skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, sorry if it reads overly negative. The reason for my post was I got sucked into the hype around the project and ended up wasting a few days for something that didn't work out. It's not the MongoDB team's fault, of course. But I started to read comments here without any counter-balance.

> At least on my 64-bit linux box, mmap page size is 4k. So if you have to read
> 100 bytes vs 4k, in the end I don't think its a big difference. From the
> drives point of view, 100 bytes and 4k are basically the same, and with os file
> caches, it'll cache the 4k anyway most likely

I beg to differ. 4k is 40 times 100 bytes and that's a lot. I could understand a 512 byte sector cache but not full 8 sectors per every disk read. Especially for metadata.

> The JavaScript support is very optional (only db.eval and $where). When it used
> it uses very little memory because nothing is really stored in it. Its
> basically processing 1 record at a time and we've written a very efficient
> wrapper.

My bad. I'm very wrong on this point, then.

> Also, v8 actually just released a 64-bit version, so we may look into
> switching back to that as well if it turns out to be a lot faster than
> trace monkey.

Yes, and V8 will probably come soon in other architectures, too. This sounds good.

BTW, I couldn't find a stable release of Spidermonkey with Tracemonkey. But it could be my fault entirely.

> Why do you think its green and small? Its actually been used in production
> for over 18 months (www.businessinsider.com for example)

It's just a personal impression based on who is using it (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments) and recent bugs. Requiring 64-bit mode for files over 3.3-4GB is a bit strange for a database.

Again, I think it has all the potential and has a fantastic team. And maybe a bit of hard testing and some presentations could dispel [my opinion on] memory usage. As I said in my previous comment, take my opinion with a grain of salt!

[Edit: formatting, little rephrasing]
I'd ask him what it was like to start bloomberg, how he did it, and when he knew he was succeeding. An old friend of mine was employee #60 at bloomberg, and he said it was a great - but very intense - place to work.
I fail to see how Google mispricing impressions is the fault of the Hizook admin.

Google already modifies the payout on clickthrough using a completely opaque system. If that system cannot handle traffic spikes, they shouldn't be defaulting to banning the Adsense account, they should just throttle inventory.
What's crap is that AdSense's TOS say that you can't run someone else's context- or content-sensitive ads. So you can't run both AdSense and whatever Yahoo/Bing/whoever has. If you could, stuff like this would be a great boon, not an automatic circuit breaker that cut you off.
especially in the instances where they've taken over companies that previously had, at the least, decent support.

in postini's web administration panel, there are certain actions that require you to contact support to be done. now that google owns them and you have to contact google, it's a long, painful process.
Food isn't the most important part of a work environment, but it really is quite good.
we should just make this post top news at HN for as long as we can.. hopefully someone at google will notice it...
> They choose the LGPL which is certainly a less known/understood license and they tack on a bunch of extra requirements.

If it had extra requirements, it wouldn't be using the LGPL (and I don't think it would even be compatible). Those are just restatements of parts of the license; you can see which sections just by reading it, as it's quite short.
That does not excuse Google's behavior in any way.

The most amazing to me is that it's now Thursday, and Google has not responded. Even if they don't like humans, they could have automatically detected by now that the traffic is due to the links.

Don't they have this thing called pagerank that computes exactly that? Another example of the left hand not talking to the right hand (and not caring).
Nitpick:

> and with os file caches, it'll cache the 4k anyway

Usually in a high-end database direct I/O is used on Linux.
Has anyone ever fronted up to Google and ask to see some customer service there?

Over the past few months there have been a number of stories about Google's bad customer service particularly in relation to the AdSense/etc programs, so I'm curious if anyone has been brave/silly enough to try.
Actually, this study (http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/workshops/accessible/McCoy.htm) lends credence to the claim. Late merges have better throughput than early merges when encouraged by traffic signs and uniformly adopted.

The study does not directly address the effect of "cheating" late merges which can create waves, but did note that traffic signs which strongly encouraged early merging by everyone increased overall transit time through construction. That suggests that the default case is better.

That makes a little sense to me: a single lane can bear less traffic, so extending the amount of distance everyone has to spend in a single lane might result in higher latency overall, if not necessarily lower throughput.
The planet is sentient. It constantly swings its tides out to create momentum that prevents it from falling into the star.
Side note to your side note:

http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/google-kills-anti...

There are plenty more like that. I've also noticed a tendency to adsense account holders to avoid talking about issues in public because this may 'rock the boat'.
I know one of those cases personally and no, they're not 'brave/silly' enough to try because there appears to be some chance you get shut down completely if you become too vocal about support issues.
We have fridges of Mountain Dew too you know.
Photos of hideous monstrosity @ http://gizmodo.com/5346996/gscreens-dual+screen-spacebook-co...

Hmm, based in Alaska, lots of military references (per http://gizmodo.com/5346996/gscreens-dual+screen-spacebook-co...) I call boondoggle.

Edit: in fairness, it's a triumph of industrial design compared to the thing Lenovo put out earlier this year.
Would you mind sharing your Script for parsing the db schema?
My favorite term from the TOS is the one where they forbid you to talk about your accounts statistics:

" Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google's prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as "Confidential" or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority. "

For the whole thing see here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms
the two screens slide out sideways and lock into place, kinda like window panels.
Index Videos
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For heavy business travelers, the question is not whether to go to the airport or not, but whether to rebook or not, and they decide that based on probabilities.
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We had to write an awk script for a class a while ago that used the output from du for a given folder. The output from the script was a dot file with the directory structure and memory used for each node below the given directory argument. Mine was pretty simple but one student figured out how to make each node look like a folder and color coded the nodes based on the amout of space used.
Hi Max,

Flightcaster may not be as useful for all travelers, but we believe it may be useful to a large enough population of travelers to be a real business.

Some business travelers can rebook flights in order to significantly increase the likelihood that they can make an important business meeting. In this case, it may be aimed at connecting flights, or at initial departing flights.

For others, having the information is useful, even if it doesn't mean rebooking. For example, I have traveled a lot for business and we joke about the value of the power outlets at the airports - another 20 minutes with power for my laptop is a big value in the airport. :-)

Lastly, we humans have to be careful about our bias toward making ambiguous numerical claims and extrapolating out from our limited experiences. The flights you have taken in your part of the world is a small sample size to generalize from. Depending on how you define us "delayed," somewhere between 20 - 30 % of U.S. domestic flights are delayed.

What numbers do you have to substantiate the claim that "flights nowadays in my part of the world are on time?"
Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
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Does money buy happiness? Yes, if it's used to buy memories
I happened upon that PDF yesterday on scribd via google. I was pondering between purchasing the $25 PDF edition of Programming Ruby 1.9 (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9) and this one. I was surprised to see this price, which had apparently been adjusted a few hours prior. I purchased it because it was written by the author of Ruby, was twice as affordable, and because the preview on scribd contained a lot more pages for me to help base my decision on. It also covers Ruby 1.8, as well.

The quality of the PDF is immaculate. Only the cover pages are scanned in: the rest of it is glorious vector text and graphics, allowing one to zoom in and out as much as they could want, similar to what I like to do when reading web sites. It's also searchable, which regular books are not.

The fact that it's a digital work forces one to scan the book, skipping past parts one recognizes, putting in practice those they don't.

Finally, a digital edition enables one to easily copy-paste those parts of code he or she doesn't feel like typing out themselves.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incorrect (business) feature prioritization
There is nothing 'amazing' about it, unfortunately, Google tech support is from Mars. The only answers I have ever had to date were cut & paste emails which usually did not address the issue at all. We keep some of them for amusement value.

Adwords is not much better by the way, we've simply stopped using it after detecting some major discrepancies (read undetected click fraud) between googles reporting and our own log files.

Complaining is pretty much pointless, we no longer bother, possibly this experience is unique but I highly doubt it.

I guess some computer in googles database records that as 'customer satisfaction going up', but in fact it is the opposite and if I ever come across a real alternative to adwords/adsense we will be gone in a heartbeat.
Resonant energy transfer has been known for a very long time. Any electrical system that has inductance or capacitance (which means all electrical systems) will have a resonance point. This resonance point is the like the resonance point of a mass spring system or like resonance of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. If you drive a system at its resonance point, you will maximize the energy transfer into the system. That is all that is going on. If both the send and receive coils resonate at the same frequency, maximum power transfer can occur. There is no magic. This isn't a technology.

Also, the coils do indeed have to be parallel to each other. Fields gradients are function as vectors in space and the receive coil must be positioned to "capture" as many field lines as possible emitted from the transmitter.
Sorry to be a little negative but this is just a little vague: "Creating a super product and selling it."

Maybe put down some of your ideas. I'm turned off just reading: SUPER product. The word super makes me think you guys have no direction.

Good luck!
that's because they are pinching every penny, their support is probably outsourced to some drone farm in india.
On my machine it looked like someone typing weird stuff.
A few stats on delays might be helpful...

25% of all flights are delayed. If you're on the last flight of the day--you have a 36% chance of delay.

That's 400,000 people per day in the U.S. alone that are delayed without much or any advanced notification. 75% of all significant delays (those over an hour) are first posted by the airlines within 30 minutes of departure.

For those that don't want to risk missing a meeting or getting home for dinner, advanced notification means you can change flights or at least warn your family and colleagues.

Stay tuned--we'll soon be posting all our accuracy metrics at http://blog.flightcaster.com.

For now, read more about how delays occur and why airlines report them so late at http://flightcaster.com/faq
Sure, but Google knows more about those visitors than anyone, by tracking them across many AdSense sites. They can take referrer and temporary traffic surges into account on what ads -- if any -- they serve.

That Google has no adjustment to apply here other than banning an account -- especially given how many total crap sites thrive on AdSense month after month without triggering countermeasures -- is disappointing.
Did the same thing (plotting tables and relation betweeen them) for the C# DataSet object.
Ah, yes. It is my understanding that there were governmental pressures to deploy a known-weak system.
So is T-Mobile the only carrier in the US that this will be available to?
well duh...twitter is useful to people who sling some sort of product, it's the new newsletter, but for regular people it's MUCH easier to use facebook
while you're at it vote this one up as well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=781751

it's about this story:

http://archlinux.me/dusty/2009/08/23/why-im-quitting-gmail/
"I think I've saved $64 million since we started talking," replied Google.

Google, being founded and run by Comp Sci PhDs, wants to automate everything. Though they don't publicize it, they are practically an AI company. Unfortunately if the Google Corporation complaints division succeeds in this automation, the first words spoken by a strong AI probably won't be along the lines of "What hath God wrought", or "I am become the angel of death", but more like "Share and Enjoy".

"Share and Enjoy" is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.

The motto stands — or rather stood — in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the offices of many talented young complaints executives — now deceased.

The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration. http://flag.blackened.net/dinsdale/dna/book2.html

Calvin and Jobs http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3191/2723090810_6501c93ae2_o....
Don't forget the Lenovo W700 or whatever it is.. The 17" + 10" monster..
I'm with the GP on this one, certainly after my personal experiences with Google on issues like this.
waaah.

just be grateful that messrs. brin and page allowed you the privilege, for as such a brief period as it were, to make a meager pittance from these text and/or image based advertisements.

find no pity from me.
This is news? I thought everyone's mother gave them this advice (possessions won't make you happy, you should live life instead).
A few correlations for your first point:

* Incentive to earn more - esp if we're looking at averages, the $0 startup guys will drag down the singles category.. The married people will likely be after a paycheque of some sort

* Age. - There's usually a link between age and income - and i'd guess at a link between age & partner status..

* Just realised that the raw data is actually there - so I shouldn't be guessing... Haven't got time this second to go through it - I'll try later..
I'm totally willing to trust the word of someone called "graphene" on this one.
it assumes a lot of background knowledge

What kind of background knowledge is required?
I'm happy to ask the right team at Google about this and point them to the post on hizook.com.
Google shoots first and doesn't ask questions later. I'm not defending google. I've been anti-google for years. I'm just saying why they disable the account. It's the easiest, automated solution to combat lots of problems like click-fraud, advertiser complaints, etc. If they don't disable the account, they have to constantly handle this type of account, the high traffic, potentially high click-thru, but low conversion attracting account.

The other solution requires making a lot of changes to a lot of accounts. The advertisers' ad positioning, the rates for the ads, which affect other adsense sites, etc. In that case, Google runs the risk of angering a lot of customers, both advertisers, and real estate providers.

The other solution: ban the account -- angers only one real estate provider.
The idea is that it formed farther away, and has been "falling" the whole time, and it's just about to hit the star. Which is dismissed as an unlikely coincidence, but maybe.

We should be able to find out soon.

If it's really that close, and the existing estimate for Q is correct, the orbital period should change measurably within the next year or two.
Two points:

1. This is not a problem with Google's Customer Service, it is a problem with their vendor relations. When Google publishes ads on your site, you are selling that space to them. Google is your customer and isn't obligated to tell you a damn thing except that they don't want to buy from you anymore.

2. There is a market opportunity here for an ad network that is willing to find good sites dropped from Google Adsense by erroneous algorithms. And that can appeal to the news herd (all the traffic driven by reddit, hn, slashot, digg, etc.) with either brand advertising or targeted ads designed to appeal to surfers from those sources.

The thing is, from a strictly mathematical point of view Google may be perfectly correct, the 100 visitors a day coming to the site while looking for robotics news may have been more valuable to their advertisers than 10,000 stimulus hungry nerds that don't buy shit. And while it's hard on the site in question Google is playing for the percentages, not sheer volume.
The Wall Has Fallen: 3 Augmented Reality Apps Now Live in iPhone App Store
On a side note, google should definitely get its act together related to customer service.

This implies that they're incompetent at providing customer service. My biggest fear is that this behavior is by design, that they are achieving all their customer service objectives, and that they have the metrics to prove it.
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Some examples from chapter one: the concept of local variables (used but not explained); the conventional meaning of recursion (when they argue that TCO only applies to iteration despite having the form of recursion); and (and IIRC) approaches to mathematical proofs that it argues against (there are also some mathematical examples, like implementing Newtons method, but I think that's OK).

There's also a bit of imagery that only makes sense if you already know what it means. As someone who's taught at Uni, I think that's pretty poor in an "introductory textbook". However, the simple truth is that it isn't an introductory textbook at all, but something more advanced and arcane.
Ask HN: What is augmented reality?
I somehow missed the bus and have no clue what is augmented reality. And for the past two days, I've been noticing a variety of posts regarding augmented reality or augmented reality apps.

What exactly is it and what are it's applications?
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The American Pie actor Jason Biggs has cut short his holiday in Europe after being attacked by one of Gibraltar's famous monkeys.
Video games finally pay off: Air Force needs more virtual than real pilots
> The comparison to homeschoolers seems a bit off.

Agreed, we have completely improper data to compare.

> It seems obvious that it's better to group kids by ability rather than age.

The counter argument I usually hear is that while a 10 year old may be academically smarter than others of the same age, the kid may not be as socially mature.

My understanding is that older schools actually did something different, all students were in the same room with one teacher. So you didn't group kids at all, and older kids helped younger kids.

I especially like the part about the older kids helping the younger kids since it can help reinforce a topic. However, I don't think this is feasible with modern society since communities are bigger and people move a lot more.
Python 3to2: Go check it out.
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Augmented reality is a description of devices that overlay (or even replace completely) your view of reality with information from a device.

Examples are cellphone applications that show data layers when pointing the cell phone at a scene and looking 'at' the scene through the lens of the phone, but similar (or even better) effects could theoretically be achieved by displays in glasses or by projecting straight on to the retina.

For a demo of current applications have a look at 'layar', there are plenty of other groups busy in this field.
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A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide
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Mails from Twitter | XSS
"Hey there.

Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter, your password was reset. Please create a new password by opening this link in your browser: [...]"

Now THIS is nice...at least now they seem to realize how they failed with this problem
The limit is 100 customers per year per account. As far as I know you can sign up for more accounts.

In fact some developers are selling exclusively through Ad Hoc distribution http://iphone.stackswap.net/scummvm.html
I like the idea of programs (and machines) that are lean and mean. (Dinosaurs were big too.) There's something really satisfying about a few lines of code that replace a hundred.
If only Get Satisfaction could get the Google account. . .. Perhaps Google should acquire them; that would likely solve the customer service issues people seem to be so upset about.