skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Non-checking backups are not a perfect solution here. Running on non-ZFS filesystems, you can get slowly building corruption in files. When you take a backup, you copy that same corruption over to your backup as well.

Going back through years of backups to find a non-corrupt copy can take a lot of time during which your service is down. Not a perfect solution by a long shot. Discovering which files have been updated and which are corrupt is also non-trivial.
A minor nitpick:

> These distributions only want one version of the lib, so when an ABI bump is made all the applications that use the lib will be rebuilt and have to be updated.

This is not true, at least on Archlinux. Currently I have 5 different versions of libpng installed:

local/lib32-libpng 1.5.14-1

local/lib32-libpng12 1.2.50-2

local/lib32-libpng14 1.4.11-2

local/libpng 1.5.14-1

local/libpng12 1.2.50-2
I also wonder how the friends/foes system affects moderation.

That's just something you can assign your own score to; it doesn't affect anything else.
I had a few quetions.
Q1 Why not running a git fsck on the canonical server before allowing mirror servers to sync ?
Q2 could it be possible to optimize git fsck to only do incremental checks, on the diffs sent to he mirrors ?
Q3 if a canonical git server is used, why not ensuring this one is very safe against data corruption ?
Q4 what about the ext4 corruption in the VMs ? Is the cause identified ?
To me, it sounds like the mirroring system is circumventing Git and is syncing the underlying directory structure, in which case, Git is absolutely not to blame. It's not a Git reliability issue. Had they been using "git fetch" on the mirror servers to clone from the backup servers, checking SHA1s while doing so, the issue would not have happened and the corrupt files would not have gotten silently replicated across servers.
> Kobo says American startups like to develop products without the "impure" influence of monetization, "but [in China] the development of a good product isn’t even thought of in the beginning," he says. "Chinese web companies have a totally nonchalant attitude towards creating the actual products. They are just a lot more focused on ways to make money from the outset.”

...because they know that, due to their country's non-existent respect for intellectual property, they can just rip off the product itself from something created in America.
I must say a big thank you to KDE's sysadmins. Please remember that they are doing this as volunteers.
The Mayor's Geek Squad
Wow! Just Wow!
Google Web Fonts crashes Internet Explorer 8
When using Google Web Fonts with fonts like the famous Pacifico, in IE 8 if the site contains any character with acute (i.e. á, é, í, ó, ú) it will crash the whole browser. I wonder how many users of my site I've lost because of this.

Demo:

- Open IE8

- Go to http://www.google.com/webfonts

- Search Pacifico

- In Preview Text type any acute character.
They also use these domains:
w3schools.com
ww.w3schools.com
wwww.w3schools.com

Probably others too.
Production is decentralized, but consumption doesn't have to be. You need to store your reading list somewhere, and once you have more than one device, you need some place where this information comes together. That's Reader.
You didn't provide not even a single reason why we should use NOSQL instead of SQL.

If sqlalchemy is good for you, then you don't need NoSQL database.

Btw, sqlalchemy is awesome.
Irony knows no bounds, except when misconfigured.
Why is "Buried in Grief" still on The Huffington Post app?
I read The Huffington Post on their iOS app on my old iPhone 4. Since Dec 19, 2012, there has been one article on the main page of the USA edition (but actually listed as part of the Money section) that has not been replaced with something current. The title is "Buried in Grief", and it is about a family dealing with a dead son's student debt. Every other article is updated regularly, many daily, but this one persists.

Why?
I think "getting bored" is the wrong term, she is talking about the fact that children should learn to find things to battle their boredom themselves. Was she still bored when she had a piece of blank paper and nothing to do?

Her conclusion seems to be that only letting the brain consume is numbing but that creation and creativity come when the media that lets you mindlessly consume is not available. This media is acting as a drug, numbing creativity. I agree with that notion.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243360
>is this really that big of a problem?

(My 2nd reply) Yes apparently it is, I feel fairly sure now.

Search this page for "Search engines have to solve this problem". — They have the same problem, and "have" to solve it. So I think it does matter fairly much. (Much enough to be worth solving :-))

And read this article from Reddit: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...
It's about an even worse version of the problem, when one uses a naive (but prevalent!) approach to comment sorting. Anyway it exemplifies how comments posted later on has no chance to reach the top of the page, no matter how useful/interesting they are.
Korean Words for TOPIK Beginner 01
Your statement is absolutely false. Any password of any length can be brute forced.
"* It completely ignores people that read the post but didn't vote. There really is no way to get a perfect count of this no matter how much scroll logging, but you could approximate it and then include it in the calculation."

Would it help if there was an incentive to vote?
You could, for example, increase a user's score by a point for each vote given but weight the vote with more points.
This way user who write good comments and active readers could benefit.

But then again, this could tempt some users to abuse the voting system.
I can't predict which of these two reactions would prevail.
I'm guessing Clay is in his 20's? If so, I'm approaching 52 years old and I loved this book equally as much in 1966 or thereabouts. If you're reading this, you made my day by reminding me of it.

> "Coding democratized how we can solve our own problems, regardless of age."

Well said. I'd add that very few old men are innovators, especially when it comes to CS or the like.

What I'm glad to see is more folks in this generation learning how to create their own channels, sell what they make and not depend on larger entities for their survival.
When someone walks too slowly in front of you, they are annoying, not "offensive". You are perfectly with in your rights to be _annoyed_ at them -- but you are _not_ "offended". In order to be offend-ED, some would have to actually _offend_ you, not just annoy you.

Similarly, in this context, I'd disagree: No, saying "dongle" in earshot of someone who tweets about "enhancing" the contents of one's shorts by stuffing socks down them does not give the over-hearer any "right" to be offend-ED, since it obviously isn't anything that this worthy regards as particularly offens-IVE. She obviously claimed the right to _maintain_ that she was offended, but by any sensible definition of the word she actually wasn't.

[Edit:] Duh, that's what I get for replying in a browser tab I opened ages ago -- I see someone said most of that already.
Downvoted for unnecessary snark and the non-apology in your edit (disagreement with tone is not misunderstanding). There are gentler and better ways to express this, e.g.:

Have you had a look at Greasemonkey or Stylish?

Because you can use greasemonkey to do the same thing doesn't make this worthless, and even if this replicated what greasemonkey does exactly (which it doesn't), it might still be an interesting take on an old problem. Reinvention is a great way to learn, and not very damaging for anyone else, so why not do it now and then? As long as you're willing to admit other versions might be better than your attempt, I see nothing wrong with it.

As a good example of reinvention which actually solved a lot of real world problems, see Linux (reinventing MINIX, but eventually diverged hugely), which started thus:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
If it's fast creation/destruction of VMs you want, for scale-out or other purposes, there's always ZeroVM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746222
It would mitigate the problem because then you couldn't upvote top comments period. If the assumption is true that all top comments are old, then this simple trick would definitely help.
The mechanical Turk
Practical algorithms and code optimization: maze generation
So they want to support Hetzner but not Github?
I got the same message (02:35 PDT). This must be a joke, given the title. However http://erlangonxen.org works fine.
"Where one of my buddies transferred to my school not because it was more convenient or a better school, but because it was the only Swedish-speaking one that taught Latin, for chissake. And it was all free, and we didn't need to have cookie bake sales."

UK: we have the same affluent area/good school, poor area/poor school issues in the UK. I so wish we could get to the situation than Finland finds itself in, but I doubt the government wants to invest in the teaching profession to the extent required.

PS: Buildings don't matter above a certain threshold level. Shiny classroom equipment doesn't matter, just BYOD with a few loaner laptops and WiFi would be good.
> If you are on Linux, OS X or Cygwin, install flask and extensions by entering the following commands, one after another

I think this is a really bad advice. Instead create a file called requirements.txt and add the required livraries, one per line.

Then you can install it with

flask/bin/pip install - r requirements.txt

Edit: More information in the documentation[0]

[0]: http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/requirements.html
Not Eating for Two Month
How to Install Android 4.2.2 on Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 P3110 with Blackbean ROM
You can always regularise things after with:

pip freeze > requirements.txt
sounds like VAT, no?

isn't VAT universally hated?
my take on this subject a year or two ago :P
http://jankom.posterous.com/kid
Do your daily backups using rsync+hardlinks (rsnapshot, dirvish or something similar) and keep a long history. This is slower than copy-on-write ZFS (obviously), but works reliably on any Linux/Unix file system and the storage cost is roughly the same as for ZFS.
There are open alternatives to GitHub - we managed to put one together we're reasonably happy with, after all - but unfortunately the buck right now tends to stop at the hardware.

As for Hetzner: The git.kde.org master server isn't at Hetzner, nor are a bunch of the mirrors. Our infra is pretty distributed and eclectic as far as hosting locations go, partly because a lot of the resources are donated from all over. We don't "support" any hoster in particular.
> To me, it sounds like the mirroring system is circumventing Git

The mirroring system which git provides?
One of the main reasons I switched away from Opera was because so many neat little projects made with new HTML5 technologies would not work in Opera. This goes both for small side projects as well as business ventures.

I do understand the lack of support for Opera, with it having just a tiny market share in the US, but it still is a form of exclusion.

I'm glad Opera is switching to Webkit & V8 because besides the many websites breaking I found Opera to be much nicer to use than Chrome or Firefox.
Hacking without WiFi: lessons learned when you can't just Google it
Exactly, and at that point you still don't have the static HTML files. You have to crawl the entire local site, which takes ages. Then you have to repeat all of this according to your desired update frequency.
From the article,

> our mirroring system had bugs

> Originally, mirrored clones were in fact not used, but non-mirrored clones on the anongits come with their own set of issues, and are more prone to getting stopped up by legitimate, authenticated force pushes, ref deletions, and so on – and if we set the refspec such that those are allowed through silently, we don’t gain much. A hybrid approach of a non-mirror initial clone followed by a shift to mirror mode could force the server to validate the entire repository as it packs it, so that is something worth investigating.
As someone who's been in the distribution business a couple of years ago, I can tell that it isn't as well supported in practice.

Imagine for example, a rather classical stack. Let's take KDE cause they are on the top of the news.

we have libpng 1.2.x With headers in include/libpng/. ( This is wrong, very acute of you to notice. )
We link kdelibs to libpng-1.2 ( independent use, inherited link )
We link kicker to libpng-1.2 ( kicker uses some things from libpng as well. Yey )

New version of libpng is installed, 1.4. Breaking ABI but not API in the process! If this version is installed in "include/libpng/" You'll link future versions of kicker against this. This gives the chain:

kdelibs : libpng 1.2.x
kicker : libpng 1.2.x libpng 1.4.x
Oh, what just happened? You say that the ABI collides at run-time and nothing loads .png files anymore?

So, what if we instead make /include/libpng link to /dev/null, and only explicitly install headers into libpng-1.2 and libpng-1.4? Sure! Lets go that way.

kicker now links properly against 1.2 for both.
The krita comes along. Krita wants to use a new fancy feature in libpng 1.5.
cool. Let's just link that.

Wait. did we just collide the public API again? Crap.

So, in practice. It doesn't work quite as well as hoped. Function resolving when several libraries provide the same function is. Messy. Especially when they aren't perfectly interchangeable.
This is a very filigree artpiece of satire, really nice!

Looks like a way to translate Banksy graffiti into the code world, including the obligatory post to HN.

It is one of the seldom pieces that many people will never detect as ironic, because they are caught in the cage of their limited mindset of "obey" and "follow the masses".

Very refreshing, thank you very much for making my day!
Sounds like some of my evenings..
all comment systems will eventually score the insightfulness as a whole, based on what the majority think.

I do find some high ranked posts to be "not so wise" on any forum, but I don't find "obvious trolls" to be highly rated (be it reddit, hn or /.)

the difference that i see with /. however is that I don't get all the high score posts "lost" somewhere because 3 posts have 10292938 points and the others "didn't get voted on recently" (where recently can be the past 5 minutes really)
I think HN changed this in the past few days. it's not the case anymore.
This is kind of what I'm doing as backups, but I still don't feel safe (I'm kind of paranoid for my backups):what if an attacker gets in your server and wipes out all your data and backups? And you know Murphy is always ready to strike... I'm currently looking at making regular backups offline, on DVD or blue ray disks, and automating the process. I wonder if this might be a service people are interested in. Let me know what you think... (I put a landing page at http://www.offlinebackups to test reactions)
This. If you consider KVM, where an OS container is a regular process, then you can see there'd be no point in doing this for KVM since you might as well just run a Linux process. It's only "interesting" for Xen because the Xen hypervisor has a strangely architected and relatively heavyweight "process".
(Web) Castles Made Of Sand
Depression in a nutshell.
I got the impression that you _are_ expected to spawn a new instance each time.
It's a nice demo and congratulation to Adam but I wonder if I m the only one that doesn't like that the browser allows this detection. I mean accessing the log is one thing but shouldn't this be this unreachable fro; the sandbox?
It's surprisingly common. Here's[1] the most recent example of Schneier talking out of his domain with the potential to cause damage.

The problem is that Schneier is a pundit, not a security expert. He has a good knowledge of cryptography but as a media pundit he's often asked questions outside of his domain and on responding or commenting he's referred to in the media as an expert. This is precisely what happened with his views on Airport Security. He was expressing views as an expert when he was known for cryptography and had no domain experience in airport security. Over time he's clearly researched it and had more interest in it, but his earlier stuff shows his lack of domain knowledge, yet because of his media presence he's automatically deemed an expert, and this is dangerous.

In the most recent example of security awareness training, I would bet £5 (to be donated to the Open Rights Group, the UK equivalent of the EFF) versus the equivalent in dollars to be donated to the EFF that Schneier never once in his lifetime has been involved in implementing a security awareness training programme. Yet his commentary on this marks him as an expert in the field as far as the media is concerned, and such views coming from 'an expert' may impact the security awareness programmes of many people trying to improve security in their own organisations worldwide. There's strong and well put opposition to this from Dave Kennedy[2] and Andy Ellis[3], the latter of which is Akamai's CSO, and someone who actually practices security on a day to day basis.

Just to be clear, I am generally critical of Schneier and I think it would be unfair not to state this. While I'm not a cryptography expert I recognise the work he's done in that field, however where his points have crossed over into my domain knowledge I've found his comments often show a lack of experience for someone deemed an expert by default. I don't blame him for this, but I do believe that he benefits from it and does nothing to counter the impression (that he is an expert in areas he clearly isn't).

[1] - http://www.schneier.com/essay-419.html

[2] - https://www.trustedsec.com/march-2013/the-debate-on-security...

[3] - http://www.csoandy.com/files/why_bother_with_awareness.html
Some NoSQL databases e.g. Cassandra scale better and are easier to manage than some SQL databases e.g. PostgreSQL.

http://labs.spotify.com/2013/02/25/in-praise-of-boring-techn...
The other day I was reading a lamentation about the rise of team sports for kids. Little league, etc. Before that you could just put a group of kids in a park and they would make up their own game. It was a creative process.

Now you tell them exactly what to do -- and it's totally rigid and even a bit jingoistic.
And I'm really glad they're like this.
Putting every eggs in one closed-source service seems trendy these days, but in the long run it's always a huge issue.
The idea behind this systems is that there is no operating system any longer.

The programming language runtime is mapped to execute directly on top of the hypervisor.

There are already such systems for Erlang, OCaml, Haskell and Java runtimes.

If the programming language has a good library, there is no need for an operating system, the hardware access can be taken care by the hypervisor.

This leads to safer and faster servers running on virtual machines.
I think it's reasonable to say that evernote - for whom this is their core business - are likely to keep their service around longer than google, for whom this is a niche side product.
Suggestion: pop a note on your landing page about in-app ads in the QR app. If someone posting on HN can get crossed wires about where the ads come from, Joe Random Six Pack Marketer is definitely going to get mixed up.

(I'll eventually have to change my BlackBerry won't I?)
Having a hot standby/failover is nice, but of course only the icing on top of your backup strategy.

I read the article same as the OP, it doesn't mention any backup system, only the mirroring. In fact, they did restore from a replica that was out of date in the end (from projects.kde.org). Had they had actual backups, the article would surely mention they only used projects.kde.org because it was somewhat more recent than their last backup?

The story about planning to do regular ZFS snapshots hints to the same, if they had a backup system they wouldn't need that.

edit: sorry, is that your post/do you have more insight? In that case I'm sure you know better than me speculating on what the author meant ;-)
I making backups using duplicity with incremental backup option, which is basically librsync, and would allow such restores (as incremental = diff)

Not sure why it's not used "more". The tool is pretty straightforward.
...whereas in America, capitalist cowboys wear white hats and respect others' intellectual property or even the common folk's human rights.
I read that as meaning that their mirroring strategy makes sure to detect these conditions and avoid clobbering the intact replicas in the event.
Thanks for pointing it out, I gave me an excuse to look at the numbers:

I took 4.6 seconds when I loaded it. In the breakdown ~4.3s of that was nginx dicking around (probably spending much of its time telling people it can't spawn an instance right now.) The lightweight nature of the page is obviously exposing the nginx overhead, which is turning out to be a bottleneck. Based on all that: with more complex pages, a more realistic limit on instances and similar resource utilization, I would expect it to be down right snappy.
An example for building parsers with Ruby: Parsing TOML
I recently spent some time in hospital fighting pneumonia. Hospitals are exceptionally boring places. I loved it. I loved not having to do anything, not having to make decisions, not having to constantly think. The highest priority of my day at one point was moving things from my table to my drawer. It was awesome.

I think we fill our lives with so much stuff that there's so little space for little things, but when I was rearranging things on my table I hadn't felt so free of responsibilities and decisions in years.
Similar to how America used to disrespect foreign intellectual property back in the day: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/khan.copyright

'The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that "nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books ... by any person not a citizen of the United States." Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement."'

It's a tendency that nations (and startups) break the rules as much as possible in the early stages or when behind, and as soon as they're ahead seek to prevent others from getting similarly ahead by lobbying for stricter regulations and intellectual property rights.
And it's not just that you're using closed software -- you're using a closed service. Even when we were considering going with Gitorious.org, which is open source, that still left service-related concerns to address: Can you get your data out conveniently?

Because no, the data isn't all in git. For example, which set of credentials was used to write which piece of data to a repo isn't stored in git, it's logged by the authentication system in front of git.