skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couple of suggestions:

1) I'd avoid mentioning CAP and FLP impossibility result much further in, this is like starting a discussion of mathematical logic or Computer Science with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

I'd definitely cover vector clocks and causality before: you really need this background in order to understand CAP/FLP. You may want to take a look at the approach Vijay Garg takes in his book:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Distributed-Computing-Vijay-G...

(E.g., use of vector clocks for proofs)

2) Don't over-focus on "webscale" (using the term only semi-ironically here) projects (I say this having contributed to multiple such projects). NFS, AFS, and CodaFS all raised very interesting questions about distributed state and disconnected operations. You may also note how some of the authors on the Plan9 (9fs, 9p, fossil) papers overlap with authors of some of the Google papers. "Mobile sensor networks" have been essentially an excuse to build distributed systems. Chord, Pastry, and Kademelia (sp? The System that Bittorrent uses) -- are actually far more truly "distributed" than many webscale systems (consistent hashing is a very simple DHT). Finally, don't forget that the Internet itself is a distributed system: the most successful eventually consistent, highly available distributed database is DNS.

I'd actually cover the web-giant infrastructure paper stuff a bit later on. While the Dynamo paper did have some novel contributions (regarding Gossip and anti-entropy), it's not what it's notable for: what's far more interesting in that paper is the way these concepts fit together.

I'd even hold my nose and cover CORBA: it's an interesting example in that it handled everything by the textbook, but failed due to complexity costs it had to incur in order do that. Far simpler RPC protocols and Web Services prevailed at the end by promising less. JINI may also be interesting to cover -- excellent system, far too ahead of its time -- Java VM and ecosystem were immature (anyone else remember Blackdown JDK on Linux?), marketed incorrectly (driver architecture?) to a market that wasn't ready for it (this is when dot-com startups could suffice on buying a couple of E10Ks or high-end Alphas).

3) This is an enormous and highly ambitious project and I commend you from embarking on it (I just re-read http://paulgraham.com/hs.html -- see the part about hard problems and ambition). Nonetheless, if you're serious about this, be sure to get plenty of editors -- there's a lot of room to make subtle mistakes (which I've done all the time). A lot of this can be genuinely confusing -- e.g., partitions aren't just due to networks, but at the same time not every type of a failure or a stop is a partition (I used to site GC pauses an example of a partition, but now I'm not so sure).

I'd help, but I've neither the cycles nor the habit of academic rigor; if you're still in touch with any profs from your uni, they could either help themselves or point you to others.
I do, UX matters!
Looks awesome, sent you an email.
Who says you have to learn English?
So is it your position that trespassing on other's property is now OK if they forget to lock the door?
> What is the difference, in your mind, between a hammer or other object being seized by authorities and a piece of real estate being seized by authorities?

The distinction is that to seize my hammer they would have to turn violent, attack, assault or threaten. In that whoever did this would basically expose what is really at the heart of the issue. With land there is a legal framework to disguise pretty much the same thing but using "ownership" language. In reality, to me it seems, it is not much different or not much different from land owners in medieval times giving land to their subjects.

> Your perspective seems very specific to California's tax structure.

I think it pertains to most states in this country. I don't know of many states that don't charge property taxes. Most countries have something similar.

In Great Britain (from what I understand from marginal discussions I've had) this is more obvious. All land belongs to the Crown and it doles it out to tenants who dole it out to sub-tenants and so on. These are often Lords and Ladies from medieval times and their heirs still collect "taxes" based on that ownership.
It goes even beyond that. A lot of other very important, fundamental topics belong under the umbrella of distributed systems, starting with routing. The Internet is, after all, a giant distributed routing system.

Another topic that's huge all by itself is peer-to-peer networks, and all their associated aspects, such as structured (DHTs like Chord, Cassandra, etc.) vs unstructured (Gnutella, Kazaa, etc.), P2P search, handling churn, handling peers with heterogenous capabilities, peer selection, topology organization, decentralized routing, file-sharing (torrents) vs streaming (PPLive, Spotify), etc.

Other topics (with several overlapping aspects) include:

- Security, such as Sybil attacks, group key management, etc;

- Overlay networks;

- CDNs;

- Ad hoc and mesh networks;

- MMOs and multiplayer games;

- SCADA and industrial control systems;

- Pub/Sub systems and application layer multicast;

- Distributed file systems;

- Load balancing and bandwidth management;

And that's just off the top of my head... I'm sure I'm missing other important topics.
What makes minecraft more interesting to me is the building and Redstone aspect. DayZ has similar elements to the survival an PvP parts of minecraft, but spending hours or days by yourself isn't nearly as easy.
The premise of the CFAA charge is entirely consistent with libertarian thinking: owners of private property, like computer networks, are entitled to exclude people from their use, or revoke a previously granted license of use, for any reason at all. This charge makes sense even if you don't believe in intellectual property: it doesn't matter what he was doing on the network, only that he had reasonable notice that his license to use it had been revoked when they banned his MAC, but then continued to use it, thus trespassing. That's "get off my lawn or I'll call the cops." That's as libertarian as it gets. If you're talking about classic libertarianism, prosecuting trespassers (I.e. Securing property rights) is one of the few legitimate functions of government.

Arguing that violation of property rights is justified by some greater social purpose is distinctly unlibertarian.

As for "abuse" of the process, that's orthogonal to libertarianism. Classic libertarians believe in limited government, but once the legitimate object of government is implicated, in this case protecting property rights, they do not have any tendency towards favoring more forgiving or lenient prosecution.
That's an interesting point of view. Do you think single player games may still be able to attain success in the current landscape?
I found a similar article not too long ago which dragged me off into reading about the Rienman Zeta function. Given quantum mechanics is governed by prime pairs and this universe is a hologram, it makes one wonder about how all this information in our universe is secured from tampering.

Looking at you Bitcoin!
MIT clearly did something wrong here... The Secret Service seemed to get involved by accident, due to the fact MIT do a lot of "Super secret stuff, that China want". MIT should have immediately moved to limit how seriously this was taken, when they understood who was perpetrating it (and why). Kind of like if a kid accidentally (because he didn't know it was one) spray pants the side of nuclear missile silo, we would treat them differently to someone trying to sabotage a nuclear missile silo (I hope!)

The article hinted at the fact MIT ran an "Open network" which ran counter to the charge of "unauthorised access". MIT should have commented on that in their report.

MIT worked with the prosecution to help build there case, that's fine, but talk about "neutrality" as that clearly isn't.

Anyone arguing that MIT didn't do anything wrong, I would say, just isn't rational.

But we still haven't gotten causation (Are they to blame for Aaron's death?).

There is always some people who say that suicide is only the victims fault, no one else. But do you apply that to people being tortured? Or people with no hope to live out their life as they thought they would. Was it the jews fault for committing suicide rather than face the camps?

Now applying that extreme analogy to the US legal system, and in particular, the plea bargain system... isn't it the same dynamic? They want to make the proposed outcome so bad that you take an easy way out. In the process they destroyed parts of your life (in Aaron's case it was his friendships, girlfriend, family, wealth).

Thus, aiding this system (the prosecutor) (as MIT did) certainly deserves some of the blame, no?
You are assuming that the small business owner is cooling his heels in some expensive yacht. While the employees back at the office are grounding their bones to dust to make such a thing happen.

The reality is far from that, the business owner is taking far bigger risks, has much more to lose and suffer due to failure and at any given point of time is going through far more stress, putting a lot of effort and has much more bigger role to play than some one who just joined the company can possibly fathom.

Now you are virtually asking them to pay you, while you don't work for nearly half the year(If you take vacation, sick leaves, and weekend off's into account). Then you have this 'working from home' thing, which is synonymous with having to take a leave, without officially taking one(Sorry but that's how WFH is being abused these days). Then you have pay them health insurance, be perfectly OK with this 5 hour work per day thing.

Putting this all together, work hardly gets done. Now not all businesses fit into a typical engineering domain, where money can be made non-linear to efforts(It's exceptionally difficult even for these businesses). There is no way ordinary office businesses can survive, let alone make profit in such situations.

If you want them to simply shut down. Its likely they will start up in some other country where the math makes sense.
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the cheapest path to a degree in the United States is to:

1. make sure your local state university offers cheap tuition to residents

2. make sure they accept credit transfers from community colleges, get it in writing

3. do 1-2 years in community college

4. transfer those to the state university and do the final years there at the cheaper tuition rate

You'd then exit with a solid computer science degree on the cheap. Speaking as someone from outside the USA most of the state universities are highly regarded.

Another option might be a BSc in Computing and Information Systems (does this count as CS to purists? does that matter if you aren't going on to higher studies?) from the University of London, Goldsmiths in this case, for just under 5000 pounds.[1]

However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere. The lowest risk option in that case is to perhaps take some uncredited core CS curriculum from OpenCourseWare, Coursera, Udacity and edX over 2014 and just see how you go. Then, if it works out, you will then be in a position to blitz a credited distance, community/state or online option that might arise in 2015+. The risk, at least in terms of "money on the line", of the community college moving to state university option is fairly low as well.

Finally, as someone with graduate degrees and who is working on a PhD in a different discipline to CompSci, I'd say you shouldn't get too caught up in worrying about degrees if it doesn't match up with you personally. There are reasonable, although often smaller than claimed or imagined, financial and personal benefits from doing a degree though and you should take another shot, or two, at it to make sure it's not for you (so long as the risk is low regarding debt, there is virtually no risk in watching lectures and reading textbooks as the time spent won't be wasted).

[1]http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/g...
The courses seem perhaps a tad dry but it seems to cover the core mathematics, statistics, databases, algorithms and has some nice looking electives.
Did you 'rip it out' in the sense of rolling back the commit, or did you refactor the code (and replace the GPL2 code with code that did the same/similar thing)?

If it were the latter, would your entire codebase be considered a derivative work (just as if I took some GPL2 code and refactored it until all the original code was gone)?
It's just a sad story. I do know one thing, don't tell
your significant other, or anyone else Anything-- "Instead, he grilled her until he had what he needed: Norton mentioned that Aaron had coauthored the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto "

I am on the end of a civil suit. It's nothing big, but I
have never felt so helpless. I can't imagine what Aaron
was feeling.

I don't know if MIT was complicit, but a few things suprised
me--50k charge to public libraries.
Ford To Unveil Solar Hybrid Concept Car At CES
With on demand pricing and instant sign up, your lead may already be your competitor's customer before their first phone call.

I view Adwords more as a marketplace than a service. Its pitting customers against each other for what is naturally a finite inventory. There is some more opaque custom pricing going on in the background that nullifies some of the true market dynamics, but I wouldn't quite call it shill bidding on Google's behalf.

The did create a very fluid and dynamic market by (mostly) removing the sales people from the process. They need no applause for this, because it makes it waaaaaay easier to buy massive quantities of advertising from them successfully over a long period of time.
I was thinking, where this sh#t came from, why am I reading this sh$t? I traced back to feedly, then I found this is from hacker news.

Why this sh*t is posted on hacker news?????

Why????????????????????????????????????????
This is incredibly insulting. How could you possibly know this?
The USG also claims it's wrong for people to shoot each other all while maintaining an army of hundreds of thousands of people empowered to do exactly that, and worse, in the right situations.
> It goes even beyond that. A lot of other very important, fundamental topics belong under the umbrella of distributed systems, starting with routing. The Internet is, after all, a giant distributed routing system.

Yes! DNS is also fascinating as far as distributed databases and consistency go:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~akella/CS740/S08/740-Papers/MD88.p...
Royalty is America's second favourite topic?
"The telephone case is more damnable, and reads like a combination of a short horizon for ROI combined with Innovator's Dilemma."

I think it was a bit simpler than that. I really don't think they understood how much more enabling voice[1] was over morse code. It really seems like they didn't get the model would change via voice because you didn't need the morse code operators.

1) they mentioned voice quality in the report and it sounds like they weren't willing to be fix it as part of a NIH mentality
> Every single hospital-ward double blind clinical trial over the last 100 years says exactly the same thing: net energy balance is what determines how fat you are, no matter the macronutrient content of the diet.

Here's my problem with this: the energy balance theory is the status quo, yet for as many studies as you can dig up to support it, you'll also find conflicting observations (some of which also go back over 100 years). I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm simply saying that the hormone theory of obesity shouldn't be disregarded solely because it doesn't fit the status quo. It needs to be tested.

Another problem I have is that the energy balance theory is just too convenient. It's a greay way to dismiss obesity as a simple failure of willpower, and to dismiss the obese as being morally inferior to the rest of us. In other words, our judgmental attitude toward obesity could be blinding us to its real cause. Let's test the hormone theory, and if it turns out wrong, we've only learned more about obesity. If it turns out correct, we could possibly save many lives and prevent a lot of suffering.

That said, I find it absurd to believe that only energy balance matters. In effect, this predicts that despite the dozens of hormones involved in human metabolism, it all boils down to caloric content. That doesn't make any sense to me. Taubes actually wrote an interesting thought experiment on this: http://garytaubes.com/2012/11/what-would-happen-if-thoughts-...
Lol, the purpose of embarrassment is not to avoid censure by those around you, but rather to avoid doing something shameful or disgraceful (whether alone or in company).

EDIT: So that I have said something in this thread other than short and flippant remarks:

The real problem I have with “And now maybe you're just a tiny bit scared sliding down?” or any other such nonsense, if we put aside the fact that it's so embarrassing I just winced myself in two—the main problem is that it is totally bewildering to the target audience. I know this, because when I was of such an age, I was saddled with caretakers for a time who thought in the same way as this poor fellow here. My four-year-old self is thinking, “Fuck you, I just fuckin climbed up this slide and you can’t stop me, I am fucking fearless—but a little hurt that you didn't think it was as cool as I did.” This is literally my four-year-old interior dialogue. I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only one.

In my (albeit limited and anecdotal experience), the little ones do not respond well to such fawning and whipperdogged pop-psychology-inspired beginner's folly emotional claptrap---it either insults them, confuses them, or dismays them. And it certainly does not instill confidence in the creature that you believe they can slide down successfully—and it is indeed reassurance that they were after, make no mistake.
Help me crowdfund my Kraken/bitcoin app
> The title seems to imply a practical bent, but it seems more like a collection of ideas (which are important and interesting, but not really what engineers need to know. IMO the #1 skill for distributed computing is to be competent at BOTH programming a single computer and at system administration).

I think this is something where different authors will emphasize different aspects. My view is that understanding of how to deal with the evolution of state within a system is crucial. Even systems that are not databases per se still have a dependency on how state is managed because you want to be able to reason about how some specific answer to a computation was derived and what guarantees it comes with (from strong consistency to some alternative but hopefully precise definition). I figure there will be disagreement on whether this important, and that's fine. There are other books.

That does bring up an interesting question: which books on distributed systems do you feel exhibit your preferred approach (free or paid)?

Re: the suggested topics:

Clusters of stateless web servers + single master. This is definitely a common setup, but you need very little if any distributed systems research to implement it.

Queues: I find the larger scale implications of queuing to be rather interesting (specifically, how cascading failures can be caused by an inadequate understanding of interactions between queues) but haven't found a good discussion beyond Google's findings that doing duplicate work often pays off as reduced 95th percentile latency.

MapReduce: There are many good books covering this topic in much more depth and specificity, so I didn't feel like I had that much to add. MR does use the techniques described - beyond job assignment the whole system rests on the DFS which uses block-level replication and some coordination protocol to maintain metadata state.

I kind of assume people have had some exposure to the paradigm at this point and do address MapReduce a bit in the context of the CALM theorem, which notes that a much larger set of relational algebra operations can actually be executed safely without coordination. Another point might be that MapReduce is inefficient in that it provides too much fault tolerance for typical workloads and cluster sizes.

Original GFS: the design has been largely superseded both by newer version of HDFS (e.g. eliminating the single point of failure in the initial design) and Google's (unpublished?) internal equivalents. BTW, the original GFS relies on Chubby, which uses Paxos internally.

Napster, BitTorrent and BitCoin: peer-to-peer systems definitely deserve a more extensive treatment in a later version of the book. The issues here are different in that trust, efficiency and resiliency are more important and I didn't have the bandwidth to handle them in the book as it stands.

Thanks for your comment, and I hope this doesn't sound like a rebuttal - I just wanted to think through the topics you mentioned one by one.
U.S. Customs Won't Apologize for Destroying Musician's Rare Flutes
The charges themselves are based on law that is rather too harsh in many people's opinion, given the scope and effect of the "crime" itself.

E.g. there's no reason that this should have been a felony, but the option of pleading to something that was a misdemeanor wasn't even available to Aaron here because of the way the law is constructed.

However given the law and the way the legal system works the prosecutor was certainly treating this just like any other CFAA case.
I think it's theoretically possible for someone to arrive at the decision to end their own life via careful evaluation, but it's quite unlikely (and at this point, the only real acknowledgement of it in the psychiatric field is in the case of terminally ill patients, when the calculus is pretty clear).

Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self-admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.
- Can you lower the price? If you do, Im interested.
I'm already doing the "Rock Your CV" as a side business! Maybe time to step it up? http://handprintresumes.com. Would love some feedback from HN on prices, design, etc.
However if your experience in the local small college was miserable you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what the real reasons were for not completing there as they will likely apply to anything you do elsewhere.

It was low level introductory programming like basic C, PHP, navigating the UNIX filesystem, writing bash scripts, some simple database work. It's stuff I've already done before and didn't find challenging, wasn't worth it.

I'm not in the States and England is out of the question as well.
It's not about the rep score, it's about people looking through my post history, determining where I work, and trolling me via my employer (this happened). Let's get back on topic, shall we?
5 Myths ABout Starting an Online Business
OK, so I think "a bit tougher" is an understatement to say the least. If they're really worried, compare file sizes too. Then compile the code and verify that the checksum on the executable is the same as before. I just think it would be really hard to pull this off, maybe the NSA could do it but they wouldn't have tipped their hand by defacing the site too.
Uber’s Denial of Liability in Death Raises Accident Accountability Questions