skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Belatedly, you probably want to check out DRBD. It can do sync and async mirroring of Linux block devices over a network. http://www.drbd.org/

With a cluster-aware filesystem like GFS, both copies can be r/w (though that might be a little touchy), otherwise it can be used for warm standby, or, in conjunction with LVM and an appropriate filesystem, you could create snapshots on the primary, and then mount them as read-only on the secondary (but this may not be very appropriate for any DB scenarios).
In what world does the "archetypal nontechnical user" have two computers connected by Ethernet?

Ignoring the difference between Ethernet and 802.llb/g/n, this was commonplace even when the article was written. Dad has a printer hooked up to his desktop. Aunt Tillie borrows Mom's laptop to look up a recipe on foodnetwork.com. Voila, two computers connected over a local network, and Aunt Tillie wants to print out her recipe on Dad's printer.
I never said netbooks were a waste of time. They were always going to be a runaway success. Tablets have been about for years. With no success.

Can you really imagine comfortably being able to use a tablet? How does that work? do you hold it with one hand and try to use it with the other? Do you ask a friend to hold it while you use it?

The only usecase I can see is putting it on the wall in the kitchen. But that's a little bit niche.

edit: Rather than downmod, how about explaining exactly which problem a tablet solves (other than the recipe in the kitchen usecase).
Red Hat's Open Source Activity Map
Ask HN: Favorite true story tech book?
My personal favorite is "The Soul of a New Machine".
And the author, Mr Lomborg, makes money by being skeptical of climate change. shrug
MITEF Northwest Dinner (5/20/2009)
You can disable Safari with iPhone's restrictions. Apparently the new 3.0 firmware will allow apps to be rated Explicit and restricted like music. Once the new firmware is released, these stories will probably go away (or be replaced with stories about apps being unfairly marked as explicit).
And how do we know that the person who removed the judge is not biased?
A counter-point: Björn Lomborg's claim that sea levels are not rising faster than predicted are unfounded and used by those wanting to downplay climate change

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/03/...
For his epitaph he suggested, "I've finally stopped getting dumber."
Relatively cheap, well-built, small, light tablets with a great OS and App Store haven't been around.
>> "Relatively cheap"

When was the last time Apple competed on price?
Mea culpa, it's a deliberate dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=572777 last month). But, besides the interesting topic, the page illustrates a problem.

I saw that the U.S. was #2 in community activity, and wanted to find #1. It took me some 30 clicks (Rfgbavn).

Heat maps are eye-catching, but when you want to find out something, there'd better be some tables handy.

(Map found via http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/red-hat-stud... )
True enough. I've given up trying to figure them out, and instead am thanking myself for not getting caught up in gold rush fever. I'm too thin-skinned to deal with this sort of thing.
Google's modernizing its logo on Docs, Code, etc.
You need to divert some time away from pointing out insignificant typos and add something meaningful to the conversation.
My suspicion is that Apple outsources the content review process (if not the whole thing). Thus you get completely asinine and inconsistent rejections like this and others.
A pretty safe set of assumptions. Considering that Apple shops around for chips like all other smartphone manufacturers, and that phones like the BB Bold have had 600+Mhz CPUs for quite a while, it'd be pretty silly to bet against that.

And lord knows the iPhone needs a speed bump. That slick UI and effects comes at a price and its almost embarrassing when you want to write down someone's phone number, but you have to tell them to wait 3 seconds while the contacts app loads.
What real meaningful conversation can you have around such a ridiculous, empty 'article'.

This sort of 'journalism' is no better than reports in tabloids that some Z-list celeb is obviously pregnant, since they went in a toy shop, and look slightly podgy from certain angles.
A New Paradigm for the Streets of NYC?
The NEXT next iPhone needs to really be your "personal computer". I imagine a time when the only computer you have will be your mobile device. How this device acts will depend on what you dock it with. Maybe when you're on the couch you'll slide it into a tablet-like device and you instantly run in tablet mode, with more apps and functionality becoming available to you in that mode.

Maybe when you're in your home office you'll dock it with a keyboard, mouse, and two monitors, and use it as your workstation.

The point is, I look forward to the day when physical device size no longer really correlates to usable power or storage space, and THAT means that, barring supercomputers and servers, most people will have just their "phone". What that device acts like will be based on which I/O peripherals you plug it in to.

A guy can dream...
I'm still reading "What the Dormouse Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer", but I'm finding it quite good. Though I guess it's more about tech (counter)culture than tech itself.
The Cuckoo's Egg: a true crime hacker espionage thriller.
Personally, I think the speed is "good enough". If they can up that without compromizing battery life, then great. But if it's a choice between battery and cpu, I'd take battery every time.

The most irritating thing is that with 3g enabled+GPS, the battery drains ridiculously quickly, and you have to enable/disable 3g yourself manually. Why can't it just do that itself? :/
As terrible as the App Store situation is today, it will get better starting in June/July. I have a hunch that Apple is going to solve this problem with parental controls.
Is this irony deliberate?
I didn't mean to direct that at you personally; just that I heard plenty of sniffy remarks about the early netbooks. Tablets have been around for a long time, but there were many missing ingredients that are now present:

- cheap and compact wireless networking
- relatively cheap and robust touch screen technology
- decent-capacity flash memory and low-power CPUs/chipsets

I worked in hardware sales for several years the main obstacle to tablet adoption was poor interface and weight of 3-5 pounds, which is a lot to keep parked on one arm.

As for uses, I can picture many (which is why I want the thing). Here's a few, all of which are predicated on the idea of something light, cool and with similar processing power to an Eee:

- reading in bed. I like reading in bed, but not the weight or head of a laptop.
- casual browsing on the sofa when watching TV and I just have to have a snuggie or shamwow :)
- reading gmail offline or pdfs on the bus (~2 hours per day)
- working on a film or TV set, where it could replace a clipboard/binder with a full script, call sheets, contact lists yadda yadda (I hate the wasteful and time-consuming practice of dumping all that info out to paper when 90% of the time it's not necessary, and 95% of the time there is adequate power around to run a small server with wi-fi)
- weighs substantially less than a large textbook and fits in my bag more easily (I'm happy to have it in a binder like a pad of notepaper)

The Kindle DX is much of the way towards what I want, but the screen is still small and I'd like color and some light functionality. I'll read off a magazine-sized screen for an hour or two. The rough size of a clipboard and weight of a thick magazine work just fine for me, I'm happy to lug that about.
maybe it's just be, but the stupid quiz spam never bothered me as much as the stupid game spam.
how many people are watching?

We're getting close to half a billion pageviews per month, the majority of which are on channel pages.

http://www.quantcast.com/justin.tv
They're not the only ones hovering around that space. The Crunchpad was aiming for $299 and I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it came out tomorrow. If a first product strikes a chord, there'll be multiple competitors under $500. $10 says these things will be all over the place in 18 months.
Cosma Shalizi will handle this one for me: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

Let me sum up.

4. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc.

7. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions.

...

I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between "human equality" and "genetic identity", and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.
This was a really good interview. Anyone who is interested in learning about their market before building their product should invest the time to listen to it.
Hank Aaron has an Erdos number of 1
I'll bet you $1k they won't. You're an outlier.

Joe public will look at a tablet and see it as half a laptop that you have to hold, instead of sit on your lap. How can I hold and type :/
Artificial Life, by Steven Levy - I've lost count of how many times I've read it.
Hiding. :)
"Underground" by Susan Dreyfus

It is about the phreaking/BBS era, specifically the Australian scene.

The deadtree version is impossible to find, but the author has released it as an ebook.

Download here: http://www.underground-book.net/download.php3
Yeah, that's what I see as the real problem. I'd really like to see more attention paid to preK-12 education in poor areas, because by the time these kids get to be 18, it's generally too late unless they have heroic individual will. But that means targeted spending - it doesn't necessarily take a lot of money, it takes a moderate amount of money that's well-spent on programs that make a serious impact.
Nokia Makes Unused Patents Available to All
A great book for inquisitive minds. I first read it when I was nine, and it got me started programming.
Strange. Apparently the Dutch word for "boom box" is "ghettoblaster."
Nice bike! I need to get one too. Right now, I just do a lot of running.
I'm poor, so $10 is the most I can throw away on a vanity bet - but I am confident that if tablets with about the functionality of an eee/ipod touch (don't care much about 3g modems etc) come on the market for under $500, they'll see a high rate of adoption. I'm at gmail if some third party wants to be referee and take $10 via paypal.
"A Computer Called LEO" - story of the first commercial computer, used to run Lyons teashops. Fascinating both in terms of computer history, and history in general, especially Lyons' attitude to perfectionism, to the extent of doing many things themselves, that these days would never survive an outsourcing purge.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-Worlds-Office/dp...

"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

Drags a bit in places, but is still interesting in a history type way. It's the story of Data General building a 32-bit minicomputer in a year in the 1970s.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/031...
Founders at Work. Lots of good true stories. Encourages me to work on my own true story.
The IT Security Flowchart
T.I. Wants Delay In Prison Sentence | Hip Hop MVP
Now, why would Apple need to compete on price to bring price down? It isn't their thing, yet they may still bring price down, and they can certainly bring demand up. Take the iPhone as an example. Before the iPhone I did not believe I could find any use for a smartphone, but now, if I had a little extra money, I would get one. And there are a lot of people less interested in me in gadgets and tech that have an iPhone already. Apple could create a market for tablets.

Their aren't any good user interfaces that I know of, yet, but if anyone can create new UI idea Apple can. And when they do others will begin to follow. Creating the demand that is needed for more hardware companies to compete with Wacom, hopefully bringing prices down.

Your scoff about how you use them is weak. You hold it like a clipboard or a notebook. You realize _all_ drug reps carry one around to get signatures verifying they've been to their clinics for the day. We will find uses for them, it's just chicken and egg for a while longer. It's just too bad MS got into it too early.

Well, I hear Windows 7 has great handwriting recognition.
Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

Story is circa 1990.
Most industries are not this bad, but reportedly, Hollywood is set up so that no motion picture ever produced is ever profitable. This was originally a corporate practice invented to screw over people contractually due a percentage of the net, but everyone went back to negotiating based on gross.
[specious]and do we want to let that happen again, only with greenies?![/specious]
Hackers, by Steven Levy is a great book too.
The Next iphone will still be one generation behind the next crop of smartphones from HTC or other manufacturers. At about the same time they introduce video someone else will be introducing a screen close to the 1024 pixels wide. After the others catch up to their UI methods the only distinguishing feature they will have will be the app store.
After the others catch up to their UI methods

Certain designers have tried to catch up to Apple for a decade, now.

the only distinguishing feature they will have will be the app store.

...which has sold a billion applications in less than a year, and whose designers are among the most talented on the planet. The quality of my iPod apps are on par with or better than my OS X apps, and that's a high bar.
I think this more or less describes the life I'm perpetually trying(and only succeeding in brief snatches) to live.
Apple to answer netbook market with $500-$700 tablet
What do you mean Trenton has no super markets? A quick google maps search shows over a dozen super markets and grocery stores. The rent you cite is less expensive than the suburbs. The cities I know best are Philly, DC, and New Haven. In each of these cities, the poor, inner city areas have lower housing prices than the surrounding suburbs, and they have available super markets.
A 10 inch tablet is a lot closer to a Mac than an iPhone. I don't see the App Store factoring in. That kind of thinking is just buzzword thinking: the App Store was a big breakthrough for smartphones (true), it would be nice to have something similar for desktop software (true, though Linux package managers could probably take a design lesson) so obviously everything else in the future must work the same way (false).
Unlike Al Gore and his fearmongering?
Yeah, this is getting just plain ridiculous. It's gotten to the point where I wonder if the defense didn't actually want to lose the case just to point out how thoroughly the justice system has been infiltrated by big media interests.
Social Networking Blitz for the Insurance Industry |
You can stitch together most of Blackboard out of Google's services. All Google really needs is some secure site for posting grades, but in reality, the old "web site with student ID number instead of name" is more widely used at my school than Blackboard anyway, so perhaps not.
Can't pick just one, but I enjoyed: Tuxedo Park, Soul Of a New Machine, and The Deadly Fuze.
Android with the Locale app does this (lets you toggle features as a function of battery state), but I've heard that Google is actually removing the API calls for toggling GPS in Cupcake (Android v1.5). I'm not entirely sure why this is supposed to be a good thing
You want a Waterwise 9000. Really. Trust me. WORLD of difference.
For all the logic required to code, programmers are some of the most irrational people on the internets.
Not a novel, or a single book, but I love Richard Feynman's descriptions of Los Alamos. I can read his accounts of mental arithmetic battles with Bohr, safecracking, the programming of dozens of old-school human computers, all day long.
> The NEXT next iPhone needs to really be your "personal computer".

Would you allow your main personal computer to have such a closed system that you aren't even allow to install unapproved software on it? I agree that this device will essentially be your interface to the digital and remote world. Can you really allow a company to censor what you can do with that? The current App store model just doesn't 'scale' to this scenario. To me the only choice is to look to other platforms until Apple changes their policy.
Make recycled paper in your office
I do suspect that; the defense seemed too competent to not know that the original judge had a conflict of interest. They let it ride knowing it gave them a literal get out of jail free card in the case of being found guilty.
Hmm. One of my startups Classleaf (http://classleaf.com/) is a semi-Blackboard competitor, which is based on the idea of a lighter learning management system. Since those that read this article might be familiar with the learning management scene, what could schools want to give them the push to use Classleaf's product? I'm going to side with the fact that many schools have existing grade management systems, and perhaps a monolithic "all-in-one" app isn't the best idea.
VC's are the best predictors of irrational investment ideas.
Since childhood, Steve Jobs. For too many reasons to mention.
I guess that makes Bill Gates the exception to the rule.
The climate issue is the most irrational topic in the world right now.
Three words: Blood and Gore.
iPhone springs to mind...perhaps not at first, but they've gradually lowered the price until it's pretty competitive compared to other smartphones.

That's really beside the point, though. Apple won't be competing with other tablets so much as creating a new category: the touch netbook.
Nokia N97 Themes : Vista 2009
Sadly, health care is so strongly regulated that starting up in that sector might be more of a legal challenge than a technical challenge.

With this administration, the very parameters of the market are within question. How much will be taken over by the government? Who wants to sell to the government?
Russian Tea HowTo
"Who judges the judges"?
Right Way/Wrong Way: Closed Betas
Even with that, I fail to see any value. It still doesn't solve anything.

One thing I never understood is how one would type on it. If one of the main purposes of a tablet is to utilize internet services, I'd imagine that typing emails/IM/tweets/etc. would be something done quite often. You want to fire off an IM or tweet in less than 3 seconds. How would that be done on a tablet? Using a touch screen keyboard won't work simply because the table would be too big to allow you to grip it and type with two thumbs. The only other option would be the hunt and peck method of typing, which would provide for a pretty crappy experience.
Haven't read the article, but just a general observation about Blackboard: from the perspective of a student and someone who is interested in education, Blackboard's products are garbage. An introductory computer science course could put something comparable together at the end of the term, and a competent Rails/Django developer could blow them out of the water. Blackboard is like the Internet Explorer of the education world.
Ask YC/HN: What Should I Ask Dr. Wolfram?
I'm interviewing Dr. Wolfram in a few hours, so I wanted to reach out to the HN community and see what questions you'd like to have answered, technical or non.

Most of my interview is going to be straightforward, but I'd love to throw at least one tech Q in somewhere.
Any developers interested in a building a simple app to change how banks works?
team@moonsideafirm.com
If I where the author of this crap I would quietly remove this article. How embarrassing to have written this and not only be wrong in almost every argument he stated as fact but also in all predictions. Apple fan boys are funny.
Predictable, given the author and the venue. No information content.

"... despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test." Really? Which evidence is that?
I've taken a couple of classes that used Blackboard. It's terrible software. I'm not surprised that they resort to suing competitors to gain an advantage. They certainly seem incapable of coming up with a decent product.

I would participate in an open source project competitor to them just because of my dislike for their product.
> Predictable, given the author and the venue. No information content.

The name of the rhetorical flaw you've engaged in is "ad hominem attack".

That is to say, you didn't give a single disagreement with the facts presented, you just said "well, the person who said it is a pederast and a simpleton..."
Ask HN: How hard should engineers work?
I'm in a small startup and do pretty much every but code. The devs on our team work around 30 hours a week it seems (time spent actually coding). Does this seem reasonable? It seems like on one hand overworking devs isn't good but at the same time are we being hampered by not pushing hard on the dev front?
How? He was certainly decried as a villain by many.
Next gen mapping visualization
This is amazing. State of the art from what I can see.
Wow you iPhone guys sure are sensitive. I see this a playing out much like the Mac from 84 onwards with regards to the UI.

> ...which has sold a billion applications in less than a year

Actually this is downloads not sales. Most estimates are that about 95% percent of downloads are free so that would make about 50M apps sold. Readers may want to consider why they are upvoting a story that contains false information and downvoting the story that corrects it. They may want to ask themselves 'just what has happened to my critical faculties with regards to the iphone'. Or not.

Of course other platforms that actually allow you to install software without the approval of their 'app store' can't trumpet numbers like these cause they don't know about every single app their users are installing. It's called freedom.
All the people who benefit from his philanthropy?
Suppose it turns out that (for example) unpredictable variation in output of wind-powered generating stations introduces too much uncertainty into the grid to effectively balance supply against load, so control and distribution requirements limit wind power's contribution to about 5% of demand [1].

Then, if we aren't careful, we'll wind up with an over-subsidized wind turbine industry with nothing to do other than provide service to a niche market and lobby congress for more money for "research and development," promising that someday, maybe the right solution will come along.

Rent-seeking by a big company does not justify rent-seeking by a small company that hopes to become a big company, because success will make it another big rent-seeking company.

[1] This is a real problem that hasn't been solved yet. There are ideas about what to do, but none of them is a slam dunk.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_Heroes_of_the_Computer_...