skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's because some startups have developers that open w3schools, start typing examples, and somehow ship a quasi-working proof-of-concept that goes into production.

There's a bit of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" here, but a whole lot of "get with the program" still required.
This looks great. Just curious: Roundcube didn't cut it for you?
The Silk Road seizure demonstrated that the only reasonable way to participate in any online drug market is to assume the market itself is compromised and untrustworthy. That means you never upload identifying information in cleartext (e.g., buyers encrypt their addresses with the seller's public key), and you run all bitcoins sent to or received from such a site through a third-party mixer.

Of course, there still has to be some level of trust on the part of a buyer, that the seller they're connecting to is actually a real drug dealer and not an undercover cop. But that was still an issue even on the original Silk Road. It was partially addressed by the feedback/review system -- which does involve a certain amount of trust in the site not to fabricate reviews -- but more importantly by the fact that high-level law enforcement is really only interested in tracking down sellers. And assuming the users are competent, running a honeypot gives you very little information about the sellers.
Alternate title: DigitalOcean went above and beyond their SLA for us.
Virtuous as their actions may have been -- or may not have, given that the difference between the Soviet Union and the Nazi regime was one of degree and not of kind -- they provided material aid to a foreign government then in arms against their own. Such behavior, whatever else may be said of it, is the very soul of treason, and those who engage in it may quite accurately be described as traitors.
I came across with a forum where a fan-made remake is being orchestrated:

http://forums.metropolisdawn.com/viewforum.php?f=29
To whom would you migrate? It seems to me that you wouldn't get better service without a managed server.
How does this have a different purpose?
I actually worked on Persuasion which shipped before Powerpoint. That category (presentation software) was another late 80's "invention". Hypercard was an amazing product that sadly died young.
You feel that the two are mutually exclusive?
"Some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more."

My guess is pg and YC partners treat marketing-speak similarly.
We're working on the clustered version now. The short answer is that data points are sharded across the cluster and replicated based on a replication factor on a per database basis. Queries hit the # nodes / RF to answer any given query. So writes scale horizontally and queries balance across the cluster.
Facebook redesigns the Like button for the first time
The fear of unknown chemicals in there is extremely warranted. However, I believe the fear of there being a higher probability online is unwarranted. Because of the anonymity between online and real personas, you're probably more likely to be buying from someone with a high online reputation, which would be more likely to give untainted products.
I'm not a huge fan of the differentiators in your pitch. Last minute help and non-monetary compensation seems like it'll run into logistical and scalability issues. Not taking a cut of the money makes me wonder how you'll make money. Take away these differentiators and you end up with another tutoring service.
> wildly improbable catastrophe

Or an extremely probable one like a hard disk failure. They only last a few years; most data centers see an annual replacement rate in the 2-13% range. The failure rate is a known quantity, and their limited 1-3 year warranties that reflect that expectation.

There isn't a host I've used more than a few years where I haven't seen hard drives (and power supplies) fail. I don't know if my experience is typical, but hardware RAID controllers seem to go bad on me not-infrequently too, losing the whole array at once. They don't pay you when it happens, they just replace it. DO was extremely generous here.
This applies to most recreational drug taking. It all entails risk. Dealers are shady and so are their sources. There aren't a lot of "completely trust this guy who sells me LSD" scenarios.

They do, but they take the risk. Shows how much people want that stuff in their body.
>> "the announcement at WWDC of a product with no release-date"

If you're referencing the Mac Pro, that one made sense to me. People have been complaining about the lack of an update for a long time and Apple was probably losing people to Hackintosh/other platforms. An announcement helps slow that loss. Also developers are likely one of the main groups the Mac Pro is relevant to so it makes sense to announce that they are working on it at WWDC. Also didn't they say 'later this year'? That's not too different that what they do every year with iOS (coming this fall).
Nice move from DO to give everyone $500 credit. As I remember, they don't guarantee data safety (you still need backups even if they did). Double disk failure is a rare thing, but it happens.
Thanks for posting this Alex. I really love hearing the others' tales of code enlightenment, and with yours being very similar to my own story, it's especially nice.
Those were very amusing tiny numbers you wrote in your post.
Your fears are no larger than those of a drug addict on the street, not sure what exactly is in the little baggies they buy. Frankly, I think online is safer, as the guy you're buying from online has a reputation system, and is less likely to stick a gun in your face and take your money. And less likely to sell you baby powder and run.
Unless tarsnap does something like LVM snapshotting, then it's not going to get a consistent snapshot. You can't just copy the directory of an active server.

See: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/continuous-archivi... section 24.3.2. Making a Base Backup.

IF you have something like LVM of ZFS doing snapshots, then you can just tar the data directory.
Search is my biggest issue too. I switched out of gmail to my self-hosted server using roundcube and searching through IMAP is excruciatingly slow compared to gmail, even after I moved the mailboxes to an SSD.

I am not sure whether this is a limitation on the IMAP protocol, but I suspect a proper replacement to gmail might involve coding a new mailbox backend and protocol.
Is there a provider that credibly offers high availability Linux servers? Disks fail, capacitors fail, power fails, network equipment fails (a lot). I'm sure it's possible to build an ultra-reliable server that mitigates all that but I doubt it would be worth the money.
Of course there are risks, it's a trade-off. But sellers are motivated to sell high-quality products.
This is nice... Great work mozilla
The WAL is used for recovering from power loss. You need both the db files and your WAL to get a backup.
Although I wouldn't over-think this, if you've never dealt with counsel before this article is worth a couple of minutes to skim through. Just one example is probaly enough to highlight, but it is a classic: Resource double-up.

"You’ll have a conference call scheduled and they’ll invite additional attorneys to sit in. And they’ll charge you for it, even though they may not say a word during the meeting.
Add a clause to your contract that says, “We agree not to bill you for any more than one attorney on any conference call with you.“
I'm not going to claim to understand the entire topic of DB locking, but I intended to refer to what happens within the DB on your behalf when the application is running a transaction without any explicit locks. If I am within a transaction, and repeat a read for some reason, I expect the same result unless my process made modifications. I forget the name of that level, but that's what I expect.

My gripe with record and related level locking comes from past pain. At one past job, our DBA spent a lot of time in Sybase (a non-MVCC DB) constantly twiddling locking granularity levels to keep processes out of each others' way. (as in deadlock)
oops;) we're fixing it right now -- in the meantime try stripping the "pricing" part of the uri.

thanks for getting back to us!

edit: Should be OK now!
Feel free to ping us at support@mist.io to if you need any further assistance.
Codemirror is very polished and has great support. (It's also used in the Chrome debugger.)
I don't see the Silk Roads of the world making much difference with regard to the drug war.

Right now Silk Road is the eBay of drugs, where convenience is it's competitive advantage. I can get some drug without visiting a shady person in some shady place, but the drugs (in general) are still coming to the US the bloody, violent way via paramilitaries, druglords, etc. A huge part of the US war on drugs takes place among and between those parties, with the US not always supporting the side you might expect.

I'd be more excited about an Etsy of drugs, where people could buy whatever they want straight from the source, bypassing the blood trail. Good luck getting packages delivered from Afghanistan or Colombia though.
"... and what would we do if we find it ?"

Grill it.

Even if it can talk to us.

In all sincerity, that's what I honestly think will happen.

Humans are the apex predators of Earth. Give us starships and we would be the apex predators of the galaxy in short order.

For tens to hundreds of thousands of years, there have been no creatures on Earth about which some human didn't think, "I wonder what that tastes like?" For Pete's sake, our ancestors ate giant, super-fast cave bears to extinction using little more than sharp sticks. Eskimos hunt huge multi-ton whales in the open ocean in flimsy canoes with hooked spears.

Sure alien life will be examined in labs and some will go to zoos. But, eventually, Monsanto would sell you Venusian steaks with a side of Martian scrapple. And, the most telling thing is, I would buy some and eat it. My mouth is already watering.
If you're taking an instantaneous snapshot of the system then yes. A standard copy/rsync/etc. isn't going to give you that. If the copy takes a long time at what point do you grab the pg_xlog directory? and are all the files there that you need/ed?
Long hours mean facetime - the illusion of working as hard or harder than your peers. I've worked in industries where this is the norm - it's terrible.

Especially if you actually are more productive than others, because then you're in a situation where you know you're working more hours than you need to, being unproductive, yet you know that the more work you finish, the more will be put onto your plate and the less likely you'll ever be able to have a decent work-life balance. So you wind up sandbagging it, put in the facetime for the hell of it, and look for a new job...
Yeah, I am about to draw it soon, lately I have been thinking about the Mark Zuckerberg quote "Done is better than perfect" :-)
A lot of these strike me as not only sneaky, but unethical and possibly even illegal. For example, as a software consultant I would feel I were committing fraud were I to bill two clients for the same hour of time.

Is there a different consensus around the definition of "billable time" in the legal world that makes this not as bad as it sounds?
Are there places where "birds of a feather" congregate? Forums, lists, etc? I'm excited to tap the wisdom of others as I get my business off the ground.
IANAL, but my understanding of entrapment is that law enforcement has to persuade you to break a law that you wouldn't otherwise have broken - for example if you walk up to a cop and say "sell me some weed" that isn't entrapment, unless he initiated it and persuaded you to try to buy some weed - so if this site was a honeypot, it wouldn't be entrapment, as buyers and sellers are both going there without any persuasion, because they already want to do something illegal.

That said, I agree with other comments here as to why it's unlikely to be a honeypot.
Pebble SDK hits 2.0, brings new APIs, full iOS 7 integration
Ask HN: How should I sell my HTML5 X11/remote desktop app?
I'm nearing beta-quality in my X11 app for Gate One (https://github.com/liftoff/GateOne). It is fast/efficient enough that you could open VLC in your browser and play back a video (proof: http://youtu.be/6zJ8TNcWTyo). Just like terminals you'll be able to embed it into your own site/app and open/host X11 applications (e.g. LibreOffice, RDP/VNC clients, web browsers, etc etc).

Right now Gate One (and its Terminal app) are open source (AGPLv3) with a commercial license available. It's not making much money with that business model--despite hundreds of thousands of devices shipped with Gate One and several SaaS platforms using it. So I've come to HN to ask for advice: How should I license the X11 app?

Something like a free trial with reminders that you need to pay (like Sublime Text 2)? If I do that how much should I charge? How do I differentiate the pricing for businesses that just want to show off their application on their website from businesses that want to use it as a replacement for Citrix?

I have my own ideas for all these things but I want to see what the HN community thinks.
> I'd like to see that argument (and note that "argue" and "assert" are not the same thing.)

Except that drugs are such a culturally charged issue that "argue" and "assert" become the same thing. Fundamentally I find the culture distasteful so I reject it. The arguments in favor seem to crassly exploit the illness of a few addicts to justify more convenient access for recreational users. This completely ignores treatment, or drug prevention in favor of a faith based approach based on barely though out laws.
Which of those things you named is protecting you from losing your database? I paid the uber-high fees for RDS with Multi-AZ failover and... well... it failed, then didn't fail over to another AZ. The instance ended up down for hours before they recovered it. That's when I jumped ship from AWS, wrote off the reserved instance payments, moved the database to some rented servers at SoftLayer, and handle nightly off-site backups myself. Not only do I have working backups and failover, but 4-8x the capacity per dollar.
The New York Subway Signs Experiment
The train-conductor finger-point is one of many odd behaviors you observe while standing on the platform at a New York City subway station. Each time a conductor pulls into a station, she points. These New Yorkers found a way to make grumpy subway conductors laugh.
It's run by one of the admins of the original SR according to the article.

And would it be even legal for the police to do this?
CodeMirror is significantly easier to work with than Ace.
Ask HN: Any ideas for a Hackathon?
I'll be participating in a Hackathon next week. What are some cool ideas that could be implemented? I want to hack on something which is usable in real life. Any ideas?
Forbes interviewed DPR (Ulbricht or not) in August.

"Roberts isn’t actually the site’s founder, he revealed in our interview. He credits Silk Road’s creation to another, even more secretive entrepreneur whom he declined to tell me anything about and who may have used the “Dread Pirate Roberts” nom de guerre before it was assumed by the person I interviewed."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-th...
I have, basically, the exact opposite view on firearms ownership, so take my reply with salt.

You're completely not wrong about political integrity being key to the process. At least speaking as an American, we don't seem to have any. I watched a neighboring state's election last night and the result was very close. Very close. Out of over 2 million votes, the opponents were separated by less than 60,000 votes in the outcome.

Of the two primary candidates, the winner was a notoriously corrupt politician who is well-known for being a political fund-raiser and (basically) morally bankrupt, while the other is more intellectually honest (at least, as comparing his statements to his voting record), but openly disapproves of things like gay marriage, and wanted to ban blowjobs. Even the libertarian candidate (and I'm a libertarian party member) was sleazy in too many ways.

Ultimately, the contest was won (predictably) by the one who spent the most money. Which means that fund-raising was critical, which means that getting in bed with money is necessary, which makes it nearly impossible to get intellectual honesty in elections. There are pretty noble efforts to eliminate, make transparent, or in some way normalize election contributions, but that just shrinks the list of viable candidates down to the rich, which isn't meant as an indictment of the rich, but isn't necessarily good for the interests of the hoi polloi either. Michael Bloomberg is rich, and he's been objectively horrible for New York City on a few landmark pieces of legislation (not meant as a comment on his entire term, but banning sodas? Really?).

As pertaining to firearms, that issue is, I think, more cut and dry. Our Constitution says we have the right to bear arms, and the job of our federal government, and its employees, is to uphold the Constitution, or to ratify it where it is wrong. The latter point is important, I think, because while I disagree with the notion that "guns are bad" (which is an argument for a different day, perhaps), I would abide the law if the Constitution were amended in the Constitutionally prescribed process. I wouldn't love it, but I am far more offended by those who would sidestep the Constitution to ignore its tenets.

Either there's support to ratify it, or there isn't. There currently isn't, but even if there were, none of the legislation proposed makes any attempt to uphold the Constitution, and all of the legislation, even that which I support, runs afoul of our governing tenets, and such be dismissed out of hand as such.
No kidding, and even if they speak English as a "first language", the cultural upbringing often makes more get lost in translation than in communication with, say, Mexicans who have a much worse grasp of English but much more in common with US culture.
I took an undergrad Compilers course at my school. We wrote a compiler from scratch in one semester. Our compiler parsed and compiled a useful subset of Pascal, but changing it to a novel programming language would have been trivial. It doesn't have to be a GOOD programming language, just a new one.

For a multimedia codec, though, there's no low-hanging fruit. H.264 is already VERY good, so beating it is hard.
Javascript Advanced Tips & Tricks
Ask HN: Which song kicks the most code out of you?
For me it is the 'Highway to Hell' by AC/DC.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, I know Brandon and I know how dedicated he is, I got to watch him and the OpSec team in action during the Chinese incursion. One of the side effects of being in the platforms group was that I had exceptional access to what was going on everywhere on Google's internal network and machines. And a lot changed after that event, both internally and externally.

I can forgive someone for thinking that if they dug trenches in the street, bought some fiber, and ran it between a couple of buildings, in a country where the rule of law was in effect, they might consider it a reasonable assumption that the fiber is laying in the street unmolested. Even if the distance is such that they can't see the entire length of the ground above the conduit.

Prior to Snowden's disclosures, it was the common belief amongst the security community that in 'safe' countries, the government in power would not subvert your infrastructure through physical access. They might do some network tricks, but not tap your fiber. In 'bad' countries counter measures were taken. And the network setup in say Russia or China was different than it was in the US and the UK. That your own government would illegally subvert your infrastructure [1] through the use of a technicality was not considered a "likely" threat [2]. Given that not it has been exploited it is rewriting a bunch of assumptions. I am not surprised in the least that they are now deploying the same hardening they use in hostile environments world wide.

[1] The NSA cannot legally tap into communications infrastructure in the US (that is the FBI's job) and when the FBI does it they need a warrant. By doing this in the UK they sidestepped those constraints.

[2] In classic vulnerability analysis you deploy your resources against both the probability and damage potential of a given threat. So for example datacenters are vulnerable to being bombed by aircraft, the probability of that is low enough that you don't defend against it, bombed by cars you put a security perimeter around the building.
I'm glad in a way that this is happening. Arduin-ification is an important step towards ubiquity and 3rd party compatible addons of all kinds.

OTOH, it really is a terrible form factor if you think about it. It's ports are spread across every edge and surface and even at that, the USB is offset on its edge just to make it interesting.
"New unified file format" ... isn't the same sort of nonsense we went thru with Office applications that led to the nightmare of trying to open the files in other applications?
This might sound a bit glib, but raid 5 shouldn't really be used in modern storage.

If you ignore the performance issues (which can vary by device) its just not safe. Depending on the size of drive can take anywhere up 30hours+ to rebuild.

bear in mind that you tend to use disks that are all the same batch, it leaves you in the danger zone for far too long.

Your options are:
somesort of clever RAID (ZFS type thing)
Another type of clever RAID (Like the LSI chunk thingy in the DCS37000)
RAID 10
Wow. Just when I thought Apple couldn't do anything to bring me back, they do this. And then that warrant canary yesterday.

Using Apple is like being in a passive-aggressive relationship. One day, she's absolutely wonderful and does everything your way and you get to cooperate on every single decision, and the next day, she gives you the cold shoulder because you weren't doing some arbitrary thing right.

The website still looks like crap, but it looks like Apple is slowly coming out of the inconsistent days of iOS 7 and fixing the stuff they should have a long time ago.

I guess that's worth something, even if it doesn't feel like enough to me.
Thanks for your feedback. Sure, any digital signal is by definition finite in its resolution (the sample rate or bits). I was trying to address the distinction between wave files of the type stored on audio CDs, and MP3s - both digital signals. I agree that the Fourier transform is in principle lossless, but it's particularly useful to use it in a lossy way, i.e. to throw out the least important (to us) components of the signal. If I was particularly misleading about this, I'd like to know.
Interesting article, but the title is totally misleading. The fast, according to the author, seems only "difficult". And the "new man" part just seems to be that he felt better after. We are, however, not given any details on how his life was bad before the start of this.
Nah, I believe the motive is money. Did you hear how much was seized from the previous admin? To make such money just sitting behind a computer, without having to worry about guns and the violence that comes with dealing drugs? There are many people who are willing to risk it.
ACID doesn't apply since you can't copy a large file in an instant. The copy takes time, in which time the files on disk can change. This isn't the same thing as the server losing power.

VM snapshots, zfs snapshots, etc are the way to go.
As I've never heard of the site before it was seized, the DEA gave it some good advertising. They probably will have grown the site much quicker by trying to stop it.
Show HN: Gioku, a GitHub-Pages-like system for your own servers