skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>You really think torrentfreak/isohunt/et al wouldn't just start filing suits over every single DMCA request they receive? What do they have to lose?

Money? Time? It wouldn't make any sense for them to litigate the cases they would obviously lose when they could choose the subset of cases where the take down issuer clearly has no copyright in the material in question -- which is the whole idea.

You're also giving the money to the wrong party. It doesn't make any sense to give YouTube or Tumblr the right to sue for bad take downs, if they thought they were bad they could just not execute them. The right for redress should be for the user who posted the material, not the intermediary. Which solves your problem with torrent sites filing frivolous claims. Do you honestly think release groups are going to get into the business of filing frivolous lawsuits against content owners? As soon as they identified themselves and consented to jurisdiction they would be counter-sued for infringement or arrested.
The Genius Of Google Fiber
Julian Assange teaches Eric Schmidt about Bitcoin
A possible point of interest for you - I use http://hckrnews.com/ to get to these stories and I think a lot of other people do to. So, even when you flag things we'll still see them.

The reason I use it is because of the first paragraph on their about page http://hckrnews.com/about.html
What was gained by making it difficult for the suspect to move for a day? Increased probability of him bleeding out?

Scenario 1) No lockdown. Suspect is discovered immediately by homeowner.

Scenario 2) Lockdown. Suspect hides for a day, and is discovered immediately when the lockdown is over.

What is gained in scenario 2? Specifically, when weighed against the cost of the lockdown.
This doesn't really fix the problem in television news. Most of the reports I watched cited sources but regularly preceded 'information' with "we can't confirm this but...". Another problem is that the media outlets are citing each other and when one media source spreads false information suddenly all media outlets are spreading it citing the original false information source.
It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login). Starting X takes a lot longer.
http://i.imgur.com/32jXq84.jpg

(Seriously, though, they taste like plastic.)
That's a good point, which I hadn't thought of.
A database query planner is an optimizing compiler. It's also a major field of research, and in many ways, much more sophisticated than other kinds of optimizing compilers.

In particular, it doesn't just optimize your algorithm, it chooses better algorithms for you.

It does this by collecting statistics about the data (and keeping them up to date), and using those statistics to estimate the inputs to each operator in a candidate plan (a combination of algorithms that answers the query), and then estimate costs, and choose the candidate plan with the lowest cost.

(The above explanation is simplified and not entirely accurate. It discards most candidate plans before they even really become a plan. And "candidate plan" is not really the right terminology, but I thought it was more descriptive at a high level.)
It's broken except for everyone who had to find out they were in lock down and not to go out as a result.

It's broken except for the people who saw the suspect in the boat - who knew from breaking news that he was being chased.

It's broken except for the people who wanted celebrate on the streets when the suspect was caught.

In the UK at least, the newspapers are often wrong in all the same ways suggested in the article, so that luxury of only publishing once a day doesn't seem to help that much.
Thanks for the input! I tend to adapt my comments into articles when the entire thought comes together coherently. I will write an article on the flaws of anonymity. Opportunity cost means trade-offs exist, but the internet already has plenty of anonymous conduits for sharing information.

Addendum to the JS thoughts:

As people saw with RSS after reader went down, the data structure isn't consistent across the RSS world either. That makes the reader problem more complex than first perceived.

Rather than try to distill complex content and fit it into a para-structure, nwzPaper is designed to be a transparent third-party to standardize article format in the publishing form:

1) title
2) abstract
3) location pin
4) article body
5) media

Each article includes the journalist's name--not to be confused with the new legal distinction of blogger--and a link to his or her content inventory and a link to a structured "perspective" to interpret the journalist's information product through.

If a search engine or aggregator organizes third-party content there will always be an indexing/crawling delay. That makes traditional search brands only useful for non-news, historic information query and analysis.

Search was a big deal ten years ago because it got rid of categories, but it is insufficient for solving the news problem.
You advertised this here few days ago with a different name, if I'm not mistaken.
http://www.buzzstream.com
I suspect that the people working at the Dunking Donuts were proud to be able to support the police officers working 18 hour shifts to get the guy! We take care of each other in Boston.
> You're right - those are the usual litany of legitimate objections to this kind of study - and they are good ones. So we addressed them:

But you guys were apparently unable to address Robert's questions: http://blog.sethroberts.net/2013/03/09/a-few-answers-from-po...
That's fine of course but you have to understand that different people have different circumstances. I have money and I don't live hand to mouth in any way. So I might feel the same way (but can't say for sure in all honesty).

But many people do (live hand to mouth) and sometimes for circumstances that are beyond their control and sometimes of course simply because they make the wrong choices. My point is simply while it is great that you in particular had no issue losing pay (or I might have possibly feel the same way) not everyone would - I'm sure you will agree with that.

Not to mention that the crowd effect many people would simply make decisions based on what others are doing or social pressure.
I am SO sick of hear "according to a source" because they don't want to clue in other news organizations.

Reporters anonymize to protect sources, which in the Western world generally means "keeping them from getting fired" (in much of the world it means "keeping them from getting fired at").

Here's the thing -- either you trust that the reporter/organization has good sources (that they've worked them for long enough that they know that their information is good), or you don't. Adding decorative details on the source (such as "beat cop") does little to support the claims, as often the people who want to talk the most are often the people with the least information.

Which is why it is virtually worthless to listen to random people on Reddit making claims that they cite as backed by their own sources ("my uncle who is a xyz says that..."). I have absolutely no reason to believe the Reddit poster is telling the truth, and even if they were I have no reason to believe that their source is telling the truth.

The world is full of liars and bullshitters. Add in the well-meaning people who "fill in the unknowns" to make the story more interesting....it's just a sea of noise that is overwhelmingly wrong. It's unfortunate that now traditional media feels that they need to fight this static by embracing it (the most laughable being reporters reading "tweets" on topics), the net result being the lowest common denominator for all.
Thanks! Although I kept meaning to change that but never did. I wanted something more like "To create an (un)social network, focus on how your product will provide value to it first users, not its peak users." Or something like that. "last" makes it sound like, well, last. Like the company is failing and you're down to your last user. I meant it in more of the full adoption sense. Lots of things I'd like to fix in the article..
As someone who exclusively followed this story online, the idea that it can replace traditional media is much overstated. Traditional media might grasp at straws and over-analyze, but you at least get some indication of what is going on. The last hour of the standoff I had no idea what was going on other than the suspect was in a boat. And I was following all of the people you're supposed to.

On a personal note, I found myself nervous all of Friday. I did check twitter frequent, refresh a few websites, etc. So from a sanity standpoint, I completely agree with the author and I'll be taking the advice next time. Go do something productive. Get your mind off the horror; you can update yourself tomorrow.
Unity pre-dates Windows Phone 7 (the first appearance of the UI concept formerly known as Metro) by some months, but the idea was around before; Adobe was quite keen on it for a while.
I think the only businesses forced closed were in Watertown. For the rest of the city, the BPD had this to say on Twitter: "#CommunityAlert: Per MEMA – People who went to work this morning not expected to remain there. Workers encouraged to return home."

That sounds very different from "not allowed to open".
City wasn't shut down. I really wish people that don't live where would cease making such posits. I went to work. Ate lunch out. Bought groceries.

Why shutdown mass transit? So he could not easily flee. It is now known he was hiding within the lockdown area and then moved out of there to the boat. If the buses and trains had been running, there is no telling where he would have gotten or what he might have done.
I know I already commented, but one other thing bothers me about this article and I feel compelled to address it:

"Yes, that's right – it wasn't until the stupid lock-down was ended that a citizen found the second murderer".

Obviously this is pure speculation, but it certainly doesn't seem unreasonable to think that if it weren't for the "stupid lock-down", the suspect probably wouldn't have been forced to hide in a boat in the first place.
For the record, 9.3 is the next version to be released, and 9.5 is not even on the radar.

Also, there are no specific plans for doing parallel query execution (that is, parallelizing a single query) in a major way any time soon. And parallel query execution can mean many things and take many forms.

Postgres is already good at parallel execution of many different queries.
They caught the guys within days, and the suspects didn't get very far at all. I'm pretty sure Boston, and all its residents, won.

If the US can't afford billions of dollars to prevent the murder of potentially dozens more innocents and the extremely quick capture of such dangerous criminals, then what the heck is the point of all that money.
I re-read your comment, now assuming there are separate references to airspace and searches.

To date, I have not read of any involuntary searches of property not _specifically_ tied to the suspects actions. Neighborhood canvassing (knocking on doors and talking to residents) is not considered a search.

The public seem to have been very cooperative, working _with_ law enforcement to locate the suspect.

Edit: Readability of "reread"
I don't mean to pile on, but just one point about the data representation: I wouldn't add the cumulative lines to any of these graphs. It's almost never the right way to visualize data concerning growth, and just makes the data look better than it is.
Agree. OP also misses a big point: they 'shut down' because they thought they knew his identity and roughly where he was. Contrast this, for example, to the DC sniper, where they knew neither.

The only reason I can figure that these two bombers weren't in Mexico or someplace else far away by Thursday is that they weren't finished with their terrorism. I think a lot of us were thinking that.

On a related note, Gov Patrick impresses me with the way he handles emergencies. I don't always agree with his politics, but he's a helluva leader.

We were all on edge (I live on the North Shore); we knew that he may be able to get out of the city and seek to continue his rampage elsewhere. I think the authorities did an outstanding job all around, and perhaps got a little lucky. But the 'lockdown' seemed to help them get the job done in a deliberate, systematic way. Other cities will learn from this.
You have to be willing to measure the cost of lives. No one likes doing it, but there's always opportunities to spend a lot of money to save a few lives, and a limited amount of money. If you don't make tradeoffs intelligently and deliberately, you wind up trading many lives for few lives.
@peterjancelis are you even remotely familiar with what you're talking about? It was all legal. Read up.
As much as gimp bugs me, I do play with it occasionally and dream one day of being able to squeeze everything out of it that it can do.

check out gimp magazine, which is a good window into what regular power users manage to achieve with it. http://gimpmagazine.org/

I learned about the GMIC filters from reading it. Also learned there's an online image filtering app from the same creators, which is pretty cool - https://gmicol.greyc.fr/
I basically stumbled onto this strategy this week. My job doesn't leave me with much time to obsessively follow breaking news on Twitter or TV. The first day or two, I listened to NPR for a couple of hours (full disclosure: I work at a member-station). But it wasn't until the next morning, reading my dead-tree edition of The New York Times, that I felt like I had a decent grasp of what the facts were.

Of course there are limitations: my NYT still had the suspects at large Friday morning. Obviously the story had developed considerably since press time.

Nevertheless, Manjoo's point is well-taken. If you don't live in the immediate vicinity (and thus need the news for personal safety), your knowledge -- and your blood pressure -- will probably benefit from a bit of moderation in news consumption.
Violence, sex, and spectacle have always been used as a crutch for bad storytelling and simply being out of ideas.
Well, presumably the response differs depending on the expected frequency of such incidents. Given that this sort of incident is thankfully rare, I don't think it's an inappropriate response. If copycats are inspired by it, tactics will have to change.
We run on Google AppEngine. So we use Google for a lot of things. Building all of the pieces that make google is more than 10 people can do in a year. We have 5 developers. And most of those only came in the last 6 months. We may build analytics, but it will be a while.
Dell also has to make sure its drivers work on Windows.
Actually, all your OS sensitivity setting will do is change the scaling of the mouse, if you want to actually change the DPI you need their software
While I appreciate the sentiment, there's a very real reason to watch breaking news while you're in the area. My school was shut down and everyone was told to stay inside, which makes it awfully hard to grab a book and let things blow over.

It's a fundamentally different thing to watch the news about somewhere else then it is to watch the news about where you are.
I went out too. Lots of shops, restaurants, bars still open in North End area.
> he destroys the lifetime value of hundreds

Lifetime? Now that is an amplification.
I don't think your comment is a substantive response to bsg75's point. He started with "On the rare occurrence..."

Exceptions can be made for exceptional circumstances. If, God forbid, terrorism on US soil becomes commonplace, then his point is no longer applicable (since his point is about rare things).
It was mostly Boston Police, Massachusetts State Police, and SWAT and local police from across the state. The only military was the Mass National Guard with air support in the visual search. Military bomb search and disposal units were also involved.
Samuru was a samurai. Several Japanese anime characters are named Samuru and are samurai. It is also turkish for otter.
How many people who are calling the events from boston "martial law" and "security theater" are from Boston or more specifically Watertown?

Until an armed man with explosives is hiding in your back yard, your opinion is not particularly useful.
Except when the news puts up source:YouTube which is fairly meaningless.
Isn't it the same thing then? Just send a counter-notice to SE's hosts?

Of course, that doesn't stop all of Stack Exchage from being down for "10 business days" in the meantime. Should be interesting to see the public response to that if it actually happens.
I don't think the decision was necessarily wrong, but it shouldn't be taken lightly either. We may be able to learn from it.

A man in Watertown, David Henneberry, found the suspect in his boat only after the curfew was lifted. The suspect himself was identified using footage voluntarily donated from citizen's cameras!

This is what we should be celebrating -- the collaboration between citizenry and police. This is not the time for STFU. We may do even better next time.
You're doing it wrong.

Most breaking news isn't meant to be watched continuously. Most news is designed for people who are busy doing other things and checking in once in a while. Breaking means it's so new they haven't had time to summarize & package it for you, so it'll be rough and weird.

That's it. The reason it's repetitive is to sound fresh for the next guy who checks in.

If you're spending time watching it repeat, expecting something new to happen as you're watching, you're frankly doing it wrong.
Agreed with both.
First, let me concede that Cassandra has had a storied history of terrible read performance. However, if the last time anyone looked at Cassandra for read performance was 0.8 or used size-tiered compaction, I'd encourage them to take another look.

The p95 latency issues were largely caused by GC pressure from having a large amount of relatively static data on-heap. In 1.2, the two largest of these: bloom filters and compression data were moved off-heap. It's my experience that with 1.2, most of the p95 latency is now caused by network and/or disk latency, as it should be.

I'm not going to compare it with other data stores in this comment, but I'd encourage people to consider that Cassandra is designed for durable persistence and larger-than-RAM datasets.

As far #4, this is mostly false. Tombstones (markers for deleted rows/columns) CAN cause issues with read performance, but "issues while GC'ing large number of tombstones" is a bit of a hand-wavey statement. The situation in which poor performance would result from tombstone pile-up is if you have rows where columns are constantly inserted and then removed before GC grace (10 days). Tombstones sit around until GC grace, so effectively consider data you insert to live for at least 10 days, unless of course you do something about it.

Usually people just tune the GC grace, as it's extremely conservative. It's also much better to use row-level deletes if possible. If the data is time-ordered and needs to be trimmed, a row-level delete with the timestamp of the trim point can improve performance dramatically. This is because a row-level tombstones will cause reads to skip any SSTables with max_timestamp < the tombstone. It also means compaction will quickly obsolete any succeeded row-level tombstones.

Here's a graph of P99 latency as observed from the application for wide row reads (involving ~60 columns on average, CL.ONE) from a real 12-node hi1.4xlarge Cassandra 1.2.3 cluster running across 3 EC2 availability zones. The p99 RTTs between these hosts is ~2ms.

http://i.imgur.com/WRdps3B.png

This also happens to be on data that is "ephemeral" as our goal is to keep it bounded at ~100 columns. The read:write ratio is about even. It has a mix of row and column-level deletes, LeveledCompactionStrategy, and the standard 10 day GC grace.
More than a bit of revisionism here; sure, that was often the pattern but not always successful in preventing deaths or hundreds of injuries per bombing, and they were less fastidious against regieme targets: attempting to assasinate Thacher and her cabinet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing, 5 killed), soldiers and spectators at Hyde Park and Regent's Park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Park_and_Regent%27s_Park_b...), etc. Again from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Ar...):

"During the IRA's 25 year campaign in England, 115 deaths and 2,134 injuries were reported, from a total of almost 500 attacks. Malcom Sutton reports 125 fatalities in Britain, 68 civilians, 50 members of the security forces and 7 paramilitaries."

By the latter count more civilians than even theoretically legitimate targets.
Google AppEngine Issue. I'm not sure we can make that happen, but I will look in to it.
the icon looks ugly.
I haven't heard any stories of people whose houses were searched in a way that they were uncomfortable with. Have you?
We can trade mark it in the context of software. We don't sell frigid gas.
What if the resident hadn't been at home because he/she went to work as normal? What if without a lockdown the search radius widens so much that the suspect is able to escape a great distance? How on earth can you rely on the suspect being too injured to move? Don't you think the lockdown was part of the reason the suspect was forced to hide in the first place, and part of the reason the resident was present and primed for anything different going on?
You seem to be aware of more case law than me. Please explain to me how this was legal. Honest question.
Simple answer Yes it can but No it won't!
I think you are conflating two points.

The story of the week was about citizen help. Citizen help in supplying media, helping to identify suspects, supplying additional photos, reporting news, finding/reporting the final location of the second suspect.

I agree with that. But to then to say that therefore, everything would have gone better had the police told no one to stay indoors, that's quite a leap of logic.

It's also worth noting that it was the fbi or police force's decision to lift the recommendation. It's just as easy to argue that that was wise on their part, as it was to ask for photographic help, etc.

All in all this seems like a strained effort to make the police forces appear incompetent or unnecessary.
I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on an old LG F1 Express Dual. Everything works, including repeated sleep. Sleep did not work on it with 12.10. It also has two finger scroll with inertia, even on this old craptop.
Gotta respect that kind of biting honesty. Thanks, dmor.
> The assumption being that the people who didn't spend that $15 will not just go out and spend it today?

By that logic, every even-numbered day should be a national day of leisure.
Here's a much simpler and more intuitive (IMHO) way of understanding this: imagine you're encoding bits as polarization. Vertically polarized is 1 and horizontally polarized is 0. Rotating the polarization by 90 degrees is then a logical NOT operator. Rotating by 45 degree is then the "square root of not" because if you do it twice you get a NOT operator. (This exactly analogous to how you can define the square root of -1 by thinking of multiplying by -1 as a rotation through 180 degrees on a number line. The square root of -1 then becomes a rotation by 90 degrees.)

BTW, you can actually do this experiment yourself at home using very inexpensive materials: a laser pointer, polarized sunglasses, and a few dollars worth of "quarter wave plate" material that is easily found on the internet.