skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say we've even lost that. A hundred years ago people might have hung their hat on any of those things you mentioned -- or more often than not, moralistic religion -- but at least they were part of some kind of grand story. Now it feels like we're all kind of floating out there. We're the middle children of history as Tyler Durden so eloquently said.

We're certainly all hard-wired for a narrative, I just had too many experiences in college, where I was like "Are you serious?! You're re-enacting last weeks episode of the Real World!" :)
"...what I would even need a database for.

"The only reason I can see is, to make data available for data-mining and (so called) BI, Business Intelligence, packages (or warehousing, cubes (as per MS))."

So, basically everything businesses want to do with data after the initial entry into the app.
Your debug page is showing: http://highlightcam.com/about/
The thing with Skype is the lost potential.

Skype has been happily sitting on all those PCs for so long at the centre of the so-called virtual office. I recently updated my skype & noticed the screen sharing, which for me makes it far more useful then go-to-meeting. The should have eaten that lunch years ago.

The skype phones should have been a game changer. Something to makes phone companies sweat.
1996 to 2003 seemed like a heyday for SF/F television: all the charts trend upwards into that period and downwards when exiting it.
I think your observation is astute -- for a literal example, see the 'GPLONLY' implementation in the Linux kernel. Unless your module explicitly declares itself as GPL licensed, Linux will refuse to vend (new) symbols to your module.
These kinds of domino effects are one reason why scalability is so hard to get right. It reminds me of precipitation in supersaturated solutions. Everything seems normal until you reach some unforeseen tipping point, and then all hell breaks loose.

I like his little veiled pitch for Google's services when he talks about how easy it was to bring more request routers online given their elastic architecture. It makes me wonder why that elasticity isn't automated -- more routers should automatically be brought online if any routers hit their maximum load.
Because of the view.
As a designer, there is rarely a single, simple solution to a problem. The best thing you can do is talk to someone, get them to figure out your problem, and then help you with your niche task.
Quantum amnesia gives time its arrow
"Here’s rock-solid proof that Snow Leopard is designed for touchscreens

[...]

"Yeah, I know, this isn’t proof that Snow Leopard is designed for a touchscreen device"
Event tracking / funnel analysis look about the same on both products.

I use both.

1) The funnel visualization in Mixpanel is better, particularly for longer funnels.

2) Tracking interactions which do not map on a one-to-one basis with pageviews is a pain in the keister in Google Analytics. For example, purchases for me are consummated off-site and there is no guarantee that the customer will return to my Thank You page to get tagged by GA's conversion code. However, since the off-site system does ping a script on my server, I can use Mixpanel's API to complete the last step in that customer's funnel. (Finally, my number of conversions reported actually bears strong resemblance to the number of sales I made in the same period.)

3) Google Analytics really, really is suboptimal for funnel segmentation along any axis which isn't available to the browser. For example, a logged in user to my site might be a guest, a trial user, or a paying customer. I want to know completion rates for a particular interaction broken down by that role. This is, literally, one line of code added to my internal Mixpanel API. If I were using Google Analytics, I'd have to start tagging many pages with arcane Javascript to cookie up the visitor with utm_some_garbage_here_argh, then configure custom segments in Google Analytics, then finally be able to sort by that.
Looking at the youtube zeitgeist page you have, most of the videos seem insanely shortened. What is a more reasonable percentage choice to get just the highlights without feeling like you are talking to a meth-head?
I actually think this is exactly the right thing to be doing. For both advertisers and for facebook.

The main problem with display ads in the search/ppc era is the same problem as display ads in the print media era: Banner ads do a crap job as magazine ads. Display ads to a crap job as search ads.

The reason search ads work is that they are part of what the user is doing anyway. If the user is searching for sites about tea, the ads that work will generally be for sites about tea. When a user is on facebook, they are doing facebooky things. The ads that work can be expected to be ones that get her to do facebooky things. The only qestion is will anyone pay to have facebook users to do facebooky things with you.

Given how much I hear about companies using 'social network marketing,' I think the answer is 'yes.'
I did this as an inhouse backup for a data warehousing app.
Just slapping 4 ide cards into a case and putting 16x250gb IDE drives on them resulted in a system that would copy about 1 disk worth before hanging with some fault or suddenly dropping to 1% speed.

Just because you can in theory hook 40 drives to n cards doesn't mean it will work - well done to them
That point I was talking about comes after the point you were talking about.
Whether the GPL is harmful or not is a debatable issue, but it does cause a lot of problems to other FOSS projects that want to use GPL code.

Lookie here: http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/INPUT-VOTE-i...

For desktop apps and standalone tools, the GPL is fine. But if you're writing a compiler, interpreter, library or even an operating system, choosing the GPL will be a bloody stupid decision.
Does anyone use raid if they could use ZFS ?
These people can be on BSD and so could use ZFS for free
What I mean is... Well, not everyone has $10,000 to pay for a dinner, even if it is on the edge of space. How are you so sure people will take out a line of credit to pay for such an extravagant couple of hours?
Death To The Div
It's the same keyboard as previous versions of OS X. The UI DPI is just scaled up (you can do that in Leopard, too).
She also thought that Frank Lloyd Wright's philosophical and political ideas were at odds with his architecture.
I only have one wish: Apple use OSX, not the iPhone OS, for their tablet.

Everything else is secondary.
Apache does too much. Whatever happened to the Unix dictum to "do one thing well"? I think this is actually a good reason for switching to Nginx whenever possible, where the conf files are tiny enough to be readable by mortals.
I worked for about three months on coding and two weeks on the concept. Yes, even though it's strongly inspired by Stackoverflow, it still requires some thinking about the implementation (especially the i18n stuff).
This doesn't explain anything (I'm not even sure what there would be to explain), or seem to have any connection to Star Trek.

All it seems to show is that in the late 90s shows started to merge sci-fi (or aspects of sci-fi) with other, more "mainstream" genres.
Most of these jobs have counterparts which are bachelor-degree required, and pay a lot more.

Also, the criteria for the "hot" job is to be above the average wage of 32,000$.
At 20 kilometers you still have gravity…

I should hope so.

They talk about saving launch fuel by launching satellites from such a tower. The dynamics elude me on that one. Sure, higher up the gravity well and all, but gossamer cylinders of (probably) hydrogen in a rocket plume is going to be worth the price of admission.
Mike Rowe: Dirty jobs have better incentive structures
It's probably a silly personal bias, but I will never be able to bring myself to pronounce out loud the words "gibibyte", "tebibyte", or even "mebibyte". I will actually say "binary gigabyte" before I say "gibibyte".
Why Gmail Failed Today
Of course not, because a core of developers who wanted the project to move forward recognized that multibillion dollar companies were benefiting but not contributing, and a change to the GPL motivated their involvement and brought the project back to life.

Did companies contribute under the BSD license? Of course, some did. But not enough to keep the project from entering a coma. And nobody wanted to fork it if no one was going to contribute.

It's not a trivial anecdote when you can say that the GPL brought a project back to life, because that's what it did.
What a lack of empathy! I completely disagree.
Wow, I was impressed by how closely this mea culpa was the same as Amazon's when they had that big S3 outage:

Compare to:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/message.jspa?...
It's not a trivial anecdote when you can say that the GPL brought a project back to life, because that's what it did.

New, active, non-umich developers -- who also happened to favor the GPL for personal/political reasons -- brought the project back to life. Not the GPL.

The project stagnated because AppleTalk ceased to be used, and AFP over TCP was generally replaced in most corporate installations by Windows Fileshares or WebDAV, and UMich didn't need it anymore -- not because corporate interests were stealing contributor's labor.

It's presumptuous to take a product that was entirely and successfully developed for years under the BSD license and then claim it as a GPL success story because the new maintainers had a moral imperative to relicense.

You wouldn't claim it a success story for their coding style if they also decided to switch to 4 character tabs and newlines before braces.
Fixed--thanks!
This is a rehash of the old "no free lunch" argument. The difference is, most of what you see in the news media is opinion, hype, and repetition, and instead of paying 100 people to produce that full time, you can have 100,000 people generate it for free, select the top 100, and get better quality content.

Does anyone honestly think that the "breaking news" cycle of TV news conveys any more information than you'd get searching on the relevant Twitter hashtag?

Those of us who actually want good journalism are a niche market. We aren't well-served by most of the media and we won't be well-served from most of the internet, but there is a niche market selling to us. The Economist meets that market, and the NY Times aspires to. But most news has turned into the type of tabloid news that, frankly, can be produced at much lower price and annoyance by sites like Huffington Post.
XKCD comic mentioned in article: http://xkcd.com/619/
Its nice to see them being so transparent about what happened and how they plan on fixing it in the future. They're obviously working on anticipating problems in the future, but what I wonder about is things like this, where they thought they were covered. How does one go about finding these failure points on systems that span multiple locations? I hope they followup with lessons learned on their quest to improve reliability.
Everything there is an implementation of a full (i.e., turing complete) programming language. SQL is not Turing Complete (at least not without non-standard recursion extensions, if memory serves).
They trend downwards because Lexx went off the air around that time, then everybody realized how crappy SF/F was without Lexx around to give it all some levity.
Chimp Reacts to Magic (video)
New York City business incubator
Only if you're famous, concerned with PR, and smart.
This is an explanation of why people like fairy tales--but he has the causation in the wrong direction.

We like fairy tales because they appeal to our natural sense of drama--they aren't the cause of it.
Yahoo Picks
Sure, but enough people do. You'd have a wedding proposal each night.
it's $10/yr if you signup with the tweetblast option
Interesting that they say the outage lasted 100 minutes instead of 1 hour 40 minutes which to me sounds worse.
"New, active, non-umich developers brought the project back to life. Not the GPL." While we're being pedantic, I'll note, completely unnecessarily for our thinking readers, that the GPL was necessary but not sufficient.

"The project stagnated because AppleTalk ceased to be used, and AFP over TCP was generally replaced in most corporate installations by Windows Fileshares or WebDAV."

That's an interesting assertion. No one could plausibly argue that the situation today is any different. And yet the project is alive and kicking.

You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period.

Me? I'd rather choose a license that the developers like. So they, you know: develop.
searching more than 6 days back in time and tagging are two things you cannot do on twitter that you can do on tweetsaver.

Personally it's worth the money to me to be able to search for old tweets.
Sony to release PS3-compatible phone in October
Security through obscurity is obviously crap, but I suspect some of that "aggregation value" == more script kiddies hammering my servers.
One solution I'm looking at is essentially mirrored raid5 over iscsi but it gets around your raid card single point of failure; the idea is that I have 2 zfs boxes (to begin/for testing these are OpenSolaris xen guests that control the spare drive slots I have in boxes that are primarily doing other things.) on each of those, i zraid the available drives. I then export iscsi luns of some standard size. The client box takes an iscsi lun from each opensolaris box and mirrors them with whatever software raid stack the client likes.

The big win here is caching... each of the opensolaris boxes can be using write-back caching, because all data is mirrored to the other opensolaris box. much like a NetAPP or EMC with dual heads, I don't have to worry about disk inconsistencies caused by write-back cache unless both drives fail. (of course, your 'real' dual-headed SAN will switch to write-through caching if one head dies, and doesn't require a full rebuild when the other head comes back online, but I can't afford a 'real' dual-headed SAN.)

Rebuild times, I imagine, will be quite significant.

Now, I am very leery of the performance of this system (being as these are xen instances, it wouldn't surprise me if it was unsuitable for anything but tape replacement) but I haven't tried yet. It seems, though that it would work just fine if I was not too cheap to use real hardware.

If you wanted to add complexity, you could have 3 or more of these opensolaris boxes, and use software raid5 on the client to save space.
Can Exercise Alone Control Blood Sugar Level For Diabetes Type 2
It's interesting to see this sort of thing happen again and again; I remember the first time I read the explanation behind AT&T's infamous nationwide crash in 1990, which was another domino-effect (a crashed switching station would reboot, broadcast that it was back, and the broadcast would crash other switching stations, which would reboot, broadcast that they were back...), and wondering how the hell you'd plan for or even test for that sort of problem.
What are the other YC companies that have released code under a open source / free software license ?
GCC does have a bit of a reputation as a nightmare codebase though- a new project using new techniques and tools (er.. LLVM) doesn't seem so unreasonable.
I'm surprised in general that technical people (especially) are celebrating this under the pretext that MS is the big bad wolf. IMHO Google is far more evil than MS ever was.

On a sidenote, has anyone else noticed that Sony is becoming Google's bitch? This all started with Sony's failing ebook project, which had an absolute pathetic collection of books (approximately 25,000) until they hooked in with Google's million+ public domain titles.
I've been reading Joel Spolsky's posts with an Israeli accent for a long time. Now I hear this American accent.

I'm not even sure why I thought that now.
Nvidia's the annoying exception, and I say that as an owner of an 8800GT who has to recompile the module for each Debian kernel upgrade. But when I think of all the other hardware in my machine which runs without a hitch under GPL'd drivers because the manufacturers were forced to contribute the code, I like the tradeoff.
I'm not trying to diss him, but why is Joel Spolsky considered such an authority on the software industry? I see he started a company Fog Creek, but I've heard of it only because I was curious as to the background of this guru. Is that company so special that it justifies its founder being so revered? Or is it his technical / coding abilities (which I have no idea about)? Or something else?
The Perils of Text-Only Search
God damn do I hope nobody distributes a build of this for ubuntards to use!

Con's original scheduler had no chance of becoming the vanilla scheduler, as it was in no way general purpose, had a number of regressions, and he was a dick about the whole thing (in a community of assholes!). He was also insistent on making the scheduler modular, something that Linus and his lieutenants rightly refused outright. This new scheduler seems to amplify all the bad qualities of his last one.

Something I found quite distasteful in the CFS battle was the way he gathered a noisy following of clueless newbies/tweakers using his kernel that made it very hard to have any honest discussion of the matter. Repeating that again with a much larger and more adolescent crowd of Ubuntu users would be really annoying.
As a developer, there is rarely a single, simple solution to a problem. Stack Overflow is very helpful to share solutions about how you solved a certain problem, when others run into that same problem.

I think this is a good idea. Perhaps Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood would consider adding another site to their collection, with a focus on general/print/web/logo design. I know I'd use it.
Another interesting post on the same subject: http://www.austinkleon.com/2005/12/17/graph-a-story-with-mr-...
What is unfair about saying that he prefers to look for successful business methods that feel like they contribute value to the world? I'd sure rather make good money contributing than make stratospheric money being a parasite.
I like this thought, but I'm not going to suggest that I can see all the ramifications and which ones we'd all end up hating in 10 years.
The other side of crowdsourcing
Seriously, do not quit your job UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE YOUR KILLER IDEA!! Apologies for those who can't stand the all-caps. If you have a good job now, what you should do is move to a cheaper place to live and get your bills down to as low as possible. In the meantime, do some market research and really think about what kind of business you want to build or what kind of service you can provide. For this to be good, it needs to accommodate both your needs for doing something you enjoy and the needs of being a realistic profitable business. To do this well, you will want one to two years worth of savings in the bank, not a couple of months! Best of luck to you in this endeavor.
This boggled me a bit until I noticed it's a 64-bit system. So an int takes 3 words, which sounds more reasonable.
Err, neither the word "incentive" nor "structure" appears in this article. Infact it's solely about whether there are more "dirty jobs" for men than women
Except that bringing new request routers online will make splashes too -- you'd have to throttle it, and even then you'd still have weird issues.

The correct solution, as outlined in their post, is for the servers to slow down when overloaded instead of trying to push load onto another server.
You can put an electromagnetic accelerator on the thing, and substitute acceleration from it for a first stage. It would be like the "pop-up" trajectory envisioned for some TSTO concepts. Just by getting the craft above the bulk of the atmosphere, you can optimize the engines to work in a narrower range of atmospheric pressure.

At 20km, you still have some atmosphere to work with as well. Perhaps such a craft could use fins to exchange some vertical velocity for horizontal.
"The security they crave turns quickly to complacency, and they wind up dissatisfied with a job they're afraid to leave."

Great quote.
I admire the transparency but I don't pretend for a second it's the whole story. This happened during work hours and if they indeed did get notified so fast, I'm wondering why it took over 90 minutes to recover.

Also, the outage, for me anyway, seemed to last much longer then the stated 100 minutes. I seem to remember being unable to access GMail for a span of about 3 hours today.
By the way, I just have to take issue with this:

"It's presumptuous to take a product that was entirely and successfully developed for years under the BSD license and then claim it as a GPL success story because the new maintainers had a moral imperative to relicense."

Something to remember is that the key pain point at this stage of Netatalk's development was that its CNID scheme -- the method by which the server gives a unique identifier to each file/directory and refers to it when communicating with the client -- was broken and frequently led to silent data loss when the server would mistakenly reuse IDs.

This problem was well-known and well-understood. And nobody -- certainly not the big companies who'd fixed the problem in their private forks -- would step up to fix it.

In this context, it's very hard to truthfully characterize Netatalk as "successfully developed for years under the BSD license."

A file server in widespread production use with a well-known data integrity problem? That no one will fix? Call it what you like, but that ain't a healthy project.
You can achieve the same effect now using XHTML namespaces. I defined <question:required>, <question:optional>, <question:subquestion>, <answer:trigger> tags when working on a dynamic survey application I did that would hide or display followup questions based on answers to previous questions.
He's saying that the gender pay issue is secondary to the fact that the way most people are payed is not motivating (ie fixed salary). He says that a pay for end product arrangement is better and in such an arrangement issues of pay inequality wouldn't exist by design.
The words may not be there, but the concepts certainly are. Most directly in the penultimate paragraph.
This is probably the most glaring flaw in SaaS and cloud computing. Even the giants go down eventually. Couple that with your own ISP's issues and your potential downtime is doubled.
I get the sense they underestimate how hard it will be to get the optics right for that in a contact lens. It might be worthwhile to forget all the electronics to begin with and just focus (no pun intended) on making a static figure viewable via microlenses and then build from there.

Another issue is that contact lenses need to breath. They admit in the article that gas permeability is affected as features are added to the lens, so I'd think glasses would be a safer option.
You can try to explain why in a way which obviates the license, but the reality is that for the players who showed up to the game, the BSD license was a deal breaker. "It's not the GPL!", you say. "It's that the developers preferred it!" Fine. But if your license drives off all your developers, justifiably or not, whether it's morally superior or not, your license has killed the project. Period.

The fact that your missing is that the once-successful project was already dead because the primary authors no longer required it and the technology landscape had changed, not because the BSD licensed was used.

Given that, I agree that the "correct" license was whatever license anyone actually willing to contribute wanted. The fact that the few new developers interested in contributing were GPL proponents is entirely happenstance and not a success story -- the project reached full maturity with years of development under the BSD license!