skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those confused (as I was at first), falcolas is referencing Percona XtraDB Cluster, a particular distribution of MySQL + XtraDB + Galera Cluster.

> Regular asynchronous replication is your best bet

That doesn't get you HA in any practical form. I've done the heartbeat thing, it created more outages by itself than would have occurred with no HA solution at all, usually failed to kick in during a real failure, and we could never fix all the split-brain scenarios. Galera is absolute magic by comparison.

Hence my suggestion that a cluster be deployed within one datacenter, with asynchronous replication to a standby.
That worked? I had to deal with conversations happening near my office a while back, and looked into noise-canceling headphones, but the reviews and articles I read claimed that they didn't do a good job on voice. They were designed for the kind of continuous noise you get from things like airplane engines, not for sporadic things.
I don't know if anyone remembers the game MayaQuest, but it was one of my favorite Mac games and I dreamed of exploring the Mayan ruins on a bicycle for years. If drones had existed back then, I think this would have been my dream job.

I guess it's my own fault that I decided it was more realistic to learn how to make games than to imitate the lives depicted in them.
I used to use and develop with GNUstep (just small personal projects) for a good chunk of the 2000s decade, until I lost interest. A lot of the important stuff is there. AFAIK they have parity with 10.4 or so.

It's true that there isn't a lot of momentum behind the project. I suspect that's just a lack of people. I wonder if they'd be receptive if some folks just jumped in and implemented more of the missing stuff. I am guessing yes.

The spirit of my comment is: you can't say objc doesn't exist outside of Apple. It's there in some form. It might even more "there" if people start using and developing it. We as individuals have the power to do that. Dismissing it very early strikes me as defeatist.
The thought experiment was that the companies went bankrupt and their products stopped working. A world without the company or its products. That probably should have been clearer, since if Amazon went bankrupt most of its products probably would go dark (unlike Apple/MS).
As a bit of a drone hobbyist (I've got a few that I tinker with) -- it makes me happy to see the technology being used for some amazing stuff (Google's rhino poacher project comes to mind).

It seems that the most we hear about drones being used is to fire missiles into crowded cafes. While truly, the possibilities are endless on the overall good that drone technology will one day provide.

I suppose there's historical precedence here quite often, where a military technology transitions into broader usage.
Yes, it was under Allchin, but I suspect that "integrated innovation" couldn't happen without Gates' approval and stewardship.

There is another twist - after XP Windows was split into two branches (since they didn't want to delay client to wait for server): Server and Longhorn. Brian Valentine managed Server (shipped as Server 2003), at same time different war room, different managers managed Longhorn ship. So essentially experienced management team was shipping server, and non-so heavy weight - Longhorn. Then some people were taken to manage XP SP2 (result of "security push"). So there is no surprise Longhorn had problems and required "reset" to finally ship as Vista.

And the lesson is: never ever branch to v+1 and v+2 branches unless absolutely required - one of them is going to be neglected.
I frequently ask myself that same question. I wish I had an answer for you. I could attempt to answer it but the NSA would probably put me on a no fly list or something as a limited form of extrajudicial punishment. Or maybe I am paranoid. But then again given all the things I have learned about what the US has done how can I not be?
While the "they hate our freedom" is a completely bullshit line, in the case of Al Qaeda who Bush was referring to, they probably would have supported primarily Sunni Iraq gassing primarily Shia Iran.

Our policies in Egypt and (ironically) putting troops in Saudi Arabia to fight Saddam, on the other hand, did motivate Al Qaeda.
> ...am glad that books don't need to take up physical space anymore.

The problem is that when stuff is out of sight, you don't even think that it is there. Look at the Internet: it's a massive amount of information and you just don't even know what you could ever find unless you spend time searching for it.

When something is physically tangible, it's way easier to locate it and to think about it. That's how our brains work.
When you're paid to clean leaves off multiple front yards? 15 * yards * days used per year = a whole lot of time. It's really not surprising that they pick what works quickest.
Actually, the one where the guy is afraid of flying, avoids it his whole life and then crashes the first time he actually flies is ironic. I think you'd be right if none of the situations were ironic, but the fact that one is really ruins it for me.
...because this is like the only viable business model in open source. And this model does here the same thing it does anywhere else: it makes it so that developers are undervalued and underpaid or paid nothing at all.

Don't get me wrong, I support open source and I believe most "infrastructure software", like OSs, compilers etc. should be open source. But I'm kind of split since the best viable option when it comes to OSs is still some flavor or *nix/BSD (after 40 freakin years and tons of cool ideas, nothing else turned into a "usable product"!) and nothing better and usable seems to come from the open source community. Microsoft had some very cool ideas in their research department (see Singularity OS for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)), and I'm afraid lots of them will go to the trashcan if Microsoft stops seeing software as a "product". If I weren't talking about Microsoft, we could at least hope they would open source the cool new research projects they loose interest in but I don't have high hopes for this, or for the open source community's ability to innovate and do really new and cool stuff.
I tried a similar product, but the silence became unnerving in 10-15 minutes.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xap/3/3/181/
So, did anyone complain at the event? Or even after the event? How did the judges and organisers respond to the complaints?
> The situation really is terrible for everyone there, but I'm not sure an US intervention would make things better

The havoc that unfolds in the Middle East is the US intervention. Instability in the region fuels the War on Terror.

There's little concern for the locals who are mere pawns in the US game. Afghans and Iraqis already know that. Others, like Egyptians, are starting to realize this.
They not only share their name with the existing startup, they are that startup:

The winning app makes it easy for consumers to find places to withdraw
small amounts of cash at a low cost, using businesses in their own
neighborhood and a PayPal technology that is very secure, said Alexander
Sjögren, who developed the app with Jose Pimienta and Osniel Gonzalez.
Sjögren is with the Miami company YellowPepper, which offers mobile
banking and payment solutions in Latin America. Pimienta and Gonzalez
co-founded Vinylfy, a startup catering to vinyl-record enthusiasts. [1]

YellowPepper is:

About YellowPepper
YellowPepper Mobile Financial Solutions provides products and services
that enable mobile financial transactions between financial institutions
(banks), businesses, and consumers in Latin America. With 1.5 million
users, YellowPepper operates in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala,
Peru, and Panama as a service provider for more than 50 financial and
non-financial institutions. For more information, log on to
www.yellowpepper.com. [2]

1. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/08/25/3585797/hackers-emerge...

2. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...
"Leaf blower motors are inordinately large emitters of CO, NOx, HC, and PM according to a study conducted for the ARB (5). Two-stroke engine fuel is a gasoline-oil mixture, thus especially toxic. Particles from combustion are virtually all smaller than PM2.5. According to the Lung Association, a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars."

Yeah, it's things like that that make me wish we could just outright ban all two-stroke engines. See also those gas scooters that occasionally go by - it's incredible how much stink they produce (and conversely, how incredibly clean-burning cars are now). At least there aren't too many of them.
Up to 60 floors / 20,000 people in an apartment building? I didn't realize that existed. I don't think you'd find an apartment building in the US that has even a fraction of that. The largest hotel in New York is the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It has 49 floors / 1,949 rooms, which I don't think comes close to 20,000 people; I couldn't find the exact occupancy.
I have showdead on and it was dead before, and now it's not. Maybe a mod saw it and fixed it or...?
I wonder how good this would be as a game engine.
It is, but only if you're Mark Zuckerberg. And even then, it would be so if you meant it as a private message to the Facebook executives and it ended up being public due to privacy settings changes which you designed.

Edit: Actually, I misread your last sentence.
It still isn't ironic, unless you were trying to teach someone what irony was and that was your example of irony.
Stalin is very impressive, but

> Simple benchmark (vs C (gcc), Stalin wins)

Did you read the comments?

> Nice, but part of the reason the C version is slow is that you are using abs instead of fabs. abs takes an int as an argument (this should be a compiler warning!) – passing a double other than zero always returns a large number. The C version is basically iterating till the error is below double’s resolution.

> Excellent point! Making the switch to fabs brings the gcc-inline speed down almost exactly to what Stalin is getting.
to me SELECT * is like var in C#
Weekend Project: IPv6/IPv4 subnet calculator
Before they radically changed direction and were acquired by Cisco, Meraki tried to target community meshes in SF and beforehand as Roofnet at MIT. They handed out/sold a lot of mesh APs. I wonder what happened to the boxes.
Meshnets don't scale well anyway so perhaps strength in numbers applies here: if there are so many small meshnets that getting a mole in each one is totally impractical, spying on meshers en masse becomes totally impractical.
No, it's not. Commodities are products with multiple sellers and minimal differentiation. You can only put Ralph Lauren clothes into that bucket by willfully ignoring the concept of differentiation. Meanwhile: there is literally no differentiation between different suppliers of IV saline; it's a standardized product.
Every time a siren shrieks on the street, our conscious minds might ignore it, but other brain regions behave as if that siren were a predator barreling straight for us.

It's worth mentioning that a siren is specifically meant to pull your attention. It's not really the same as a constant background susurrus.

I work in the heart of a city, and there's a constant babble of traffic and pedestrians a few floors below. That's fine and can be tuned out - the noise that's distracting me from concentration is random loud office noise. Noise that can't be filtered out as 'background'.
You might need to fake it and that's ok.

Given that the hackaton might be 2 days, unless your idea is 'simple' enough to have a MVP in 1 day (never seen it happen), the second day will be all preparation for the presentation because this is what will win a jury.
>The ground stations are at White Sands in New Mexico, at a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory site in Wrightwood, California, and a European Space Agency site in Tenerife, Spain.

At least two of these stations are located in mostly-dry climate.
It has been 1GB for quite a while.
The Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town in New York has eleven thousand tenants, which is at least a fraction.
Everytime I'm reminded a country like this just spurned me an honestly-applied-for work visa, it brings the taste of sour grapes back up my throat, now that I'm leaving in a few months. It's unfortunate that as others mentioned, many of the individual people I like call this country home. I hope someday to be able to convince them to up their roots and come hang out with me in Canada or Sweden or some cooler place.
Sure. I've never used the cloud, I simply can't make the business case for it. Traffic or storage will kill it every time.
So the root of the problem is that people are paying other peoples to clean their yards... guess it's the same "hidden cost / side-effect of externalizing things".

That's why I try to stick to the "keep as many things in-house as possible", both for my household and family and for my business :)

EDIT+: I think the so called "american way of doing things" is so successful business-wise exactly because of the "externalize as much as you can" philosophy, but it kind of fails big when the hidden costs of externalization are non-financial and manifest themselves as "lower quality of life" or "worse health" and at the same time get offloaded to other people than the ones doing the externalizing (like to the neighbors of the people that pay companies that use powered leafblowers to clean up their yards).
Again, the sudden title change of submissions suck.
Off-topic: The blog title is a perfect example to demonstrate why to never use line-height in the place of margin.
As it apparently needs to be explained: Microsoft's predatory behavior in 1990s resulted in an incalculable and unrecoverable loss of trust among technologists -- which was bound to ultimately catch up to the company. You can get away with predatory behavior when you're dominant, but when you miss new markets -- as Microsoft did repeatedly in the lost decade of the 2000s -- you can be damned sure no one is going to be foolish enough to open those markets to a known monopolist. Microsoft is left with two choices: invent new markets or try to earn back the public's trust. They have no track record in either department; as the Magic 8-ball says, "outlook not so good"...
There wasn't much that could be done. According to the rules, all's fair so long as the code wasn't written until the hackathon itself, which is pretty much impossible to prove or disprove anyway. You can prepare as long as you want. There is a section about a "code review" but I doubt that was really done; IIRC we didn't even submit our code, we just did a demo & video.

The strongest complaint we could make was that it was strongly against the spirit of a hackathon, which is a difficult argument to win.
Where Sand Is Gold, the Reserves Are Running Dry
GitLab is used to collaborate on software. It uses git repositories and has an issue tracker. (GitLab.com co-founder)
There used to be one in Brisbane in the mid 2000s (BrisMesh), but it seems to be dead now.
Facebook joined the Linaro Enterprise Group (watched the announcement at ARM TechCon in Santa Clara last year), indicating that they are at least interested in developing that necessary server environment.

You're definitely right there is a large software maintenance cost, but that has to be weighed against any perf/watt savings (Anandtech's Calxeda review shows even early systems have potential http://www.anandtech.com/show/6757/calxedas-arm-server-teste...), being able to put pricing pressure on Intel, and not being tied to Intel as a single supply source.
I can't easily get a feel for Joyent's pricing. Is it comparable/cheaper than AWS or?
It depends where. In Japan modern books are still made to be very durable and have high quality, UV protected paper if you purchase a proper edition.
> I believe that the primary reason for the success of C++ is its easy compatibility with C, and any creators of would-be C++ replacements who fail to understand this are doomed to failure.

The main reason were actually

- Most C compiler vendors bundled C++ compilers in the begining

- The C and C++ compiler vendors that matter are OS vendors

Any language can replace C or C++, if an OS vendor decides that it is the way to go.

Lets say Apple decides to have Objective-C as their systems language, or Microsoft decides to have C# as their systems language.

Once upon a time, Apple's system programming language was a Pascal dialect, just as an example.

Developers are always at the mercy what languages are the official ones in a given platform.

This is how Microsoft is deprecating C on Windows nowadays, by leaving their C compiler at C90 level and stating C++ is the official systems language for Windows on their tooling.
I used to -- and still do, to some effect -- fetishize living in a highrise. I was a suburban kid who grew up in a boring (and, in retrospect, wonderful) house surrounded by other boring houses -- I watched Seinfeld and Frasier, and loved the idea of living in an apartment complex, where prospective friends and plotlines were only yards and floors away.

Looking at Michael's pictures, I'm struck with a particular sense of envy -- I realize, knowing what I know about median Hong Kong quality of living, that its likely unpleasant to live in these conditions. And yet, the sheer mathematics of it -- twenty thousand tenants divided by sixty floors is around three hundred per floor -- makes me smile at so many imaginary hallway interactions.
"Literally" is a lost battle. Literally.
Update: Thanks for changing it back.
I think Microsoft has always been a software company, and never really intended to get into any other business. At the same time, Apple grew from being a strictly hardware company into a "platform" company. That is, they began developing the software that ran on their hardware. This put them in a much better position to begin developing devices that were not traditional computers.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has done all they can to avoid making hardware. It shows with the Surface...while it's a nice piece of hardware there are many failures with the device that perhaps a company with more experience building those kinds of things would have caught early on in development. Only recently have they began working in hardware, and developing full products. I don't believe they would have even had this capability had it not been for the extraordinary work that Microsoft Research does. But Microsoft has made a ton of money by pushing both their consumer software and their tools/infrastructure for companies to develop their own software on the .NET platform. It's widely known that Microsoft's developer support channels (if you want to pay for them) are much more developed than Apple's, whose dev environments are geared for far simpler setups. .NET shops, for example, pretty much do not need to worry about the latest and greatest tools. Microsoft can provide everything you need to get work done on their platform.

But personally, I don't think you could possibly develop as good of a business relationship between hardware manufacturer and software developer as a company which includes both facets of product development. These days, the real money is in getting people to buy your gadget, as Apple has shown. Microsoft missed out on that, because they did not invest properly in building hardware when they could have.

And that's where Microsoft went "wrong". Though they may not have...
I understand, and nVidia makes graphics chips, but they don't have a semiconductor fab. :-)
I think we'll know the answer to that question when oil finally really does run out.

There is too much uncertainty past that point to make any predictions at all but I figure as soon as the ability to project power short of ICBMs goes out the window and the geopolitical map drawn up around one particular resource gets redrawn there will be a big push for something more stable in the longer term. And trade embargoes are a lot easier to maintain when it isn't as easy to move around. Until then it will be status quo with bigger countries ignoring the treaties they've signed and ratified whenever they feel like.
I disagree about it being ironic.
Unless, in order to overcome his fear of flying, he decided to learn how to become a pilot, and crashed on his first lesson after the instructor said "now you have a go, Bob".
Taxes pay for roads, schools, police, sewers, water, courts, etc. They are things you consume by living in this country and thing that most people would like to have around. They also pay for the military, the CIA, and evidently things like supporting the gassing of Iran. But they are not enforced loyalty.

Moreover, you can get out of paying US taxes. You just have to leave the country, renounce your citizenship, and pay an exit tax (after all, it would be rather absurd to allow someone to profit off the US legal system and business environment and then leave before paying the bill)
901614 – Adopt Tor as a feature in Firefox
> Should I move to another country and pay a different government my tax money instead? Arguably.

I'd say any government which does not have a standing army killing innocent people overseas is a better choice. At least your taxes would then not be used to produce bombs and guns. I agree with you that no country is perfect and you can find flaws in every of them, but still. There are some levels of differences.
Before C became mainstream, Modula-2 and many Pascal dialects like Apple and Turbo Pascal could already fulfil the same role with better type safety and Go compile times in 16 bit systems.

However they lacked the bundling to a commercial OS like UNIX, hence C grew in importance, because developers tend to use the languages supported by the OS vendors.
Of course. The joke is that
Cheney's statement that there is
"no doubt" that Saddam has WMDs
because we still had the receipts
from when we sent him the chemical
weapons for him to use against
Iran.
What about Apple and Google? They have repeatedly violated the trust of hackers, yet only a small minority have fully divorced themselves from these companies' products. As much as I'd love to believe in the morality of our market, I don't really think that's the case. Not that I believe MS's predatory behavior helped their cause at all, but I still think the primary reason why people don't use, or don't want to use, Microsoft products anymore is because they are inferior to others' products.

There was definitely a time where, for most people, that was not the case.

Edit: Just a little example...I don't remember continuously hearing about Microsoft employees going to fucked-up countries and running clandestine rescue missions http://pastebin.com/CuUcHM6m
Reading the tutorial is indeed very pleasant. I have to say however, that from such a new language I would ask for more correct string handling as opposed to the let-me-sidestep-encoding-issues-and-still-call-it-UTF8 that's going on.

Defining characters as 8 bit is not quite correct (you will get char variables holding a fraction of a character), treating strings as arrays of characters by conversion also isn't (now you have an array of partial characters) and ignoring the encoding (just assuming UTF8) is a sure cause for annoying bugs - something the rest of the language goes great lengths to avoid.

I've only read the tutorial so far. Maybe the library fixes some of the issues - we'll see. The thing is just that if you start adding metadata to your sting types (they do encode the length (in what? Characters? Partial characters? Bytes?)), then why not also at least add an encoding (to help programmers not to mix strings of different encodings)? Why do everything right and then weasel out when you get to strings?

Sorry. I'm totally obsessive what string encodings is concerned :-)
Your Mode of Day: Not All times of Day are (born) Equal
You're in good company:

http://www.americafirstparty.org/docs/platform.shtml