantly I simply refused to pay domain squatters for domains.
The Scholar and The Soldier
He is dead wrong on his comment about how there are no incentives on the supply side to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Everyone pays for transit and it is a major cost for any website operator other than something nearly pure text like hacker-news. Even the Tier 1 networks pay each-other transit fees based on ongoing negotiation.

It seems it's very difficult to maintain awareness of where your knowledge is accurate and where it isn't the more success you accumulate as a more passive desiccation maker than in the trenches problem solver.
> when that link is posted to a non-porn subreddit it's more of a problem.

I think that's a seperate concern. Moderators delete bad posts, and the spam filter operates on a per-subreddit basis.

> Reddit is better as a community rather than a dump for links

I'd agree its certainly different as a community than say Digg, but I'm not sure if its for the better because reddit freezes out content creators from using Reddit to syndicate their content.

People posting links to stuff copied onto a pay-per-click image sharing site are pretty far down the food chain. What worries me is that essentially content-creators can't use Reddit without becoming a part of Reddit's community and 'paying their dues' as it is.

Reddit's mods and users have banned or severely punished even major newspapers who wanted to just post their articles on Reddit, and not become Redditors themselves.
This is pretty cool. For some reason I want to click and drag/rotate the 3D model that is onscreen already.

I'd also love to see a picture of what the real thing looks like :)

edit: btw, the font rendering is a little odd on Chrome 23 with Win7 @ http://i.imgur.com/ZvTAs.png
That would be fantastic. As I said, root is very highly polished and you've done a great job. We have something in the pipeline that might make sense to collaborate on. Will shoot you an email to discuss.
Unless you are left handed and hebrew.
Not to discredit Authy here, given they're admirably embracing the open standard, but Google Authenticator happily takes any OTP code.
Cops use Taser on woman buying too many iPhones
The goal is of course that in the end btrfs will have better guarantees than ext4, for example with data and metadata checksums.
> you also get our new Javascript customization service that allows you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code

wtf is this, how it works, what it does, and where can I find more details?
>Friedman wrote a paper on Friedman's Thermostat.

No he didn't.

He just used the WORD "thermostat" once, in an article.

And his use of the word was unrelated to the concept presented in the blog post (which is not Friedman's but older and which nobody calls "Friedman's thermostat" except the author of the blog post).

Here's an analogy for the situation:

David Pogue writes and article titled "The perfect gadget for Christmas", which is simply a review of 10 hot current gadgets.

Then, 30 years later, some blogger writes "How come nobody knows "Pogue's Perfect Gadget" theory? You know the one that says that when you put a cat inside a gadget's enclosure with a quantum based poisoning device the cat's state is both dead and alive?"

He then goes to admit that idea: is not Pogues, it was found earlier, and nobody calls it that -- all the while complaining why people don't know it by his made up name "whereas they do some other Pogue's articles".

The whole blog post smells crank to me...
New OpenAccess journal launches, with REST api endpoint on every article page
Is this one of those blogs generated with markov chains?
Oxygen-Powered Jet Might Someday Travel The World In 4 Hours If Technology Proves Viable And Meets Actual Market Demand At Acceptable Cost

Near as I can tell, the article is mixing up two different things. SABRE is being tested as a rocket engine - it recently got some press on here because they had a successful heat exchanger test which, while pretty cool, does not an engine make. As I understand it since that test the ESA has given the nod to SABRE and believes there isn't any technical reason why the engine won't work.

The article mentions that the main advantage will be that "aircrafts can carry less load in terms of on-board liquid oxygen". This is presumably actually referring to rockets, not aircraft, since conventional jet aircraft already use regular old air. "massive throw-away first stages", again, hopefully refers to rockets, otherwise there might be some expensive property damage when your passenger jet drops its first stage on La Guardia.

There is an actual passenger jet piece, though. A separate initiative called the A2, a hypersonic passenger jet based on a derivative of SABRE. If built, it could apparently travel at Mach 5 and take you halfway around the world in something like 4.6 hours, which is pretty close to 4 if you squint.

All of this stuff is being planned by the same company, and Wikipedia says the plane's coming within 25 years "if there is market demand" - so although this all sounds good, and it's nice they've had a successful test, I think it's safe for now to treat this new oxygen-powered jet as vapourware.

(sorry)
Morphing a 1999-founded 'failure' into a billion-dollar success, over the difficult period of the early 200X's, provides more support for the proposition that Andreesen is a persistent genius, than the proposition he's just been lucky.
Yahoo Is Said to Plan a Board Shake-Up, Adding Levchin
It is a great post.

But let's not fall into the trap of "honest, open sharing" is better than pretending, that pretending is bad, or that either is better than not sharing at all. Lots of people make their lives better by pretending enough so that it becomes so. Lots of people also aren't interested in sharing at all. Lots of what appears to be open honest vulnerability sharing is also posturing and pretending, but it's hard for an outsider to know.

tl;dr- don't judge.
The study of disequillibrium is the only thing importend in the real world.

To explain how the market reaches equillibrium (mostly only in theory) or how it at least sometimes moves towards equillibrium (mostly in the real world) is what economic analysis must provide. Just like Darwin explained what make evolution work.

The Theory behind this is called Market Process Theory, it is mostly created by people from the Austrian School of Economics but also from a lot of swedish economist.
So, now Apple, Godly Apple, is rushing incomplete, knowingly broken products out just to fit with their hardware release schedule?

I don't have a dog in the race, but maybe I'm realizing why Scott was fired.
Right. Back in the day a friend and I got paid to crack a pediatrician's Xenix-based billing system (at the pediatrician's request). He'd forgotten the admin password.

We basically just fired up some crack scripts and let them run, then charged him (what we thought was) a lot of money.

Only later did I realize why he was so happy with the deal, and seemed to think he'd gotten a bargain -- without the admin password he couldn't generate any bills.

I would wager that the amount of receivables in the system exceeded what we charged by at least one order of magnitude, maybe two.
Exactly. The other factor, obviously, is that you have to already have that $5000 and be able to part with it for a while. It doesn't matter that you get it back if you don't have it in the first place.
Looks like the someone from Authy is reading this thread so here goes...

Feedback:

* Registration is a bit complex; all texts to my phone (with the exception of the registration code) are completely useless as the real info is sent to my email address

* Why is my backup encryption key in plain text? A dual-password field with sameness-checks would be better.

* Restoring from backup is... painful.

- I cannot just reregister my phone, I have to go through a reset process online. Ok, fine. I got texts to my phone instantly but the reset email took almost 15 minutes to reach me.

- The app crashes tapping any "GA" item other than the first one.

- I have to type in my encryption key for each "GA" item and the app crashes each and every time.

- The first time I tried to restore authy, after typing in my encryption key to recover the first "GA" item, the app crashed and wouldn't let me recover any of the other items... I had to do the whole process all over again.

* Aside from the above, the app looks and works so much better than Google Authenticator on my iPhone (5). Especially considering I'll be able to recover my tokens when switching phones -- Google Authenticator completely screws this up (broken phone? Get a replacement phone from Apple? Upgrade? All your tokens in Google Authenticator are lost, even if you recover from backup).
"Rubber Room", for me, at least, conjures up a whole different set of images:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/350/h...
This comment is about as insightful as one saying that anyone who serves in the German armed forces in 2012 must be a Nazi sympathist.
This is awesome! Thanks for putting it together.
We just rolled out the site for our OpenAccess journal - eLife (elife.elifesciences.org). We have a REST api for article metadata, hosted by fluidinfo, and our full article XML is available from a github repo: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-articles. We are also hiring: http://www.elifesciences.org/jobs-ui-dev/.
Cool. Too bad I've seen the Github [1] homepage only once, and will never have see it again.

[1] - or any other authenticated service for that matter.
IE flaw allows websites to track your mouse cursor
How do you differentiate yourself to clients who think they could get the same code from some guy for 10x cheaper?
Writing in fountain pen doesn't leave pressure marks, because fountain pens do not require pressure on the paper.

When I'm not doing physics homework in Mathematica, I do it with fountain pen. It's rather enjoyable.
I guess I don't really buy that that rhetoric is what caused "Apple Maps sucks" to be a meme for the last month and a half. I mean, are you saying millions of people were conned into thinking it was inferior to Google Maps?
America Online, the largest Internet access service, said today it will acquire Netscape Communications in a deal valued at $4.2 billion.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-218360.html

HP today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Opsware Inc. (Nasdaq: OPSW), a market-leading data center automation software company, through a cash tender offer for $14.25 per share, or an enterprise value (net of existing cash and debt) of approximately $1.6 billion on a fully diluted basis.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2007/070723xa.html
I believe the comparison images are from the other pad, so some differences are not surprising.

The original images look fine to me - they just look like they were taken with a SLR in low light, which may give a slightly odd/unusual feel to them.
I don't know if likening yourselves to Sauron will assuage our caution to adopt your tool. :)
...don't forget maps. They failed at that too. But I can tell you that it was not necessarily Apple that failed at maps. The same problems I had with Apple maps were there in Magellan GPS and their map and content provider Navteq....which is Apple Maps' map, nav, and data provider.

Ever notice when you were doing the turn-by-turn directions that there is a lag in the marker that leads you to miss or almost miss turns, especially in complex intersections....that lag was a huge issue 8 years ago, as it is today. In all that time, Navteq did very little, it seems, to improve routing, maps, or navigation. I was just using Apple Maps yesterday (I'm a very patient and open minded person that gives several unbiased opportunities) when I was told to go around this very short road segment. Turns out it was probably because the segment it marked as "No Thru Trucks". Those Navteq annoyances are what made Magellan GPS horrible and after who knows how long of doing nothing to improve them, Navteq has brought Apple to its knees.
Hotmail and Yahoo using secret domain blacklist, aparently
7 Electric BMWs from the Past 40 Years, 1 From the Future (Hopefully Late 2013)
Ask HN: what are the most promising startups in e-commerce?
Hi,

I have a simple question: what are the most promising startups in e-commerce? What do you think?
Oil river spotted on Saturn moon
Thoughts on Climate Change
Which market? To assume there is a single "database market" is to incorrectly lump document, key-value, graph, OLTP and analytic RDBMS into the same group. These are different tools for different purposes.
Perfectly understood what you said. Good and Bad are associated to things by individuals.

I think I probably wanted to know what one should do when Bad things happen.

And, I guess I know the answer to that already: just keep moving forward.
Something like a Lamy Safari or Al-Star is a good place to start; they're inexpensive (as fountain pens go) and basically indestructible, and you can either buy ink cartridges or a converter that lets you fill it out of a bottle.
This is more for foot transport, and it's not a turn-by-street, but rather more literally a stand-in-place and turn-to-your-right type thing.
Unless you had been building an efficient backend/internal tool for receiving mapping error reports and fixing the issues. I know Google's got their own very efficient tools for doing this; Apple might not have had the time to do this yet, at the time of their Apple Maps release.
One good thing, about this whole Apple Maps FUBAR; I will probably continue using Waze for turn by turn directions. They have that down pat.
Consequences of Dell Embracing Ubuntu
>How is he comparing them? From what I understand he's saying that both of them are illegal therefore should be shut down.

No, I'm saying that both of them are illegal, thus both of them ARE shut down in a similar manner.

When you assume...
Show HN: Create public links for your email attachments
This is of course obviously false. Morality is a part of human nature. It isn't gifted by the supernatural. Therefore concepts like justice, good, bad have as real an existence as you. If humans are part of the natural order so is natural law.
I sometimes wonder how effective stunts like this are.

About 10 years ago, I had a job opening the mail in an MBA admissions office. Most of the application was required to be filed online; the only exceptions were a transcript and two letters of reference. My job was to open the mail, file the allowable papers, and throw out everything else.

Easily 80% of the mail that came through the door went into the trash. People submitted all kinds of things, from hard copies of their entire application to photographs to fancy art portfolios. The first day was heartbreaking as I felt like I was throwing away people's life's work, but when I asked my boss for advice, she said it was a conscious decision on the part of the admissions committee: they didn't want to unfairly disadvantage people who followed their instructions.

After a while, this system made sense. More people tried stunts to bypass the regular admissions process than there were slots in the admitted class. Submitting banned supplemental material was less an indicator that someone was a creative thinker than that they'd read a book that said admissions stunts work.
I am using an Android device. And I do clearly see pixelation when I zoom in, before the new tiles load.

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png
You have a point. I think SIM didn't have significant tech problems, but too much of its work became do-able from the ground during the interval when its problems were being solved. That's the reason it got a lower priority in the National Academy report that determines astrophysics mission priorities. And since SIM was a pathfinder for TPF...
That's James Burke, in the years before he created his excellent "Connections" and "The Day The Universe Changed" series. Highly recommended - I watched every episode when they came out starting in the late 1970s.
#1. Agree. Although non-technical people do find them useful. You yourself are just a bit more technical and have a better grasp. Problem is some of our users didn't even know how to install an App etc. We are thinking of ways of making registration easier.

#2. Because you only have to enter it once and it's a complex field, you should see what you are typing.

#3. App shouldn't crash. The reason you have to go through the online process is mostly for security, you wouldn't want it to be just super easy.
The other problems seem like bugs.? We'll fix those, can you e-mail me at support@authy.com, i'd like to get repro steps.

#4 Thanks!. Let's get the above fixed.
for the hacker news crowd .... Peopleware
I'm using the maps app on and Android phone. When I zoom in, I see the pixelation before the new tileset loads.

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png
Yay. Another "I got mine" article from an Internet celebrity.

He's got no idea what middle class means.

He's throwing out the usual conservative talking points about deregulation. (How'd that work for the banking system? In, say, 1929, 1989, 2007? Electricity in CA? The environment before 1970?)

He's of course in favor of manipulating IPO prices, because that's where he makes money, after all.

He's completely delusional about AirBnB.

And he's just a plain lunatic when he says he'd take eye cancer to have Glass.

It certainly makes you sit up and listen. And then shake your head sadly that you wasted time on the article.
All your tokens in Google Authenticator are lost, even
if you recover from backup

So restoring from an iCloud back-up won't save my bacon in this case?
I thought we were talking about the Google Maps app. Because that's what I'm talking about.

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png
Actually, the crumbling of the family is quite new. The past 50 years has seen a rapid and sad dissolution of the family: http://dalrock.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/p70-126_pdf_hist_...
Which is exactly how it's always worked on the iPhone (since getting a compass in 2009).

I'm pretty direction savvy but I find that whole spinning map thing pretty confusing. I think this interface is nicer - turn right, turn right, walk. Seems really intuitive to me.
I love GitHub but the new homepage makes GitHub feel like a small, seed funded startup & not a trusted company.
The disposable pilot 'Varsity' pens are remarkably good for costing only a few dollars apiece.

You can't do flex-nib (read: variable width lines) work with them, but as an everyday writer, they're great.
Sounds like a good blog post if someone went more in depth here. I for one am really happy to see these tools coming out of the woodwork!
Turn your hard drive into Private Photo Cloud
I'm using google maps for android. When I zoom in, I can clearly see the pixelation of the tiles before the new tiles load. The google play store doesn't show any updates for the app. Where are you getting your information?

Here's a screenshot I took after I enabled airplane mode: http://i.imgur.com/wc5Ie.png
We are trying to gauge whether bloggers that embed videos in their blog care about how much SEO bump they get from those videos
> Those companies have aggressively lobbied the TLC not to permit apps that they feel would break down the existing ban on “prearrangement” of rides between yellow cab drivers and customers, saying that to do so could severely threaten their business. That argument held sway among some TLC commissioners, who said they feared the impact on jobs of allowing the apps to be used.

Good thing those people were not around when the computer was invented.
I was getting around .019% - .03%. Which I thought was awful. Around a dollar a click and targeting all the major programming languages.
Because on a Nexus 7, you might also go to the Google Play store to buy books, music, or videos. But Amazon has removed that from the Kindle Fire.

That is the madness of which I speak. Because they are afraid that if I don't use the Kindle Fire I won't buy videos, they therefore won't let me buy videos unless I use the Kindle Fire. It seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. That same logic would call for them to not have a Kindle app on the Nexus 7, would it not?
Macworld recently wrote about this:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1168038/playing_amazon_insta...

As others have commented, it's a licensing issue.

One workaround is loading the Amazon Video Player in Safari on a Mac, then mirroring the display on AppleTV. Looks best in full screen mode.
You don't have to find history insightful. You're still wrong. If you don't think there's people in gitmo with no charges, you're blinded by your fairy-tail fantasy.
Well, that's only true when the world is progressing towards a better tomorrow. There are plenty of times when it hasn't been true -- say, during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.