skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They claim the oplog ensures durability, but it actually gets written and fsynced quite late in the process. This becomes quite obvious when the master of your replicaset changes: clients will receive errors and you will get inconsistent data you have to clean up later. This is the sort of thing Postgres and even Redis get right.

They claim sharding works up to a high number of nodes, but even when following their recommendations, it's pretty easy to get inconsistencies. Also, many useful commands don't work (or work differently) with sharding. This is the sort of thing Cassandra and HBase get right.

They used to claim you can have control over whether reads/writes happen on the master or slaves, but not all commands supported this differentiation. There's was safe and masterOnly, but they don't always apply (and amazingly enough, don't always work). This is the sort of thing Cassandra gets right, and at least newer Mongo (and clients) support more granularity, and more consistently.

They claim certain benchmark numbers, but neglect to mention they're done without durability or any router/replica/shard setup.

It's nothing overly enthusiastic creators of a new database wouldn't be expected to do, but still annoying.
This hits home with me. My wife and I were just discussing our redditing/news feed problem earlier today (basically, we can't put our iPhones down). This has been going on for months and it's affecting our relationship. Not in a drastic negative way, but we can't even watch a movie together anymore without fcking around with our smartphones. Anyway, we're unplugging on Saturdays now. We'll see how that goes.
Steganography In Images
Worse yet, they cheat society from advancing as quickly.
> How the heck do you effectively test a service like Dropbox fully, without making it your full-time job (IT dept). Take the other comment on this article, where someone fired up an old machine and it wiped out his files. What test would have caught that?

PRECISELY!

And, if you can't reasonably expect to fully test it and verify it's reliability (of any service) then you DO NOT rely on it for critical data you cannot loose. Choosing to do so and then crying foul when you do loose data isn't engineering, it's, at best, wishful thinking.

Again, this does not mean that Dropbox --or any other service for that matter-- is bad. Not at all. It just means that you have to understand what you are walking into and, if you can't, or don't, then take steps to safeguard from the potential for external data loss, because you just don't know.
Agreed. And this might be just me, but I greatly prefer talking on a computer (laptop or desktop) to holding a phone in my hand up to my ear. Especially for long personal calls or calls to businesses where I know I'll probably be on hold forever (e.g. Comcast) - it is INSANELY handy for that. Speaker phone would probably accomplish something similar but the audio quality in and out is lower on my phone than on my laptop, and it also (like you said) uses minutes. The calls are also more reliable in my experience - I've never had a call dropped or had the audio cut out over Gmail on a good WiFi connection.
Disagree. The problem is someone who wasn't supposed to share the photo shared it. Allowing friends of friends to see tagged photos is one of the points of tagging. My friends don't want to see my pictures of you, they want to see your pictures of me. In either case, reposting it to twitter should be taboo (and copyright infringement!).
At my last job (developing cross-platform mobile games for iOS & Android), we wrote our game engine in C++ with Cocos2d-X, with Lua bindings for every OS feature, such as in-app purchase, HTTP client, all Cocoas2d objects, etc. with all of the game logic written entirely in Lua. As long as you stay entirely in Lua, the performance is excellent. The only time you take a hit is when you call between Lua & C++.

Generating the Lua bindings is very easy - there's a tool called ToLua++ which reads a simplified C++ header and generates the C code for the bindings.
CrazyEgg[1], the click tracking tool, has a good interface that gives you a heatmap of how far people are scrolling down your page. It's very handy.

[1]: http://www.crazyegg.com/
You can also use the MongoDB Profiler to get a historical view of the performance of your queries and can easily separate out results based on scanned documents and query time.

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/manage-the-database-...
I was told skype phones were pretty big in the UK. Is that not the case? I talked to someone on skype while he was on the bus (or so he told me)
Please don't take this personally, but I'd like to propose a new rule of etiquette on HN: it's unacceptably lazy to say that some business "needs to do better" without explaining exactly what they should do better, or how.

GitHub is doing better by proactively upgrading their network. During the upgrade, they have run in to some technical difficulties. There are maybe, what, a thousand people in the U.S. that have worked on network administration for something GitHub's size? And far fewer who could have predicted this kind of trouble?

If we're going to shit on someone, we should at least make it nutrient-rich: include recommendations based on experience from dealing with problems of that nature and magnitude.
I imagine they were pointing out the irony that someone who wanted to see the end of internet anonymity, which would inherently reduce privacy, is now complaining of a privacy breech on a site where there is relatively no anonymity.
I'm not sure I agree completely with either of you.

Instead, I prefer to not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Or too many people deploying features willy-nilly.
The reason why I dislike MongoDB is because it exist in between that key+value store and ful blown database. They market is as the best of both worlds, but it ends up being the wost of each world. Its like all those car+bike, car+boat, car+plane, boat+plane, boat+bike combinations that have been marketed over the years.

If I had a bunch of keys and values, I'd put it in memcache. If I had relational data, I'd put it in postgres. I don't see where mongo fits into play. Every time I've seen it used in production, it always seems like its being used as an improperly implemented RDBMS or an improperly implemented key+value store.
Creating Ruby on Rails Models
When did that change? They did when I last checked (which, admittedly, was Some Years Ago.)
Is this guerrilla marketing for their new "Poke" app?
Have you read their actual contract terms instead of their marketing materials?

If any content on your website (even if user-generated) violates their "code of ethics", Gandi can take your domain from you. There's pretty much no way to run any kind of forum, blog with comments, website with any adult content, or even a site which simply expresses opinions that are not legal in another country, without giving Gandi the contractual right to take your domain and kill your site whenever they want. And good luck explaining that your definition of "hacking" (i.e. Hacker News) is not the same as theirs.

That's bullshit.

By accepting Our Contracts and using Our services, You agree to
abide to Our code of ethics which consists, in particular, of
protecting and respecting minors, human dignity, public order and
good moral standards, not infringing on the rights of third parties
(private life, image, honor and reputation, trademarks, designs
and models, copyrights, etc.) or the security of persons, property,
the government, or the good working order of public institutions,
and to help in the fight against abusive and/or deviant uses of the
Internet (spamming, phishing, hacking, cracking, or attempts at
hacking or cracking), or any other infraction as cited in the Penal
Code.

You also commit Yourself to ensuring that any third party to whom
You would resell Our services, or grant a license of use, or grant
any access or ability to modify any published Contents, will fully
abide by the terms and conditions herein, and that You are able to
effectively guarantee this commitment with regards to Gandi, and
You remain fully responsible in case of violation of this Contract
and/or violation of laws and legislations in force, without prejudice
of Your liability towards third parties

...

You acknowledge and accept that the use of Our service:
• is expressly forbidden for use in any way that engages or
participates in practices that are deviant, abusive, illegal, or
prejudicial, and
• must be done so in a way that is strictly legal and that respects
all applicable and regulatory laws, and if applicable, the country
in which You are located and perform Your activity, or the
destination where You propose Your products and services,
• must notably respect the rights of third parties (intellectual
property rights, personality rights, image, honor, and reputation
rights, and the right of privacy and the secrecy of
correspondence), and
• must be appropriate to the age and sensibility of each of the
individuals that any of the content is destined for, directly or
indirectly, published or made available to via the technical
solutions used.

...and that's just part of it.

http://www.gandi.net/static/contracts/en/g2/pdf/MSA-1.3-EN.p...
Have you tried turning it off and on again?

The site loaded just fine for me in Chrome on Windows, but I've restarted my computer once today already.
What an exaggerated titled. Does the pic show anything compromising/very intimate? It appears it does not. Then why all the fuss about it? This could've went swiftly under the radar if she simply would've handled it privately.

A simple direct message on Twitter: 'hey, that's not supposed to be public, can you take it down please? and delete your tweet too.'

Simple and I can't imagine she would've been denied the request, for the very same reason, that she's a Zuckerberg.
I just recently fell in love with Python while writing a Sublime Text plugin but I'm still very much a beginner and I'm not sure if the format of this blog is great for beginners.

1. The formatting of the posts need some work. The text is often intimidating because its in big chunks and where there are code blocks there isn't any clear way to distiguish them from body copy. The way http://codular.com/ does it is real nice, maybe some of those ideas would work for this.

2. Some of concepts need to be explained more. In some of the articles you tend to gloss over some big things that a beginner wouldn't know.

I may be a beginner to Python but I'm not a beginner to programming so that's where I'm coming from. I think its good but it could be a lot better though.
That man was a hero to me! Space:1999 was a brilliant show and had so much love in it — as a nine year old in 1975 it made very excited about the idea that I could live on a moonbase by the time I turned 33 years old. To me the internet seems like a less exciting second place prize by contrast...
I like this response. I often give the same response to people who ask me why I moved to the US. All I get is cold stares and jingoistic statements.
So after pushing every single one of its billion users to make more things public, to the point of physically changing your settings, they complain that one of their photos was made public and shared. To complain about someone elses etiquette here is absolutely laughable, and the fact that it was done in public versus in private makes me think that the ex-director of marketing just missed the spotlight and wanted a story.
What do you mean by "...as the domain tool it is, and not the prepackaged broad-spectrum scripting language..."?

I haven't used Lua yet, but reading about it led me to believe it was a "broad-spectrum scripting language".

I'd like to understand the distinction you're making more deeply.
I pay the carriers for cell phone plan but they give out my call / text records to law enforcement for a pay without warrant anyways. I don't think Gmail would hand local law enforcement such data without a warrant. Even if it did, it would still be no worse.

I know we think that paying makes us customers and they will care about us. However, it probably does not apply to naturally monopolistic markets of traditional/cell telephony and Internet services providers.
Indeed, yet they didn't ask - it was assumed. Both parties assumed. Equally so it's not too much to ask for someone to state how private or public an image or piece of information is. This is really why it's up to the individual to keep things private when they truly want them to be. There is no real thing called privacy. And human behaviour on average dictates that a) people make mistakes and could share things they might not mean to, and b) that many people, the less close they are to you the more so, that will not think about being able to easily share something (perhaps unless expressly stated otherwise in that moment).
I tried helping a stereotypically computer-unskilled person with some Facebook issues recently. They had some problems that made it look like someone might have gotten access to their account. So I wanted to go in and make sure that they were in good shape - change password, check that the emails were all ok, make sure that the phone number for the account hadn't been changed by someone so they could get access into the account again. It's rather difficult to do. Facebook's interface has become so difficult and complicated, that I had to look around for quite some time to be able to do these basic things.
It's clear that the easiest way to get to the top of hacker news is to discuss why you hate MongoDB
http://blog.serverdensity.com/does-everyone-hate-mongodb/
I would give you a +10 if I could.

That was the book that put me on a path 3 years ago from C# enterprise code monkey to being where I am today, as an independent Rails consultant. I never even heard of Rails before reading this book, let alone had any idea of the current tech landscape outside of the enterprise bubble.

When I quit my job 6 mos ago I reread it in an evening - startled to find that I actually adhered to a majority of the advice in the book, which at first read was mostly alien to me. I credit that phenomenon to Chad Fowler's subversively succinct writing style, it has that get under your skin, call-to-action quality to it.
an icon on a gray background, colored a very-slightly darker grey.
name.com is pretty stellar, actually. I would still be using them rather than NameCheap if they had the dynamic DNS features NameCheap does.
"But as for me and my house, we will use C."

I had to upvote you just for that. (Not that I necessarily agree ... just that it's a hell of a clever ending).
The Skyline problem explained
Whoops! Well, anyway, I think my point still- energy content is not the only factor- as diesel can get much more than 12% improved fuel economy. Diesel runs at much higher compression ratios, which is a good part of the increased economy. There's other things too, like the lack of a throttle plate which reduces pumping losses.
If you like the ease-of-use of Ubuntu, but don't like Unity nor Gnome 3, just use Xubuntu (or Lubuntu).

Xubuntu in particular provides what I think of as a regular no-surprises desktop --- exactly what I want and expect from a desktop OS.
Also interested to check it out!
This tactic is used more and more by people as a method of marketing too. It's annoying.
I love Google Voice; I do. It may not be smart, but I put it on my resume and as my primary contact info. But at the same time, that you can't receive mms is just crazy. I mean, forward it to my email even. I'm fine with that.

Partial sidenote: If I were, say, Yahoo, and looking to do a few big projects, this is one I'd tackle. Google has shown people will use it if it's simple, but there's not wide adoption. Yahoo Phone could supplant GVoice and things like SnapChat in one fell swoop.
There is something to be said for well architected software independent of any features that one may find attractive in it. For databases this is a big problem as you often don't find out about technical problems until you are already committed to the technology and are trying to scale it.

The same thing happened with MySQL and now it looks like it is happening with MongoDB as well. Mongo has so many corner cases and although I have never scaled it up in production the amount of moving pieces and the clear lack of attention paid to distributed programming literature in the design doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

Technical problems with MongoDB are being explained away as features in the same way MySQL did. Why does Mongo MMAP its datafiles?? So the cache stays warm!!! Why doesn't MySQL have transactions? No one needs transactions, just lock the table !!

If you didn't consider these cases you might think that Mongo sounded pretty good. I don't fault 10gen for pushing this hard and taking advantage of the perception that NoSQL is a more modern technology. I just can't believe there isn't something better that does what Mongo does.
Maybe it's guerilla research for free user-volunteered information about their sharing-privacy shortcomings.
They could just use `http://blockbuster/`.

I don't mean to endorse GTLDs, of course; it's apparent that they're solely a caustic money-making scheme and have no fathomable benefits.
VPN Man-in-the-Middle Attacks: Fact or Fiction?
We use it for a bunch of stuff at Disney. Games, websites, etc.
50 Years of Doctor Who (Infographic)
Skeuomorphism isn't realism

People argue that "skeuomorphism" isn't the right term for slapping photo textures on everything. It might not be, but obviously "realism" is an even worse term. Leather, chrome, or paper background textures resemble nothing "real" about showing weather forecasts, emails, or search results.

(That isn't to say good design can't use photo textures, but even many of the better examples tend toward the overblown "realism" of CD-ROM software from twenty years ago.)
Perhaps legal definitions need to be updated, so "free" can't used if there are "strings attached" or rather an exchange of information or other.
Healthcare Sector Vulnerable to Hackers
>On the logging, not sure what you mean by the old logs get clobbered.

For us the logs are not opened in append-mode, just write. We don't do any house cleaning except for logrotate, but that only runs nightly and isn't the cause of what we're seeing. Like I said, it may not be for the normal mongod instance, but it's definitely true for mongos. I'll double-check on the version number of what we're running

> do you host your databases on Amazon?

Nope, all owned servers, over a local network on a switch we own as well. The switching happens on some clusters more then others, so it's possibly a usage related thing.
OMG, I was going to put an Any Rand book on there as a joke and I see one seriously posted one here. If you like Rand books now, you probably newly "discovered" her and her books and philosophy. Strong probability you are around college age, plu or minus a few years. Circle back when you are wiser and compare what you think then to what you think now.
Interesting perspective, I hadn't thought of that.
Node-gmetric (ganglia utils) refactor got accepted
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-googl... (search for DiRT).
IMO anything less than a billing cycle (minus a week or so) is pretty acceptable for a post-mortem, although a week is better.
I actually think '5 Development Tips Every Designer Should Know' would be more useful. This is because a designer these days probably has to play with CSS and HTML, if not jQuery too.

A developer won't be handling the design themselves, but a designer might well be contributing some code on the front-end. And it's sometimes the case that such code isn't well (or consistently) formatted, or is too complicated, as writing code isn't the primary aspect of their job.

It's like poorly organised PSDs. You might be totally fine littering your file with spurious layers, bad names, and inconsistent groupings. The person you might share it with won't feel the same way, and it'll compel them to waste time figuring it out and possibly spend more time making it sane.

But for personal projects where a developer might want their own site, the advice here is good.
It's nice that modern servers often come with 4 NICs, and Gigabit is Auto-MDIX.
One interesting trick I've learned regarding "Don’t rush to StackOverflow. Think!" is that it sometimes helps me to go to StackOverflow and write out the question using clear, precise language and code examples. Nine times out of ten, the simple act of writing out the question helps me to solve the problem on my own. If it doesn't, then I can click 'submit'.
The thing that pissed me off about MongoDB was finding it in an environment where it had no business being because it had been heavily marketed as 'cool!' 'saves time!', 'web scale!', and so on.

Besides antirez being a friend, I think something like redis more credible due to the fact that it seems fairly clear about what it is, and what it is not.
You are missing the point. Any such surrogates are only getting you so far. To go anywhere near the real thing, you have to behave like it - not to mimic it.

You're second link stands behind my argument.
s/options/option/g
This observation doesn't surprise me: “I have never seen an industry with more gaping security holes,” said Avi Rubin, a computer scientist and technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. “If our financial industry regarded security the way the health-care sector does, I would stuff my cash in a mattress under my bed.”
> But at the same time, that you can't receive mms is just crazy

To be fair, I don't think I've ever sent or received an MMS. I'm pretty sure it's not that common, so most people probably don't really miss it.
Though Virgin Galactic is very far from orbit yet. They've been doing glide flights with SpaceshipTwo for years since their big hybrid rocket motor has not been progressing very fast and even had a ground accident. Stuff like that can happen if an airplane body company builds a rocket ship.

We can draw a lot of lessons from the space shuttle - it was very successful in lifting re-entries. It takes a huge amount of expensive wind tunnel and test time to develop something like this.

Why STS was so expensive must be analyzed more deeply - we definitely can not afford to waste all the lessons learned in that program. I think, in details, it contained many technologies that were not robust and required lots of checking and hand work (people with salaries). This also made it less reliable. Strategically, it was a huge one off program, meaning there was no possibility of iteration and trial and error: feeding information from operations back to improving design. (Cue Gall's law.)

Since development is so expensive (afaik a lot of the testing infrastructure has been driven down), this is also why most space capsules use known-to-work shapes: Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or Soyuz. Some small capsule designs have even used Corona spysat film return canister shape.
That turned narcissistic and annoyingly stupid halfway through. And I'm not talking about the obvious stupidity in it.
As a newbie C developer I'd for one would really appreciate a follow-up to this if primitur has the time.
I wonder what Harvard's “digital etiquette”, Harvard's websites privacy settings, OR overall "human decency" meant to Zuckerberg when he was unlawfully scraping data off of their websites.
You are quoting Randi Zuckerberg. She does not work at Facebook, so she certainly doesn't sell your information to advertisers or change the site's TOS.