skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Change for change's sake should be avoided.
> The article argues that we should change them for performance's sake.

I also said providing a bypass was reasonable, but the article gives the impression that the block-level interface is yesterday's jam, and something less than the starting point. It is the starting point and will continue to be because block-level storage is the major use-case. Block-level access accounts for basically all bulk storage in /dev. Extra performance and features (ioctl calls, or a management interface) are gravy, but without the block-level interface, it is not accessible to 99.9% of all software and will not serve for general storage, including pre-existing filesystems, from FAT12 to Btrfs. There are applications for which those are interfaces. There's no reason to make it difficult to apply those layers. Looking forward, if it can't store current and unforseen filesystems out of the box (the block interface), even if that means a 50% reduction in speed, it doesn't deserve the name "mass storage." Noone wants a key-value store even if it is 100% faster. They may be faster, but it doesn't look like storage. And there's no need for it to look different either, because people expect to be able to use it like a block device. Take WD Green drives with their larger allocation sizes. There happens to be an optimal cluster size, but the interface is still that of block IO. If flash works best for a certain allocation size or other tweaks, or even a specific high-level formatting, fine, but it's still going to need to provide the block IO interface as a starting point if it's going to be used as a drive.

It's nice to see at least one punitive downvote though.
I hope that the defenders of the legal theories that allow people to be held without trial for many years get their fair share of the blame. Gitmo itself is bad, but the legal theories that let almost anyone be held there without due process are worse.

I understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups. But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity? There's a reason that US citizens have rights like due process (and you can see why everyone should get them, including Gitmo prisoners): If you can't prove it but refuse to let the defendant maintain the freedom that should be associated with presumption of innocence, you get incarceration of the type described in the original posting.
That may tell you more about who buys into the popular notion of keeping up with the news than who's interested in the world. There's a lot of social signaling involved in appearing informed about a somewhat arbitrary selection of current events.
From what I understand about bitcoin, it has a history of transactions hashed from previous transaction, therefore every transaction is tracable, and every bitcoin is identified throughout this process. I don't understand how the author got the information from, but it is definitely wrong
I've always been in that weird zone that I could go out partying with the cool kids.. but never enjoyed it. Going into a club and I'd always ask myself "Why the fuck am I here, I hate this place.". And that's my only regret.. I should have spent more time in the "Linux group" or hacker meetups. This is the folks I always liked and had fun being with. Why am I telling you this? Because screw the apparences. If you like design, UX, and have been diagnosed with Asperger's (I'm definitely a bit aspergers too!), well, you should definitely hit more UX / design / hacker clubs. Working on a cool project and giving a talk of it definitely help to spark discussions.

Also, it's not in the quantity. Find a good team to start working on cool projects, and they'll soon be your best friends. Don't force it, just be yourself and try to be nice.

One last suggestion: Offer yourself as a volunteer for events that you care about! Not only you'll get to meet awesome people, but you'll also have some privileged moments with well-known speakers and organizers.
http://blog.manbolo.com/2012/04/08/ios-automated-tests-with-...

This blog talks about the tool for automated testing. It's kinda "complicated" to setup. In the blog, he eventually gets to a commandline:

instruments -t /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/Instruments/PlugIns/AutomationInstrument.bundle/Contents/Resources/Automation.tracetemplate "/Users/jc/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/5.1/Applications/C28DDC1B-810E-43BD-A0E7-C16A680D8E15/TestAutomation.app" -e UIASCRIPT /Users/jc/Documents/Dev/TestAutomation/TestAutomation/TestUI/Test-2.js

But there's a lot of setup, so =/
Rackspace Looks To The Telcos to take on AWS
I hope so, but it doesn't seem to be happening: after John Yoo finished his work at the Bush DoJ, he got a cushy position at Berkeley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo
I wish NVCA made a full breakdown of the data available. New York did top MA in "internet-related investments" in 2012, but that's not an accurate depiction of tech investment. MA has strong robotics, hardware, and medical devices industries that contribute to the ecosystem here.

In your last link, they're talking about funds raised by VCs, not dollars invested. NY firms did have a good year in 2011 -- $4 billion raised to MA's $2.5 -- but in 2012 MA firms raised twice as much as NY firms, and MA firms have raised $1.5+ billion in Q1 of 2013 alone.
It could be that a large retailer with an existing user base could launch their own currency, much as Amazon has done in a limited fashion with Amazon Coins. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/...
The stuff I read in the morning is very different from the stuff I read through the day. The morning is all about news - where I am playing catch up to what the world's editors think is important for me. I hardly look back at yesterdays news. In contrast, what I read through the day is largely intent/search driven, suggested by a friend or colleague, discovered through email etc. This content typically has longer shelf life, and is more valuable to me.

This is why I think, what I read as "News" should be largely driven by what I'm doing throughout the day. I'm working on Pugmarks.me [1] with this exact premise. Here are some design principles we're using:

1. What I read should be greatly influenced by my professional interests, as opposed to what is popular
2. My colleagues often have an overlap with my interests, and their experiences should help me discover great content
3. If have a set of sources that I trust, and this is continually evolving. A system should attempt to help me discover content from these sources (and potential new sources) before reaching out to the larger web
4. When I discover great content, I should be able to hold on to it, and rediscover it when I'm in a similar context again in the future

With these principles in action at Pugmarks.me, I've been able to significantly improve the quality of my reading.

[1]: http://pugmarks.me
I stopped reading after the "untraceable" claim and the "dark alley" simile. What a showstopper.

No wonder he doesn't get Bitcoin at all.
I wonder if this indicates a change in the NYT's moral leadership, or if Washington is ready to close gitmo and wants to drive public opinion in a way that'll make it more acceptable politically.

I suppose we'll be able to tell by whether the NYT starts asking the hard questions on drones in the next few months.

And by the way, I'm all for hypocrisy when it means moving against the cruelty and injustice of the past.
I'll have to try that out. So far I've tried iosnoop, lsof and dtrace to get an idea of what the program is up to. I did get a bit of info from those tools.
I believed so for years and haven't intentionally tried to read or watch news for almost more than 10 years; and I like it that way. Instead, I focus on tech updates especially related to the field I'm involved with. And feel, even sitting idle will do less harm, hypothetically.
what's amazing is that laws are added as riders onto unrelated legislation. at least, that's my understanding[1,2].

i suspect that the only people who read the bills are those trying to sneak something in, or watchdog groups like the eff.

everybody else in washington is there for the hookers n'blow.

[1] Plenty of references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_%28legislation%29
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/gop-pledge-...

[2] These last two are Monsanto and firearms related bills being snuck through via the "avoid government shutdown" scare:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/21/174973235/did-co...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/03/21/174969923...
Right now Numba is still pre 1.0 and so there will be issues for specific cases. The best way to get them solved is to provide your test-case so that we can grow the test suite.

Right now, I agree that Cython and pure C++ is still the best approach if you have a case which Numba does not yet quite solve. However, I expect this to change over the next 6-12 months as Numba is getting a lot of attention both inside of Continuum and externally at several industrial-strength locations.

Our goal is that Numba can replace (almost all) Cython and raw C-extensions or even Go-extensions faster than other language approach will be able to build a run-time and ecosystem the equivalent of what is available with Python.

The roadmap (which includes Go-like channels and go-routines) as well as compiled class-support is here: http://numba.pydata.org/numba-doc/dev/roadmap.html

The project is open-source and contributions and contributors are welcome to join.
Already so many comment mine will be buried deep. Anyway: I am happy to see that in fact pg has no China-blindspot.

I feared pg and others (eg Fred Wilson) were never talking about China because they droped half of the world out of their sight, as so many people sadly do. In fact it seem to not be the case. It was more of a strong reticence against saying stupid things, and a righteous understanding that not saying stupid things about China is very hard.

But still, the nearby horizon is inevitably a confrontation between US and China, and we need clever and trusted people to state their best bets about how to handle this issue, which, left alone, can rot in the wrong hands and have a bad ending for everyone.
I love these time-capsule style re-posts.
With this story of Guantanamo Bay and the story of children born into prison camps in North Korea, as a mere software engineer, it makes me feel hopeless as to how to help.
Use a Motorola Atrix LapDock with a Raspberry Pie
> When you transfer bitcoins to someone else, it’s as if you handed over a paper bag filled with $100 bills in a dark alley.

This analogy is so wildy off the mark. In fact, an opposite scenario is more apt; a transfer of bitcoins is like handing someone a bag filled with cash, and then announcing it to everyone else in the world so that we can all agree on who has possesion of what. Only now you have a robot or other faceless surrogate perform the transaction for you, and (ideally) nobody knows which surrogates, or addresses, map to which people. The fact that Krugman's analogy botches the primary mechanism that makes crypto-currency work is disappointing.

Edit: wording.
I await the day the headline will be:

"Supreme Court to decide if anything can be patented at all"
In this case I think the hypocrisy is positive; I would much rather NYT be hypocritical by speaking out against Guantanamo rather than holding their old position.
Throughput is different from availability, and I'm not conflating them. But they are not completely unrelated, either.

All I'm saying is that it might turn out to be more expensive to design high-availability architectures using a small number of high-throughput servers than it is to design one using a large number of low-throughput servers. Sometimes this doesn't matter because you only need to crunch data a few times a week. Other times, you need 99.99% uptime.
A few other points: not everything we do ought to be subject to the criteria he laid out. Any hobby could be said to be a waste of your time or insignificant to your "real" life.

I also agree that while the news may be designed to make readers emotional and cause them to miss details or make cognitive errors, whether or not those negative effects happen depends on the reader. I find reading the news to be an excellent exercise in figuring out which facts are really important in a story, especially when those facts are missing from whatever article you happen to be reading. One of my favorite things to do after reading an obviously lacking article is to ask myself "What fact or number could the author have presented to conclusively prove his point?" And then try to find that fact or number.

As superficial as the news tends to be, it can still function as an entry point into a new subject. A sufficiently bad article on a sufficiently interesting subject will prompt me to seek out some additional information on my own. For example, silly rants about educational quality led me to read up on the ways that teacher performance is calculated. Lackluster articles about the visual changes in Windows 8 made me seek out articles on theories of computer UI design.

Lastly, I will argue that some news consumption is in fact the imperative of good citizens in a democracy. Without some background on current events, a citizen can't make informed decisions in elections, or in their other civic activities. While following every gaffe is obviously not necessary, a critical review of politician's claims requires that people understand what problems the politicians will be solving.
ShowHN: node.js balanced payments client
The interesting part wasn't the algorithm that played the game, but another algorithm that learned what the goals and subgoals of the game were just from watching a single playthrough. The AI that played the game was just to prove it worked.
I get what you're saying and agree, but it remains that a lot of people using Bitcoin actually do want to be anonymous.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/439/how-can-one-r...
The article makes some bold affirmations, which I'm not sure are covered by actual research (they may be). That being said, having stopped watching TV in the last years had made me better spend my spare time (e.g. studying or working on personal projects).
Because many think HN should only be about writing the latest and greatest social app, not things that move humanity forward.

/rant
Come on guys, Hewlett and Packard were engineers, and they _slightly_ predated pg, Larry, Sergei, and Mark Z. Even their mentor was a professor, not a "business guy". From Wikipedia[1]:

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression. Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard. In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard (HP) in Packard's garage with an initial capital investment of US$538."

Drones in khakis and blue shirts have been trying to infiltrate the valley ever since. It's true that their influence waxes and wanes, but they've never been the ones to drive things here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard
Since the writing of this post, AMZN has gone up ~150%.
We need to examine Jewish Privilege and Brown Preference.
Until it finds a glitch in the matrix that allows it to pause real life.
>unfettered access to the opportunity to play with these ideas. //

Generally patent law allows unfettered access for personal or research purposes, including commercial research, but limits commercial exploitation.

So with [high quality] patents you get access to a vast database of knowledge which would otherwise be locked up in commercial secrets.
Setting aside the fact that in reality the person who cures cancer will get admitted because colleges take into account academic honors and achievements, and setting aside the fact that there is a high correlation between test score and likelihood of discovering a cure for cancer, the point you are making is one of "what constitutes merit," which is entirely tangential to my original point (which in no way equated merit to solely test scores).
These papers (or those of them that I've read, anyway, mostly the earlier ones) are really fantastic.
"It is in literature as in life: wherever you turn, you stumble at once upon the incorrigible mob of humanity, swarming in all directions, crowding and soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the number, which no man can count, of bad books, those rank weeds of literature, which draw nourishment from the corn and choke it. The time, money and attention of the public, which rightfully belong to good books and their noble aims, they take for themselves: they are written for the mere purpose of making money or procuring places. So they are not only useless; they do positive mischief. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature has no other aim than to get a few shillings out of the pockets of the public; and to this end author, publisher and reviewer are in league."

Schopenhauer, 'On Books and Reading', from early 1800s I think.
http://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Books_and_Reading

With some small changes in language, it could easily apply to today's news. There are many great quotes, but in essence he says reading is essential, but you must be discriminating about what you read, because most of it is garbage. And you must be careful not to read so much that you aren't able to process it or drown out your own independent thoughts and activities.

I had already reached these conclusions on my own long ago, but he puts it into words very well, and it is interesting that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
That's from nearly five years ago and consists of three comments.
There are plenty of built-in performance/introspection tools in OS X that you can try first before resorting to a third-party solution:

1) What ports it opens:

- netstat shows you what ports a program has running

- DTrace shows you all syscalls a process makes (among other things). dtruss is a convenient wrapper script included in OS X which shows you all the syscalls a process makes (including opening sockets.

2) What files it opens

- Again, DTrace's syscall provider lets you introspect all syscalls, including open(). There's even a handy wrapper script included with OS X called opensnoop.

- Alternately, you can use the fs_usage command line tool to tap into the xnu kernel's trace mechanism. This shows all sorts of filesystem events, including what files are opened.

3) What libraries a binary is linked to

OS X binaries use the Mach-O format, not ELF like most other Unixes. So you have to use OS X's binary introspection tools to understand that format rather than the standard GNU binutils. What you're looking for here is otool, which lets you introspect Mach-O binaries. Specifically, "otool -L /Applications/Mail.app/Mail" for instance shows you which libraries Mail links to. Run this recursively to get the transitive closure of all dependencies a binary links against. Another way to do this is to run "vmmap -v <pid>" to show you the vm layout of a process, which includes the __TEXT/__DATA segments of all libraries the process links against.

And of course, gdb/lldb is included with the developer tools, you can just attach to whatever process you care about and set breakpoints, type "info sharedlib" to see what libraries are in the address space, etc. Also, for better or worse, Objective-C is an extremely dynamic language, so you can even do things like write a shared library with code you want to inject into a process (potentially monkey-patching existing methods using ObjC categories) and dlopen it from gdb to insert it into the target process's address space.
Oh, neat, I think I might print one of those out!
For some uses this may be a better option, it will still require handling of the flash chips. Assuming SAS connectivity as the interface this is perfectly possible with the OSD standard from T10 (SCSI committee).

SATA is not going to work since it is a block interface only and not easily extensible in a sane way.
"Gold’s value comes in part because it has nonmonetary uses, such as filling teeth and making jewelry" - my favorite line. I really do hope that the sarcasm was real
Obama could order it closed tomorrow.

Congress could refuse to fund that action but it would still be ordered closed and his hands would be a tiny bit cleaner.

But he likes his drones and gitmo now, so that's pretty much it until Hillary becomes president and I think she likes the idea of gitmo too.
Sites like these mitigate some of the problems with news but they make others worse. A good comment thread can provide a lot of valuable background and context, for example. On the other hand, the bias towards unimportant but attention-grabbing stories is not especially improved by making editorial decisions with a literal popularity contest.
Deploying an Azure Website from Source Control
The article takes a primordial approach to what news is. Technology and media have long addressed this problem, and news is really free now - thanks to Blogger, Google News, Twitter and the like.

Its also an irony that most of us discover our news on a site like Hacker News, and are seconding an opinion that news has become bad.

Some ways to rethink news:

1) News should be an ambient thing. It should be around you, and relate to what you are doing, where you are, who you are, and the people you care about.

2) The good things you do today must reflect in what you receive as news tomorrow.

3) News can be seen as appealing to the producer or consumer in you. When you read something just for infotainment, its for the consumer. When you read something, and you go like - this can help me, its helping the producer. We should strive to tilt the balance of news, and make it more productive - for you.
I really haven't had much time to learn on bitcoins, so sorry my dumb question.. but when people are buying illegal drugs by using bitcoins, are they really "Announcing it to everyone else?". I believe, maybe in theory, that there's a clear trace of the transactions, but it gets way more easier to hide both side, no? For instance, we know that XYZ shared 1k$ with ABC.. good luck finding to find out who's that XYZ.
Closing it would mean having the prisoners moved elsewhere, but not a change to how they are being dealt with. That's the real issue; the location isn't what matters.
Actually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with heated resistance and continual protest (e.g. waterboarding enactments outside the law school). As a tenured professor, though, he couldn't be tossed out.
It's the entire Western sense of superiority (I'm American). Gitmo is America saying that the rules we hold ourselves to don't apply to "others." It's hypocritical bullshit, and we deserve what we get because of it.

But it's not just the US (or just Gitmo) -- read about the treatment of refugees in Australia (tl;dr: it's better than Gitmo, but not good by a long shot -- http://mitahungerstrike.wordpress.com). And I don't mean to pick on Australia, because the Australian government is no more (or less) guilty than the governments of much of the developed world, I just want to make a point that we all are having terrible things done to other human beings in our names.

It's a damn sad state of affairs.
Not quite sure what this article is talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems#File_syst...

I personally believe log-based file systems are a perfect match due to never saving the same file repeatedly to the same location (so provides built in wear-leveling) and one can optimize writes by always clearing the head of the log for the next write.