skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TL;DR:

Datacenter operators incur a significant cost if after a cluster-wide power outage some nodes fail permanently; finding chunks of data that are lost (i.e. all replicas failed) is a big fixed cost, so it is in their interest to reduce the probability of data loss at the expense of increasing the magnitude of data loss (i.e. you lose data less often, but when you do, you lose more data).

> The probability of data loss is minimized when each node is a member of exactly one copyset. For example, assume our system has 9 nodes with R[eplication]= 3 that are split into three copy sets: {1, 2, 3}, {4, 5, 6}, [and] {7, 8, 9}. Our system would only lose data if nodes 1, 2 and 3, nodes 4, 5 and 6 or nodes 7, 8 and 9 fail simultaneously.

> In contrast, with random replication and a sufﬁcient number of chunks, any combination of 3 nodes would be a copyset, and any combination of 3 nodes that fail simultaneously would cause data loss.

In the case above, in case of single node failure there only 2 other nodes from which new replacement node can bootstrap. They then relax the constraint that one node belongs to only one Copyset, which slightly increases the probability of data loss, but speeds up recovery from partial failure.
Given the remarkable intel that can be gathered, I'm surprised the NSA/CIA/FBI aren't giving away smartphones to targets as anonymous presents or under the pretense of winning a contest.
I know what Snowden’s feeling right now
Success and Firefox OS
I would really like to see a "Learn C++ in minutes" post.
13 Ways to Manage Your (Hectic) Schedule and Stay on Task
I have to ask: What does this Acme stand for?
"BBQ: Chars the topmost group of chickens into the corresponding ASCII code. ASCII stands for American Standard Chicken for Information Interchange."

Dude thought of everything...
I'm not sure you can already but in the near future, yes: Firefox, Opera and Chrome.
The U.S. Senate Wants to Control Malware Like It's a Missile
I don't think Gnome is a relevant example. They don't support adding functionality back that they've taken out, whereas Firefox users are encouraged to add all the functions they want via extensions.

The downside of progressive functions in the base install is that the core Firefox team would have to support all the functions.
Who says they aren't :)
With two big differences:

1. Knowledge resources available to team and experience of the organization in the subject matter far exceed what the WebOS team had.

2. Was free/open and somewhat collaborative almost from the beginning. I say "somewhat collaborative" because the priority of the team was to create an operating system for a phone, with other forms (like a computer connected to other devices) taking a far backseat.

However, I agree in that, despite optimizations, it has a long way to go to compete with Android which almost "owns" the market it is after.

Politically, the timing is fairly good this announcement, though. Right after Google's black eye over privacy concerns, people might be slightly more likely to embrace Mozilla products. But, who knows. Competing in Android's turf is going to be a serious uphill battle.

It will succeed if:

1. They really embrace community input and provide incentives for people to get involved. That is part of being Mozilla. They don't need to be Apple or Google.

2. They need a charismatic leader with the vision of Jobs, someone with the design talent of Jony Ive, and someone that is capable of recruiting and organizing community talent like _______ (a name doesn't come to mind).
But you don't need to disable JS altogether to prevent that, only disable replacing context menus. Unfortunately for that argument, updating to FF23 removes all of the 'advanced' JS options, not just the checkbox to disable it altogether.
Oregon Trail Criticism
maybe this is getting a bit off-topic, but i did live in the usa for a while - my partner had a sabbatical at yale. and pretty much everything in new haven seemed to come down to race. where you lived. what you drove. which shops you used. race was by far the best indicator i found for almost anything i cared to think of.

i guess maybe connecticut is particularly racist and as you go further south things are more balanced - i wouldn't know.

but it's not just me, is it? if we're talking about justice then america's legal system is famous for how it discriminates against coloured people. that and its size are what its known for, internationally. it's pretty much designed to kill blacks, right?

so to say that it's "not much about race" seems pretty weird. that seemed to be the defining characteristic of american culture - and particularly its legal system - to me.

i'm sorry if this comes across as america-bashing. but recently i've been told here so many times that my rights don't matter because i'm not american. so it's got the point where, well, we're just being realists, right? compassion, mutual respect, that kind of thing aren't what life is about...
So why don't you skip the government and vote with your own money for the things you support? If enough of people buy the product, then the company makes profit and the product deserves to exist on the market. Be it protection, war or helping the poor. Your choice.
I think his point was that even anonymized data isn't as anonymous as you think.
Bitcoin ATM to be demonstrated at Bitcoin London
We want you to fork our theme.
I think the licence would make a lot of people skip over it; it seems to have far fewer features than Linux as well. I'm not saying it isn't cool, but reading their site and Wikipedia nothing is jumping out at me.
Could you elaborate. Which claims are incorrect?
(blog author)

Well I thought refactoring went all the way back to Forth.

I'm sure that with some language xyz it worked out very well for some project abc and that obviously disproves my whole point and you can move on...

I found writing large projects in Python - a language I was very familiar with, expert even - to become very difficult to extend aka maintain after a long time. My post should be seen in the bigger picture of the post I was following up about "Scaling My Server", and others I have written.
'about:support' is also accessible via Help->Troubleshooting Information.
One can dream: Google docs + Vim
I use a strongly, statically typed functional language. Because my code has no mutable state, the type system of the program proves the program correct. So I don't have to write any tests at all and maintenance is easy.
That is probably the wrong way to think about it. Its like saying "Well, we shouldnt be using motor cars because thats puts Horse carriages out of business". Or something to that effect.

We are moving towards a world where js is ubiquitous. Its everywhere..already. If web-crawlers dont support js completely ( looking at you google! ) then we should force them to (by creating more js based apps thats outside the crawlability of google ). If screen readers dont read js ( they should and thats why we have ARIA ), they will eventually. At the end of the day, as long as you are trying to adapt to them ( which is backward ) they will never move. Start moving swiftly and they will have to adapt to you.
I'd buy one of these. Especially if I can debrand it easily.

Any news when they're coming to the UK?
If people don't know the difference between diesel and gasoline, is a note that says "Note: Diesel is not the same as Gasoline" going to help? Doubt it.

The assertion is that 'configuration creep' is overwhelming for the unsophisticated user in the first place, adding even more notes and explanations to all the configuration options is not going to help.
Germany also profits from US, British spying
Not always. I check latest reviews for app, be it free or paid. And stuff like this can hurt downloads.
True Story: I got chastised in my annual performance review because I didn't have a scheduled staff meeting for my 5-person team.

I've always found meetings like that to be useless, but I guess there was some official policy someone that stated "thou shalt haveth staff meetings".
Isn't the display-to-retina capture handled by physical security? Ie -- aren't most top-secret (not sure the exact classification but you know what I mean) facilities controlled in regards to what electronic equipment you can take inside?
Useful old technologies: ASN.1
I'm all for change that improves usability, efficiency, and performance, for instance. I'm not for changes that obviously inhibit such things, like the changes that Mozilla has made recently.

about:config is not as convenient to use as a checkbox in the preferences dialog. If what you're suggesting were actually true, then there'd be no need for a preferences dialog at all, and all users would configure Firefox using about:config. But we both know that isn't true. It is not convenient to remember the name of a specific about:config option, especially when the names change periodically. Even filtering by part of the option name isn't convenient, as that requires remembering Mozilla's terminology, and using a general term like "javascript" still leaves many options to sift through manually.

As for the status bar, the URL popup shown when hovering over links is much less usable than the status bar. It is harder to quickly focus on, for instance. Having to remember yet another obscure keyboard shortcut for functionality that should be enable by default, like the addon bar, does not promote usability, as well.

The menu bar is not a "waste of space" because it more than pays back its cost by making a huge amount of commonly-used functionality very easily accessible. It is especially valuable because of the cross-application conventions it embodies, making it take even less effort to perform common tasks.

We shouldn't have to manually enable core functionality like menus or the status bar, for example. Such functionality should already be enabled by default when Firefox is first installed. Anyone who doesn't like the menu bar or the status bar should have the option to disable them, of course. But they should not have been disabled by default, or even removed completely.
Bad news defines Blackberry's Friday earnings call
Author argues that blocking by blacklist is better than blocking everything. But most people use whitelist, Chrome has native support for it.
I know it's not going to matter this year, and probably not next year either. But the fact that it's going to be extremely easy to develop on those platform, plus the fact that it's probably also be a lot easier to deploy your apps (than on Apple store) probably means that those OSes will gain a lot of traction.

There's also the theory that Samsung will probably want to stop being dependent on Google, and use its own OS. That could be a game changer.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2013)
Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.
It may well be legal, if part of the stated purpose of collecting the data, as agreed with the customer in the T's and C's that they thoroughly read through and agreed to, was to collect data for research, network development, service development and other wooley terms that cover this kind of R&D.

What many companies do is anonymise the data, remove the actual phone numbers /account details and replace with dummy numbers. While not ideal (backwards matching is possible due to the clues the data "gives up"), its probably safer than it sounds.
World’s first telescopic contact lens gives Superman-like vision
There's also a continuum of how dynamic/static languages are, both regarding the syntax itself and idiomatic code. There's a bit of a difference between e.g. Ada and C, or Python and Scheme with macros turned to 11.

And the final recommendation for Go seems a bit odd, as I wouldn't really cite that as a language with a thorough, bullet-proof type system (not saying that it isn't worth recommending, but given the context of the post...)
Why should we believe that Snowden is in the Moscow airport?
If I can briefly remove my tinfoil hat...

As far as I can tell, no media outlet has been able to independently confirm that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is actually in Sheremetyevo airport. No one has seen him, and the Russian Government has not presented him to the media. Yet the New York Times, and other outlets, report on his location as if it were a verified fact. Why is this?
I'm surprised by the early launch. I've been using a Geeksphone Peak as my primary phone for a couple of weeks and FirefoxOS is far from ready. There are bugs, missing features, apps that won't do basic things... Here I was thinking FirefoxOS needed an extra year of development and they're already launching devices!
Linux Kernel 3.10 Released
If one wants to see an app store where review spam is out of control one should take look at Apple's Mac App Store - because in this store you still can review applications that you obtained through redeeming a promo code.

Examples (need the Mac App Store app to see the reviews):

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/icd-any-musics-to-cd/id61667... (mostly reviews by accounts who only review apps by this one developer)

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audio-studio-pro/id598189439... (mass upvoting of fake reviews, downvoting of real reviews)

Ironically through a bug in the App Store the only apps that display any 'stars' in search results are apps that weren't update for months and said spammer apps that can gather unusual many reviews in a short time frame. (In a slow category like music getting even 5 ratings/reviews takes weeks. Suspicious apps usually get more than 5 ratings in one day.)

Then there's the trick to register your app as a handler for all possible 3 letter file extensions. (Perform a search for 'extension:fzx' or for any other nonsense 3 letter extension in the Mac App Store). Which hijacks OS X' built in "couldn't find app to handle somefile.fzx. do you want to search the app store?" and drives a lot of traffic to said apps - without being any helpful to the user in handling said file. One such app is:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ftp-client-professional/id46...

That app topped overall grossing charts for weeks until the ratings got so bad that even the dullest user won't download it.

The Mac App Store currently is a spammed mess and it really throws a bad light on the OS X software ecosystem and Apple's platform.
Sorry to be blunt, but it's clear you have never had to design or support a user-facing product. Anyone who has done either of these things will disagree with your base assumptions, ie. that users care about understanding their software, that they read warning texts, and that they don't mindlessly flip switches when trying to achieve unrelated goals.
As a user of GP Peak I can testify the UI is almost snappy enough, but once you open up Firefox (or any other app that relies on web) everything slows down considerably, the devices freezes or is extremely slow to respond to input and the battery is hammered. Half an hour of attempts to browse the web and do stuff can halve it.

Other than that, the phone itself performs it's basic functions just fine and the battery life is quite good if you don't touch any of the "smart" features.

Having said that, the device is a developer preview and I like Mozilla and their mission and I hope they will succeed with subsequent versions.
Why aren't your applicants Pre-Qualified?
That's what I remember, but yknow, it's been over a decade so memories fade. I remember that it took me a little bit of time to transition from trying to guess combinations of words that would appear in my target documents to just utilizing keywords.
Microsoft launches web-based Xbox Music, available for subscribers now
Ahh! This has been happening to me since childhood and I never knew it was a documented psychological phenomenon. Thanks.
What is your primary motive, experience or money?

1. If it is experience, then find an open source project to
contribute. Mozilla, VLC Player, that come to my mind. The upshot is you get to work on something that is huge, and if you work hard enough, and your patch gets accepted, it will shine on your CV.

Of course, on the flip side, no money is involved.

2. You want to earn some bucks? Elance, Odesk. Create a profile, and start bidding. Simple as that.

My recommendation: Go for open source. You will learn more.
It would be great, but in reality Snowden would not be safe in Germany. We still have tens of thousands US military personel (the US central commands for Europe and Africa are here) and lots of US intelligence agencies active here. The US were also using Germany to transfer their secret prisoners to the torture prisons in East Europe.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/cia-folter-in-polen-im-wa...
AdBlock Plus started allowing some advertising they deemed "non-intrusive". This was a default setting and easily toggled in the settings, but there was still a big backlash.
The All Seeing Eye – Web metrics in the 21st century
Isn't "some language xyz worked out very well..." and "I found writing large projects in Python..." basically the same (anecdotal) argument?
This seems like a job in which you get little in return. There are no details here. Would I even get a place to stay or would I have to pay for that? It also seems strange that you throw in terms like "entrepreneurs" and "lifestyle designers" when this sounds a lot like a job. I have to apply, I need to pick up a list of specific skills and I work on projects which aren't my own. Why wouldn't I just work at a real job and make real money?

Personally, I think that anyone looking for this sort of life would be better off freelancing. I can live for under USD $500 in the Philippines (rent as low as USD $100 for a new two bedroom apartment) which means that I'm choosing where I live and what I work on. I can get by with just an hour of work per day and I can work on my own project for the rest of the day (or more realistically, work on one decent project for a month or two and live off the payment for the rest of the year.)

I'm sure you guys mean well, but it doesn't seem like a great deal.
I think we are getting into spam territory with this site.
This is one of the worst comments I've seen around here lately. It makes lots and lots of assumptions, doesn't back them up, and then jumps to stupid conclusions.

A platform being open is not merely academic. It makes future open source software exponentionally better just like it did in the past decades. In fact, if this gets mainstream it will be the first to be truly open. Android has an open source license, but Google has never been really open about it. http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open-sauce/55247-...

And why does relying on a publicly specified language with vibrant ecosystem make the platform less open? You argued that by using proprietary languages? Though I completely agree JS needs to mature... a lot.

I trust Mozilla's vision that they're doing the right thing to move the web forward by putting efforts into desktop or mobile or whatever they find worthwhile.
That's why guys who finish bottom of their class remember the most.
I do remember when everyone was excited about Google - with the colourful logo, the funny-sounding yet mathematically-based name, and their "I'm feeling lucky" button. Then I remember youtube coming online and the first new greats of the re-energised internet. I remember "Netscape" and the prominence of Yahoo and other search engines. There were quite a few knocking around. Napster was a cool sounding name and "What do you mean you can just download the song?" was quite a common question. Early attempts at building sites had you looking as much at yahoo and msn rankings as Google :) Then there were a plethora of search engines trying to secure niches, and they couldn't be ignored, then Google started buying everything and we were hearing about how awesome it was to work at their place and about the history of starting in a garage and how the underdogs with the cool motto had risen to power. Then adsense became big and people realised you could make money by letting them advertise on your site, and people thought 'wow', but by that time everything had already become much much more cut-throat. People were starting to question whether they would link to your site without 'a reciprocal' - suddenly words like 'reciprocal' meant something to the owner of a camp-site in southern England. Things started to get very competative, and 'rankings' were really a hot topic. Around this time, article marketing spawned millions of spam article directories and content-creation bots. There were tons of spam link directories where bots could post links. All anchor text was keyphrased up to the teeth, and everyone was into SEO. SEO for Google - nobody "optimised" for the other sites. The controversy was largely around which browser would win, not which search engine - everyone knew that would be Google. By mid 2000's it was basically just Google, people had stopped really caring about the others. The only blips on the radar now seem to be Yandex in Russia and of course Baidu. Apart from them and the possibility of a small portion of traffic being taken if yahoo and bing ever merge, the internet is basically governed by Google now, and it's increasingly clear that they wield more power than many governments - a supra-national self-regulating power that can make or break any business at will. that's a scary amount of power to have given anyone.
Japanese earthquake literally made waves in Norway
Ideally I would like to enable Javascript for web applications but disable it for web sites.

I see very few convincing reasons to start running code in order to display a text article or video, apart from better ad tracking.
It's likely a bargain if you end up using a lot of support hours.
All the telcos collect this data as far as I know. They're allowed to for the purposes of improving and maintaining their network. A few crunch it for marketing purposes but this has to be opt-in (not that customers would have any idea what that might entail, even if the privacy policy describes it broadly). I can't comment on the legality of the project I worked on, but I assume it was checked out by legal counsel.

I personally wouldn't want my data mined in this way. I don't retain any brand loyalty, lets put it that way.
I dropped Wordpress in favor of http://anchorcms.com earlier this year. It's a little raw, not even to 1.0 yet, but quite functional and very lightweight.
What language Y is to Lisp as Mac OS X is to raw Unix?
Which type system proves program correctness? A good type system can guarantee that your program doesn't suffer from certain classes of errors but that's very very far from correctness. Unless you only write programs that don't have any goal at all besides being memory safe: Behold MemSafe 2.9: it doesn't do anything at all, and most importantly, it doesn't do it in a memory safe way!
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2013)
Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.

Also see: Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970190
Graeme Obree unveils the finished Beastie
what was the title of the book you read?
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2013)
Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
At least they should delete the offending reviews. But as it stands for now fake reviews (be it positive or negative) stay for months in the app store.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970187