skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's just it - it's not a new flavor of linux as much as it's a kernel++ to support Chrome. No one will know or care if it's linux or not. The question is will people gel to the idea of just having a browser and nothing else.
Maybe the accountant, if he even exists, was doing exactly what he was told? By far the most likely scenario IMO.
But I though that "Mel" sounded "ghastly". Shirley that's unforgivable? :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=679208
I think there is a need and place for it.

One of the things I am hoping to do with my start-up is to build simple tools to help wet-lab scientists access informatics solutions to analyse and visualise their data, and simple tools for informatics scientists to visualise their data so that a wet-lab scientist can understand it (more easily). There is a huge communication gap between (bio)wet-lab and (bio)informaticians, and I think 'data science' tools can help to bridge that gap.
exaggerating about how much money you have is part of the corporate hiphop shtick.
And instead of just shutting it down cold-turkey why not try to see if he could borrow money from the employees to keep the business afloat. I believe the article writer, his friend pushed him too fast into closing the business down especially when he had customers already and a robust work force that he could have paired down.
Playster.org - a New Events Search Engine - in Open Beta
And reading maps at night using red flashlights...
Installing VirtualBox 3.0 On An Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop
Cheap iPod Screen Protectors
Keep your iPod looking brand new all the time with the iPod Screen Protectors. If you don't want to have the hassle or expensive of protecting your iPod completely then you can simply opt to protect your screen instead - which for most people is the only real concern.
Sacombank tuyển nhân viên 
(LĐ) - Ngân hàng Sài Gòn Thương Tín (Sacombank) cần tuyển NV cho chi nhánh Hải Phòng. NV tín dụng nam, tuổi dưới 35, cao hơn 1,65m, kỹ năng giao tiếp và phân tích tài chính, giải quyết vấn đề tốt.
Oh, gross. What a way to go. You know it wasn't a pleasant death when the police take a day to identify someone killed on their own property.

Sigh, I really hate the pointless deaths of good people.
> a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

His writing style plays for cheap laughs by insulting people, but that can only go so far. After a while, don't people grow up and get tired of that kind of thing? "Mike Arrington is a doody-head! Hah hah! Poop!"

Were one to look at his actual point, one might also go back 30 years and wonder if those silly upstarts at Microsoft with their "pee sees" have a chance against serious mainframes, with the millions of lines of code already written for them.
Look, I agree it was a sarcastic remark - but if you're going to take any sort of high ground (which is why I used the technical superiority comment, even though it was probably a poor choice of words) to sum up your argument, at least use something that doesn't have connotations of overzealous teens whose primary goal in life is to tell each other to F off.

It demeans his argument from a scathing piece (which I mostly agree with) to a blatant rant...
So basically what you are saying is that google plan to "embrace and extend" the web?

While this may be a step which is required to bring the web as a platform forwards, I'm not sure I like the sound of that either.
This whole article can be summarized in one word: DISCIPLINE.

Reading about how to stop being un-productive is .. well .. unproductive. Not getting shit done? Go do something!
The field of "human sciences" is slippery.
Economics, as a mere example, aims to be a "real science" and there is "good and solid research" but, nonetheless, the results are under our eyes.
I will not try to ask why this happens, many epistemologists have tried to.
Borrowing money for manufacturing/construction-type businesses is fairly common. It's not unusual to have open orders that exceed your on-hand capital. It's also not unusual for such businesses to have seasonal cycles. If you only worked on what you had cash for you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to those who borrow.

After all, spending money you haven't received yet is the basis of accrual accounting.

Of course, I wouldn't borrow money on a web startup project. That's a whole nother can of worms. But that's not what his business was.

Sounds like he got behind the power curve when he lost the discipline to run an accrual business. It takes a lot more attention to detail, which he didn't have, unfortunately.
Goldman Sachs might have been doing $100m a day by sniffing the NYSE
I liked the book excerpt linked on HN last week and am currently reading Felix Dennis's "How to Get Rich". He places accepting venture capital as substantially worse than debt.
Am I reading this right? I hope not.

Another user of GFS in the same primary datacenter as App
Engine is issuing a request to the GFS servers that reliably causes a
crash.

A google employee had a bug in their GFS-using code which ended up crashing GFS for themselves and all GAE users?

The failover procedure [...] was not designed to handle failover during full unavailability for a long period (greater than three hours).

Wouldn't something like a fire or a significant code bug in GFS cause full unavailability for hours?
Not true. Traditional radio stations do pay royalties.
Chrome OS isn't competing with Windows or Linux, in the same way the iPhone OS isn't competing with Windows. They are for two different types of device, bought by different markets for different reasons.

Chrome OS and iPhone are both about operating systems for small, portable, constrained devices. Chrome OS will power miniature web browsers, while Windows and distros like Ubuntu will power full-fat machines for real work.

Basically, Chrome won't be a mini-Windows or a mini-Ubuntu, but a maxi-Android.
A course in accounting isn't necessary. The first few chapters of a "Principles" text and PAYING ATTENTION is all that is needed if you're not doing the actual accounting yourself. EDIT: "Accounting the Easy Way" is a good book for anyone who just wants/needs to understand it rather than doing it.
The hardest part is knowing what you need to do next, versus what you want to do. Speaking as someone who wasted 5 days architecturing some fancy ajax<->CLOS thing instead of implementing the simple admin interface that I now desperately need (was working at a library today which filtered all non web traffic and cut me off of ssh)
The joke is to portray Steve Jobs as someone who doesn't respect Adsense as a product.
They're not looking to put it on desktops -- they're looking to put it on dedicated appliance web browser devices.

Also, no-one will know that this has anything to do with linux. People will just see the Google label, and they'll call the product 'Google' without realising that it has anything to do with linux; linux will just be a plumbing detail.

Personally, I don't think this will impact desktop devices at all.
You laugh, but you should be respecting the engineering vision and guts it took do the Right Thing; dropping the kludgy "industry standards" and aspiring to the Ideal, instead of running yet another ASP/Java/PHP/Oracle farm like all their peers.
The artists are losing, just as they have always done. However now at least cracks are appearing in the production/marketing/distribution oligopoly, with the potential a new model, fairer to the artists, will arise in their place.

The long term loser of this war will be the labels, and good riddance.
Indeed, I think he hates them because he sees his old-school world (and thereby his job-security) challenged by this, as he calls it, freetard-thing, which seems to be a blob in his mind consisting of elements from: blogs, linux, oss, free, internet, sandals, open, free. I think this is so, because when he gave a talk about his blog he stated that i got into blogging out of fear that Linux would kill old-school journalism.
Very clever, and I love Readability, but I don't think this one's necessary. :)

On our signup for our time tracking app, Freckle (http://letsfreckle.com), we just left the password fields clear.

Number of signups: >4000. Number of people who complained: 4. Number of people who wrote nice things: 15.

Translation: people like it, but it's not really remarkable. (And we did it 6 mos before the Man Who Would Be King wrote about this idea.)
Cloud Balancing, Cloud Bursting, and Intercloud
I think that's a little over the top, given that their total revenues are on the order of 53 billion for 2008 (that's 212 million per trading day). This alleges that fully half of those trades would have been done on behalf of this information.

Regardless, it is pretty bad form to abuse the position that GS had, and I think like anybody else that breaks the rules on such a level that they should be kicked off the exchange completely, not just curbed.
Interesting. But I hope you put something in the comments of your code on how to create that keyboard shortcut and the unicode for λ.
Six virtues of being an IT undergrad…(in Sri Lanka)
I take it you have not seen this Halo commercial then :)

http://www.break.com/index/best-halo-3-trailer.html
Software engineering will never be a rigorous discipline with proven results, because it involves human activity.

That is utter nonsense, and that's easy to prove: A car's appeal often has little to do with its capabilities and everything to do with its brand associations. No-one drives a Maserati for its reliability or its ample luggage space! There are few consumer products where the "human factor" is more important than in the auto industry. Yet is designing and building cars not engineering?
Maybe in the US, in Germany I have not noticed that it is especially other religious groups who do the criticizing. I think there is even an official warning from the government in Germany, though Scientology is not illegal. Not sure though - haven't really heard anything in a while...
Can you prove that God exists? Otherwise it's just a fairy tale :)

How would you prove that Google is not doing anything evil? You assume they're not, but that's just as (in)valid as my assumption that they might be. You could argue that proof is needed either way.

> Capacity to do something and trust are different things.

Google has the capacity to "do something", and I don't really trust them. But I can't really "not use Google" either.

The problem is that my chances of affecting what data Google has on me are very, very limited. They have their hands on most of what happens on the Internet.

I can reduce my "footprint" for example by disabling referrer information from my browser, but coincidentally, GMail won't let me in anymore if I do that.

Choosing "not to use Google" is difficult when every site I visit causes my browser to say hi to them. Of course, there are other reasons too. They're still the most efficient search engine, for example.

You're right, my bank could be doing nasty things too, but switching banks would be easy. Assuming it would help, of course :p
> I'm wondering if it is possible to inject some insulin into a person, then put him on the scales (denying him any food/drink) and observe the weight increase. Obviously that is not possible.

This is not intellectually honest. It's not what he means, and you know it. Of course weight-gain comes from food, the problem is the relation between what you eat and what you store. If insulin or lack of can change the scales from 1:1 to 10:1, then it doesn't matter very much how much you eat any more, does it? Since you can realistically change only about 20-30% of both eaten food and burned calories.

I'm not saying insulin does this (though it might very well) but for the sake of the discussion please don't fight the wrong idea.
Destroying the World's Computers: When Is the Next 1859?
News Flash: When combined, MSN and Windows Live are bigger than Digg, Twitter and CNN.

CNN is the website of a 24/hour television network; twitter and digg are Web 2.0 social networking things. None of which Microsoft is proud to be "bigger than".
All these arguments about BBC should have just used jQuery are non-starters.

There are plenty of off the shelf website production systems on the market, for instance. If you think a JS team should only ever use a library, I presume all your websites are created in Drupal using built in templates.

Software you produce yourself does exactly what you want with no bloat. jQuery is excellent, but there will always be gaps in it for any given organisation. Additionally there will be bloat. Sizzle is fantastic software, but my guess (based on actual observations) is that 90-95% of the selectors it is given in the wild are of the '#someid' or 'tag.classname' type. These can be handled with 20 lines of code, but Sizzle is closer to 1000. Many libraries contain code to support use on both standards compliant and quirks mode web pages, but if you only ever code in one of these, that extra code is useless.

Then there is the issue of dependency. External dependencies are one of the weakest points of any software product. You can't directly fix bugs or fill functionality gaps, so you must either branch the product or work around the issues. Both approaches cause pain when wishing to upgrade to the next version (a decision which may be forced on you by the supplier's support levels) by either having to re-engineer the patch or check compatibility of the workaround. Yes, you can submit bugs or patches, but you cannot control when, or even if, these will end up in a released version. Even if your bug is fixed, you may still have to re-engineer your codebase, because the fix may break your workaround.

If your organisation has the resources to produce a piece of software itself, it should. That organisation will end up with a product that does exactly what is required with no bloat, will avoid the pain of external dependencies, and will have team of people on board which provides a centre of excellence for that technology. For organisations much smaller than the BBC, these benefits will probably outweigh the small cost saving of using a JS library like jQuery. For the BBC, it's a "no-brainer".
Listen 443
> the primary engineer discovered that the
isolated servers supporting the Status Site were running in the same
data center as the primary App Engine serving cluster.

Hilarious - they were running the status site for App Engine on the App Engine infrastructure so when it went down they couldn't post it's status as being down. I'm sure people will be quite philosophical about this outage and how difficult distributed systems are to manage, but this seems kind of an obvious mistake to make...
OT: I don't even have ssh on 22, thanks to lamers and a bad experience with fail2ban and spoofed IP. The library system doesn't even let you do https; I was locked out gmail even. Not cool.
FWIW it remembers the time integral of current, not voltage.
I still think that Opera OS would be a better idea :)
> Google employs hundreds of students every summer to work on random open-source projects.

They do lots of things to generate good will, so there's just no way they could possibly be doing anything evil, right?

They even say "Don't Be Evil", so there's no way they could be evil, right?

People tend to judge entities based on the actions they can see.
... which are all probably not relevant in scale.

It's like the "how many humans ever lived?" question. People immediately start discussing about the definition of a "human being", homo whatever. I say it's pretty much irrelevant to the final number.
Probably ∫ estimated human population · estimated literacy rate · estimated hours per year a literate person would spend writing · words per hour · dt, or something like that. Given the dramatically higher levels of population, literacy, leisure time, and typing speed in recent decades, you should be able to get a pretty good estimate that way.
I don't see what you're laughing at. Their systems seem to be sufficiently isolated that the bug at least didn't affect other products (search, mail, etc.).

That alone is already more than you could expect from many other sites.

Showstopper bugs happen in any system, google is no exception here. More important is their handling and communication of the issue. And that was stellar, even despite the communication hole during the blackout.

This post mortem makes up for that faux-pas in my book. How often you get to read a detailed analysis like that from a company the size of google?
With clear admission of their faults and detailed description of the steps they're going to take to resolve them?

This is the google I want to see and it gives me good faith that they'll fix their communication issues for the next downtime.

It also makes me wonder what there is to laugh about. As a customer I can not complain much about the way this was handled (I have seen much, much worse). As a competitor I'd piss my pants just again over the sheer self-confidence and professionalism google displays at this scale.

Does your company have equal monitoring and procedures in place to detect, identify and resolve a low-level bug like this in a comparable timeframe?

So, no laughing here.
I had the same feeling. It doesn't help you fathom anything at all.
The question is how to attain discipline, not whether you need discipline :)
Most of your ideas will never take shape, and that's ok
Yes, that was an obvious mistake. A brown-paper-bag bug so to say.

The difference between google and many other companies is: They are not afraid to admit it and I'm sure that will be fixed before the next outage.

Most other hosting providers I've dealt with would not even tell me the exact cause for an outage. Or at most in blurry terms, preferably handing off the blame to someone else. You wouldn't believe how often these pesky core routers at my datacenters supposedly had a problem!

I also don't know many other providers with a status page as detailed as google's in first place.

So, yes, this was a funny screw-up. But on a very high niveau. This is a bit like mocking someone who drove his Ferrari into a wall - at least he had a Ferrari to drive into a wall... ;-)
Agreed. I don't know much about finance, but it seems like insider trading taken to a whole new level -- real-time, automated, massive scale DPI to hijack streams and push actions through just before trades are publicly committed.

Pretty much the grossest abuse of trust and position you could ever pull off at a stock exchange? If the sources behind the article are correct, then there's going to be massive fallout here.
>>>>when he overheard one of them say “well even I could do this”. <<<<

I guess I'm not the only one to make the "shitz easy" blunder (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501 which really kicked up a shitstorm on the net =P ) and this disease doesn't seem to be limited to just programmers.
Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
That's only 666 grams of fat, right? That's a pound and a half of fat. If you mix that with a pound and a half of something else, you can probably keep it down, no problem. Eating three pounds of food in a day is easy. That's like a 1.5ℓ bottle of water, in volume.
I don't think its clear that the query of death bug was included/fixed in the 8am GFS upgrade - they're just saying that an issue with similar external symptoms was recently fixed by upgrading to this newer version.

Sounds like the fact that this newer version was available was completely unrelated to this specific bug.
Zoom Experiment in Flash
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Dining Table To Ultimate Programmer Office With Under £1500
"I have not once, and I am not exaggerating once seen a person who logically should be fit as they ate healthily and exercised an adequate amount and was still obese, ever."

Well, sure. That's what "ate healthily" means, and it's how you determine that they're doing everything right: they're not obese.

I'm not suggesting that there's anything involved but intake and exercise; I'm responding to the idea that you can eat as much as possible and just burn it off with a little extra exercise. That's totally not doable.
Discipline is a decision. That is all. You decide to goof off. Be responsible for making your decisions, and you will find a way towards better discipline. You could say that discipline is "recognition of having made a decision" ..
To be fair, the libraries also stock music and movies (at least in Germany they do).
Given that large trading houses will scrap perfectly good dealing rooms in order to get a few milliseconds improvement in their real-time trading abilities what I fail to understand about all this is how they managed to overlook this for as long as it was the case.

Even physical access to the cables running other peoples trades should have been impossible, let alone root access on machines that actually do the trades.

All it took was some software in the right location, but they shouldn't have had access to that location to begin with. All they should have been able to see was their own traffic, on their own machines, hooked up to their switches, and beyond that you might have been in a position to do something evil.

Whoever agreed to the fox guarding the henhouse is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
It would be interesting to know how the phones were allegedly hacked. Were these just wiretaps on landlines or something more sophisticated?
Proof that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't punch him in the dick without being brought up on assault and battery charges.

This phrase, alone, makes me wanna buy a Real News Paper subscribtion. I never read such profanity reading the Washington Post.

Why perform inexpensive literary contortions, and dive face first into pie just to make me laugh, Ted Dziuba?
Yes, I understood that from reading the article, the point is that they still wasted an hour in trying to see if that would fix it or not because the symptoms were similar (crash of the master GFS server).
Debt Management
Don't run tis story or someone will die?

Don't write this or the terrorists strike. Don't write about our soldiers killing and raping in Iraq as they may die in retaliation. Don't write about that epidemic or more people may die due to panic...

News is always about life and death.

This way the Chinese also argue when subduing information about the Tian'anmen massacre "to prevent more people from dying".
Something like that is never going to fly. What if I meet somebody who doesn't have an enabled phone? I'll still need to carry around the business card. So why put in the extra effort for other systems?

For the first time I see a benefit in putting a QR code on my card, though - maybe the "enabled" people could just scan the QR code and would not need to bother with taking the card.

I thought QR codes would be superfluous because of OCR, but apparently the technology is still not there yet?
I just found out about nbr 2 days ago. Ran it for about 20 minutes from the stick before ditching xp for a permanent install.

I think what they mean by "no one wants linux netbooks" is really, "no one can find a place to buy linux netbooks anymore."