skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love the idea, but I simply do not see how they can make it work at this scale. Based on the numbers they will be ordering around 40,000 units. Can you really buy custom made components in small quantities and expect to get acceptable prices?

The only way I can see this working is if they partnered with a company who will be making this phone anyway, basically a phone that looks almost exactly like Ubuntu Edge. So basically they would start with maybe a $200 (to make) top of the line smartphone from one of the big manufacturers, and then spend $600 upgrading it with sapphire lens, fastest ARM CPU, 4GB ram and all the SSD memory. Here is the thing, I can see this working, because they can sell these phones at cost, or below cost, as an investment into the ecosystem. So, this might actually be a $800 phone that costs $800-900 to make.

However, I am worried about some of the unproven components like the sapphire lens and silicon-anode batteries. Can they find suppliers, and can they make it work in the phone. And will they have to recall all 40k of those phone when the battery expends to 4x the size or blows?

The problem to liking it with Formula 1 is, in F1, the engines, the cars, and all the other components are blown all the time, and then get rebuilt, tested, refined, and tested some more, by people who know what they are doing, not consumers.

I like the ambitious project, I just feel like they really need about 4x the budget or more to pull this of.
Honestly, this doesn't sound like a bad batch of drives or the like -- sounds like they weren't doing scrubbing on their RAID.

In case it's helpful, and for general knowledge dissemination:

What likely happened is that a drive "failed". This is usually when the RAID card decides that a drive has had enough command errors that it fails the drive. It may actually be fine, and just had a spate of bad responses. You might try to online the drive again and let it rebuild, but that's debatable.

At any rate, so they replaced the drive. That's fine. But then, to rebuild the RAID back to optimal state, it has to read all of the data off of the other drives. Here's where a bad scrubbing policy bites you -- because if those drives have any sectors that have gone bad or problems with the hardware, those drives might fail as soon as the rebuild runs.

Scrubbing should be done regularly (weekly?). What it does is, in essence, test every sector on all of the disks in the array to make sure that all of them are still fully functional so that -- if there is a failure -- you're pretty sure you can rebuild.

The downside of scrubbing is that, for better or worse, it does exercise your disks fairly heavily. Also, if you don't have a suitable trough period then you might even find it difficult to have the available I/O bandwidth to do it.

That said, you should do it if you're not.
I created a cheap Ikea standing desk at home.
But I have big problems standing all day. After a few hours, the discomfort in my legs is getting too high and I could not work efficiently any more.

So I bought a bar chair, in order to be able to sit on my standing desk.
I try to use it as few as possible, and it works quite well for me :)
Unless you literally had a single thread of execution running on each core, you would still have to worry about all those things you mentioned. Presumably, Cloudflare's software is too complex to make that feasible. So while it makes sense to bypass the kernel for the biggest bottleneck in their system, processing IP traffic, it wouldn't make sense to give up the convenience the kernel provides for things like scheduling, disk drivers, etc. Plus, security would obviously be a concern. Running complex internet-facing software in ring 0 on the bare metal all the time is like riding a motorcycle naked. Sure, you might be able to go a bit faster, but if things go wrong, there is literally no protection.
> One side thinks that malloc(0) should return a null pointer and be done with it, which sounds like a fine idea until you realize that you can't call free or realloc on the same pointer.

Calling free(NULL); does nothing, as expected, and calling realloc(NULL, size_t) is the same as calling malloc(size_t), so it does not have that as a bad side effects.
> So what you're saying is that the lives of US personnel are more valuable than that of innocent Pakistani civilians, including the 94 children cited in the report?

I think the point is that the best option is the one that you would predict results in the fewest amount of deaths. Do you think the option of sending in soldiers would definitely result in fewer deaths?

Now, I'm much more inclined to agree with the idea that we should end the war on terror in general. But I'm not so convinced that, in the meantime, drones shouldn't be used.
"Just because you hide in her closet does not make her your girlfriend"
This was discussed (read: good-naturedly ridiculed) on DIYDrones: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/colorado-town-consid...
If anyone thinks that this sounds farfetched, it really just scratches the surface of the waste and corruption in Detroit. When I was working for a contractor installing and fixing servers at various plants and facilities, the only union workers who actively appeared to be doing their jobs were the union work rules compliance guys, who hovered over us to see if there was any possible way to file a grievance over violations of the "work rules". We were not allowed to "move" a system on our own - even just an inch in order to move a cable. Plugging in ethernet cables was okay, but if we dared to plug in a power cord on our own we were fucked. If we needed a system moved a couple of feet, or plugged in, we were lucky if it took less than a week for a worker to get around to it.

Just about everyone else seemed like they were on a picnic.
I can only extrapolate how criminals are treated from how we dealt with "detainees" in Iraq. The biggest difference is that at ECP2 in Fallujah, we only stuck our hands down the pants of people who we were detaining.
The problem is that we have seen this all before. It is freaking scary to pick up a history book after reading the news.

"The Algerian War of Independence does provide such similarities in terms of geography and topography, social makeup, as well as military and insurgent forces at play. The French, however, lost Algeria after eight years of bitter fighting and the subject is further obscured by the emotions surrounding the atrocities by both sides, thus making the collation of objective testimonies difficult. Most confusing, though, are the circumstances specific to a troubled France at the time, such as the profound tensions that existed between citizens in the métropole and French immigrants in Algeria proper, the continued effort to resume its former place as a major power in the world, the collapse of the Fourth Republic in 1958,..."[1]

The technology might improve and the tactics might go through a revision or two but what is the possibility of similar outcomes? Is unilateral, and sometimes excessive, force the only possibility?

[1]http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/french-counterinsurgenc...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War#French_counter-ins...
> And the crybabies that think that all they do is a unique invention and that it costs millions of dollars to write a couple of lines of code

I think that is a great point. I believe that many people think that you should get a patent for something if you thought of something first. It certainly has an appeal towards the common man if you can get rewarded for just an idea. As IT professionals we all know someone who has an idea and just needs someone to execute.
Why we chose Riak
Some thoughts on guns in America.
If prior form is anything to go by they're about to break it all again with the Mir switch.
What advantages would that give you over using Xcode on a MacBook?
I understand your argument as it applies to drugs, but the problem when it's applied to porn is that while nobody is harmed by growing drugs, some people are harmed in some porn productions. So it's not an accurate analogy. As an extreme, do you believe it would be better if we could sell snuff films legally?
I have been programming for about a year and a half. I am now in college and am developing a web application for my start up. I think "getting to the next level" is often a big problem for those teaching themselves programming. There seems to be a plethora of resources available to beginners, but not as many "intermediate" lessons.

My suggestion is to pick a category - whether it is games, web development, mobile, etc - and start a project there. As others have said, dive in over your head. Take it one step at a time, it will be slow at first. No matter what you are doing, utilize search engines and Stack Overflow. They are your best friends. Don't worry if you use a framework and feel completely overwhelmed at first - it's normal. Also, learn Linux. It will make your life easier, and give you a better understanding of how operating systems work.

Lastly – just some general advice about something I have learned. You will hit some rough patches where you spends hours or even days on something trivial. This is part of the learning process. Becoming a better programmer means you organize your projects differently, and you learn how to debug more efficiently. Something cool about this though – sometimes you have an error and try 10 different fixes. None of them work. This is not wasted time – you just learned 10 new things, and chances are next time you will be able to debug a little bit more quickly.
The perils of being a knowledge worker
There's a slider between 100% bootstrapped and 100% invested, and using that slider is what gives you leverage in tough times.
I think the main difference is that SLIME is for Common Lisp and Geiser is for Guile/Racket. More than that, I don't know enough about SLIME to say.
Congrats Raganwald! Funny how seeing that streetcar suddenly made me nostalgic for Toronto.
A successful business does everything it can to make money as soon as it can. It can take investments because bootstrapping doesn't make sense in many situation (growth would be too slow), but saying premature + asymmetric effort to capture value is just counterproductive is actually exactly the opposite of what works.

A business needs to make money as soon as it can. It's how it survives. Facebook and Twitter are exceptions.
frigging brilliant - longest fiction ive read in about a decade
This is just plain wrong. There is no reason not to use setup.py for your private "application" as he calls it. Even if it's not distributed trough the public index you may still benefit from having version numbers and "abstract" dependencies for your app. That way you may choose where to look for the dependencies at deploy time and use a private cheeseshop for delivering your private packages, not to mention that requirements.txt is a pip only thing.
Australian national culture does not include deference of the kind seen in Japan and Korea. I do not understand the point of the substitution. What is the assumption you are referring to?

As for snide remarks, the bit about the question mark was correcting a repeated and minor punctuation mistake, and I genuinely thought you might want to know about it. However, in the context of this thread it was a bit of a passive aggressive cheap shot, and I apologize.

That said, you're still being overly aggressive and your incivility throughout most of this thread is against the guidelines.
from the main-page:

Because i prefer growing and healing to poking at corpses, the continuously running Scheme interpreter takes the center of the stage in Geiser. A bundle of Elisp shims orchestrates the dialog between the Scheme interpreter, Emacs and, ultimately, the schemer, giving her access to live metadata.
Why is this acceptable? Would we allow police detectives to out source solving a crime or garbage men to outsource picking up the trash? Why can't the patent office just hire good people like this guy who can figure this stuff out in 10 minutes? Perhaps the cost of filing a patent should increase each time you do it so the same people don't just keep flooding the patent office with this junk.
Here at Toptal we were boot strapped for more than a year before taking any money from a16z and others. It not only helps funding, it also helps the core of your company run at a fundamental level; seeing every operation through the lens of profit vs. loss which most (purely) funded VC companies don't grasp very well at all. It's extremely important.
Ubunut-Forums hacked
It was at one time a good example but Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million into Github one year ago.

http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-deve...
The Amazing FishCam, since 1994
Yes, you can. The ZeroMQ git repository now contains a pure Java implementation of ZMTP/2.0 which aims to be compatible with libzmq 3.2.2.

https://github.com/zeromq/jeromq

I've recently started to migrate my ZeroMQ/JNI to pure JeroMQ and I have a few simple components in production already.
iM an iDiot
If I understand it correctly the serverless part means that the whole OAuth process is handled in JavaScript on the client (the user's browser). There is no server-to-server communication.
War is money, so keeping an enemy is important. If the US ended its War on Terrorism today, there would be no other organization, faction or nation willing to step up to be Public Enemy #1.

I think this is a reasonable assumption. Consider that during the Cold War, US military spending was justified by the Cold War. Then the USSR collapsed, and noboody blinked or even skipped a beat (military spending wise), because hey, the world's still dangerous (not in small part thanks to the weapons sold around like candy during the cold war?), and also Saddam, Somalia, whatever; sarcastically you could call it lots of make-work until the War On Terrorism could begin proper.

Then everybody is more or less instantly told that this "war" may take a long time, many generations, and that these are oh so tough and dangerous times, like setting someone's house on fire and then saying it's gonna get warmer. The huge surplus Bush turned into debt, that money ended up in the coffers defense contractors and whatnot; whoever has it now, it's not like fairies took it away to outer space (which is kind of how you're supposed to think about it: out of sight, out of mind).

"War is a Racket" [1] is such an old book... and no matter how true it might have been back then, it certainy seems true today. A very costly, lethal or profitable racket, depending on your part in it.

[1] http://archive.org/details/WarIsARacket
MyNSA: Google for the Private Web comes out of Stealth Mode
Going from $0 to a $750m valuation still counts as bootstrapping, even though "not taking VC" is no longer technically true.

Incidentally, there's not necessarily anything to be "proud" of if you don't take VC. It depends on the details of the business. 37signals has done fine without taking VC (though they did take a personal investment from Jeff Bezos), but Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like would never have been successful without substantial outside investment.
A visualization of the world's largest data breaches - infographic
How one Japanese gaming startup is generating $3.8 million in revenue per day
Note that they did periodic backups, which would have scrubbed the same sectors as a full resync, so that's not the case.
The story has internet fiction written all over it. Definitely one of the better examples of it, still a good read 11 years on :)
He isn't a bit pyro is he?
You could have just said, "no" and it would have been okay. We would have understood. We're on the same side after all. :)
CurveZMQ - authentication and encryption library

https://github.com/zeromq/curvezmq

CurveZMQ was recently announced by Pieter Hintjens (one of the 0mq contributors) on his blog:

http://hintjens.com/blog:45
Thanks. In my defence, I had checked the definition of 'principal' and found 'something of principal or chief importance' [1] so had thought it was the correct option.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/principal
this is another classic example of the HN echo chamber - "wait there are non white collar professions outside of programming - where people can make a lot of money too?!? :O".. there are "n" ways to make more money than a programmer in most parts of the world outside the valley (heck even in the valley) - and not just as a banker / consultant etc..
Still waiting for developer E-mail 1 about this.

No updates. No device. No communication whatsoever.

Good work!
"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

And yet somehow immigrants (Nigerian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Armenian) living in poverty somehow find a way to work hard enough to become successful. They make their own outcome. Why is it only the impoverished Americans that cannot succeed.

I think we have to look here at what it takes to succeed.

1. Dedicated parent(s). Two of them (a mom and a dad) can do far more than one so probability of success rises if both stick around. These inner city kids almost NEVER have a dad in the picture. This leaves mom to work or she is a complete welfare loser and probably on drugs too.

2. Standards/Morals. One bad choice can ruin a person's life. We all have turning points in life where we choose to take a hit off a pope, or pass on it. Have unprotected sex, or abstain. Assault someone, commit a robbery, ETC. These choices have a ripple effect on the rest of our lives.

3. Hard work. Why work if you can live off of the dole? Why work for white people and help their society since they are so racist? (this is a common attitude).

Immigrants come to America with almost nothing. They see opportunity though. They work hard and succeed. They stick together. Dad does not leave, mom does not smoke crack or sleep around. They have values, morals and a strong work ethic. This is what separates immigrants living in poverty and your more typical inner city situation in Philadelphia.
Just saying that without elaborating isn't very useful. Or credible.
The article about us was written in March of 2011, before we accepted funding. We were bootstrapped for 4 years.
The problem with working at a company like that is that by the time you realize you are stuck, you have no relevant practical experience anymore and it can be rather difficult to get hired at places that are worth working at.
Not really.

A backup would be a filesystem level event, so at best it would only access 1/N of the sectors (where N is the duplication level). It isn't guaranteed to access all of the sectors the data resides in -- and also, it may have hit the kernel's filesystem cache or the on-disk cache or something like that, too, bypassing the physical media entirely.

Also keep in mind that a RAID rebuild is a media level event, it doesn't just copy files. It will copy over the "empty" sectors, too, because it just has no idea what's what on the disk. It faithfully recreates the raw bytes on the media.

The disk might have failed in a part of the disk you aren't actually using and never noticed because all of your actual data is intact -- the the RAID can't really rebuild without them.
I'd recommend ZFS for working with these kind of arrays; scrub is a command that's easy to regularly schedule, and will only use idle I/O bandwidth (helps that the RAID functionality is integrated with the whole filesystem).

If you have an infrequent scrub policy and hit bad sectors on rebuild, it can detect checksum failures and mark specific files as corrupted, rather than declaring all your disks defective. Traditional linux md raid behaviour is particularly bad in this regard: if you have a raid6 configuration and haven't been scrubbing, and then have a single disk failure, all your disks will have a few random isolated bad sectors (i.e. sectors that will URE when you attempt to read them) on, but since you still have one disk's worth of parity it's possible to recover all your data with no downtime (and with ZFS raidz2 this is what would happen). But with md raid as soon as you hit those bad sectors during the rebuild it will consider those drives as failing and kick them out of the array, and since all your drives have at least one bad sector on that means it's impossible to recover the array.
How do you ensure dis/likes are unique if it's anonymous? Or is that simply a trade-off that can't be avoided?
Ask HN: How to process credit card payments
Hello HN. First question here so if possible take it easy on me :)

Main question is how can one start to process payments from many to many. Does one work directly with visa api or through a bank? And what are the security conditions that one would need to abide by(nuclear resistant datacenter etc).

Thank you in advance.
Without knowing details this sounds very much like the stuck clients issue Armin Ronacher complains about here: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/26/disconnects-are-good-for-y... (discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161073)

In a nutshell if the server goes away while a client is in recv the client will never know and waits forever.
The best way to get answers to your questions:

https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team
I was in a similar situation once. I was outsourced to another company to do a rather specific sysadmin job. After a couple of months they switched systems, making my job obsolete.
For some reason however, I never actually met the IT-manager. We nodded at each other in the hallway, sure, and he new I was the outsourced guy, but I’m sure he never knew what I really did. In fact, nobody knew what I did exactly. Even before the system swap, since it was a very specific task. Apparently he wasn’t aware that I was hired as a sysadmin for the previous system only, or maybe they replaced some paperwork, I don’t know. Fact is that for some reason my contract wasn’t terminated.

After a while, I began coding my own projects. Which was a bit of a challenge, since IT wouldn’t let me install software. I did have Notepad, and a WAMP-server on my USB thumb drive. Mind you, I did not have an office of my own, it was basically an office garden. Co-workers (testing, helpdesk, project management, not too technical stuff) could watch my screen directly. So I had to disguise my project websites as a corporate intranet page. Every once in a while someone would say ‘wow, that looks difficult’ and I would say ‘well, you know’. Mind you this was just basic HTML and PHP stuff.

The next problem was internet access. They did have internet there, but most websites were blocked by IT, and they were monitoring internet traffic, too. So I learned how to set up a proxy server, and figured that if I kept the amount of traffic down I’d be allright. Besides, I couldn’t have my coworkers seeing me browse SO all day, right? It’s amazing how resourceful you get when your resources are limited!

The funny thing is that when you look busy yet can still ‘find the time’ to help others, people hold you in high regard. They even sent praise about me to the IT manager, who came down to me once and told me he heard great things about me, and he passed the praise on to my outsourcing company.
After a year or so I learned a great deal about web development, and finished a couple of side projects. I started to get some remorse. As funny and unique as the situation was, it didn’t feel right at all. Eventually I quit (to everyone’s surprise, because I was doing such a great job!), moving on to more challenging work, and above all a more ‘fair’ way to make money.

What struck me from those days is that nobody in my department actually knew what the others were doing. For all I know everybody was coding up their side projects in the boss’ time. And that was just my department, let alone the whole company. Large corporations (I’ve worked for several) are just so inefficient, I think that at least 50% of all employee hours is wasted on politics and sherades. The number is even higher if you count in useless meetings.