skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference is that, he claims, "making messes is never justified". Which is somewhat divorced from the reality of real world development that sometimes, even if you do everything right, comes down to firefighting, making the deadline at all costs, and doing what you're told even though you disagree with it.

I agree in that you should not justify messes by calling them "technical debt" that you'll pay back later when in fact there is no pressing reason not to do it right other than your own laziness. But then, that's also true for the design variety of technical debt.
As if the term "open source" wasn't already meaningless..
I think what you're looking for is this: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=m...

I have that set up myself for several addresses; all it does is send email through a given email address' SMTP servers. It does NOT retrieve emails for you. Specifically, this prevents Gmail from adding the SMTP headers to signify "On Behalf of" on the receiver's view of your email.

Gmail provides retrieval through a separate feature, although I think it kind of sucks due to a time delay (instant gratification and all that...) so I use the "ghetto" method of forwarding too.
Finding Better Friends: Delicious and SPEAR
>> one of the driving forces was to let non-geeks build software

He makes the extremely important point that the technology has failed if ordinary people can't use it to get their own work done. However, I've personally seen a project where the aim was essentially to let non-programmers program, and the result was horrendously messy. In large part, I think that's because a lot of people ended up developing that had no understanding of the underlying concepts, and as a result the output was extremely hacked together and unintuitive. I think it's great when people realize that the whole point of most software is to enable regular users to complete a task without worrying about the internal computation, but it's just as important to realize the need to _understand_ what is happening.
Can we really secure php script ?
The Capitalist Programmer
The only problem in this guy's life is his mentality.

He gets almost $200K handed to him and decides he wants to be an author? Great! But he's going about it all wrong.

Move out of the city, man! Find a nice country home. Ditch the Blackberry and all the other tech toys. Sell the suits. Stop spending money needlessly on train rides, eating out, and all that other nonsense. He's still trying to live his old lifestyle. It makes no sense at all.

Buy yourself a cheap laptop, get a basic package from your local ISP, install OpenOffice so you have a word processor for your writing, save your pennies, grow and cook your own food, and write!

Geez, I probably shouldn't armchair-quarterback other people's lives this early in the morning, but....
I believe this man has let the past failures of AI give him a dark view of its future.
I have the 500GB in the same series (with the corrupted firmware) and the fix did very nice things for it. Also, I have never had problems with the 7200.12 (the newer version of the same drive) in a 1TB model.
Yeah, he says that Lisp is too hard for the common man, and then sort of implies that this is because it doesn't use ALGOL derived syntax. I don't think that's the issue. It's not Mort who's fallen in love with ALGOL syntax, it's the CS graduate Elvis's who cling to their expensively acquired "skills" (priesthood memberships) with religious fervor (he says, as a CS student).

I program in C#, and lambdas and delegates are nice (I can't use expression trees because the company I work for standardizes on .NET 2.0). But the system is too gnarly, still verbose as fuck, and nowhere near as nice as Lisp (as Krishnan freely admits). This just increases the need for sophisticated developer tools and makes things more obscurantist, not less. C# is just another variation on Java, i.e. a way to drag Elvis types 10% closer to Lisp without depriving them of their oh so precious ALGOL syntax.

Fuck the priesthood, seriously.
I really liked this article. I've been playing around with some social-news-rating algorithms of my own, which are quite different from any of the ones listed here. One of these days I'll find the time to sit down and code a site around it them...

Also...I'm pretty sure that his argument for the "Dampening The Weighted Votes By Record Age" section is wrong. If you assume that each vote has the same weight (like HN, Digg, etc.), then you can rearrange the terms so that it's possible to use an algorithm that updates the 'rating' of the story on-the-fly.
Apparently they use HTTPS for input/output using tomcat and some custom application.

That's a strange choice, HTTPS would incur quite a bit of overhead for something that is essentially a (large) drive at the end of a network cable used internally only. Why the encryption ?

quote from the article:

"A Backblaze Storage Pod isn’t a complete building block until it boots and is on the network. The pods boot 64-bit Debian 4 Linux and the JFS file system, and they are self-contained appliances, where all access to and from the pods is through HTTPS. Below is a layer cake diagram.

Starting at the bottom, there are 45 hard drives exposed through the SATA controllers. We then use the fdisk tool on Linux to create one partition per drive. On top of that, we cluster 15 hard drives into a single RAID6 volume with two parity drives (out of the 15). The RAID6 is created with the mdadm utility. On top of that is the JFS file system, and the only access we then allow to this totally self-contained storage building block is through HTTPS running custom Backblaze application layer logic in Apache Tomcat 5.5."

That's an odd choice for a storage server protocol stack.
Very interesting insight! I may try building a scaled-down version just for fun.

The cost comparison between raw drives, their custom solution, and Amazon S3, etc was a little skewed. S3 is designed for pay as you go storage so you're not paying for capacity you don't need. If you just need a few dozen gigabytes, it's a much better deal. If you need terabytes or a petabyte, a dedicated storage solution is more economical.

It's the same argument as vacation house vs timeshare. If you lived in a timeshare all year, it would cost more than buying the house.
Indeed, I think the post exhibits the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Presumably you think that a woman described as "foxy" has red fur and a bushy tail? Or if someone tells you a UI needs spicing up then you hang some chilli peppers on the monitor?

You may think it's pedantry you're practising - other people seem to cope with the dual meanings, personally I think you know exactly what is meant and are just being facetious (my father is just the same; in this instance he attempts to use the apparent absurdity as an attack against the intellectual standards of those espousing Organic, I think that attack fails and makes him look foolish, ditto for yourself).
this is a dupe

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=796329
What happens when one of the PSU's fails catastrophically, pushing a big electrical surge through the hard disks, frying half of them?

I didn't see anything in here that discusses that eventuality? And when you have that many servers, it IS going to happen at some point...
I agree that standardization reduces transaction costs, but the cost to the landlord of having a unit sit vacant for a year seems significantly higher. And, there are probably restaurant owners who are operating sub-optimally -- maybe they aren't remodeling because they are scared of what the terms of the next lease will be like.
A Just World
I think the Harry Potters and Twilights show that kids DO love to read, they just have to have a reason why. When I grew up, no one directed me to any of my favorite reads like 1984 and Catcher in the Rye. Honestly, the whole reading for a grade thing is so stale I can't believe it still exists.

College is much the same way. I just had a class where we read the novel "Pattern Recognition." In this lovely novel they get all excited about some artistic video someone posted to the internet, as if it was worth spending millions of dollars to find out who posted it. Thus, I can understand how kids might feel like some of the shit they have to read is just that: shit.
A previous intelligence test, taken about a year-and-a-half previously, had won them entrance to gifted primary schools. So how many of the kids still classified as gifted just eighteen months later? Only half

Now, that's disappointing. Newsweek has a fascinating article there, but they missed the best part. Sure, a 5 minute test is interesting, and the correlations are too, but that is fascinating fact. Only 50% of the gifted students are gifted a year and a half later? That really makes you think. What about the other way around? How many students, not originally classified as gifted would be classified that way after a year or two? It also seems to help the claim that school dumbs you down.
These modules are basically equivalent to the xbee parts. You'd have to pull out the spec sheets to see the differences, which may come down to the MAC layer or software protocals.
EBay Skype to sell stake in Skype
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: The Ars Technica Review
Bye Bye Linux (Ubuntu), Hi Again Windows
I know this is sort of frowned upon, but education is an important factor. Perhaps not in how smart someone is, but rather how dedicated they are. Granted, a start up sale or failure can show the same thing.
> She codes in linux

really ?
Why the new UI? (The Ribbon in Office 2007 & 2010)
I think of it as a geeky buzzword invented by coders to get management to understand the need for refactoring, increasing test coverage, and other necessary "mess-cleanup" actions that revisit working code.

In other words, it is a necessary term.
It seems to me that their business model, and their requirements, and their implementation solve one problem, and they do it well. The problem backblaze is solving is backups. Their front-end software sends a pile of data to the datacenter, where it is written en-masse. Should restore ever be needed, the data is then transfered back en-masse. Both of these operations have needs that are different from an S3 type service. Backup/restore can have latencies built in, can have slow seek times, etc. This allows them to take advantage of the lower end hardware.

For example each of these "pods" only has 4GB of RAM. If I was doing lots of random I/O on 67TB of drives, I would want a heck of a lot more ram for caching efficiencies.
Looks sharp, but it looks like it's somewhat more orientated towards businesses - this isn't a bad thing, but inline with the original HN request above, I think you will likely need two workflows: business and 'public'.

The public workflow would need to be super-simple looking (that whole web 2.0-ish look 'n feel) with prominent search. Perhaps something like: chcheck.com/business vs chcheck.com/public and chcheck.com/ would represent the user's path choice.

Just some thoughts - perhaps you're already moving down a similar path. Best of luck!
Computers aren't that hard, but fewer women than men will find them interesting for the same reason fewer women do anything involving math, because Math is boring, things are boring, equations are boring. Using language is interesting, people are interesting, jobs that require lots of social interaction are better than jobs that don't.

Most people hate this kind of systematising, abstract, logical thought. Fewer men hate it than women so there are more men in these fields.
The two greatest tech reviewers I've read are John Siracusa for OSX and Anand Lal Shimpi (love his series on SSDs).
I used OpenDNS while at Defcon to avoid my DNS servers being spoofed. The minor configuration change was totally worth it.
Ask HN: I'm resigning soon, any suggestions what to build on my own?
This summer I decided to take some time off - the last two weeks of August - and spend them at home doing nothing. The experience of freedom from office work was so wonderful that I want more of it!

This Monday, immediately upon returning, I told my boss I'll be resigning in about three months. (That's a reasonable grace period because the job happens to be my all-time favorite - http://kosmosnimki.ru - plus I happen to be the lead client-side dev, and the boss happens to be my schoolmate.) Same day I told my landlord I'll be moving away in a month to find a cheaper apartment. There's some money stashed from previous odd jobs that will last me several months at least.

So freedom is ahead, now what? Starting a startup would be the logical course of action... except I've never had a burning desire to make a lot of money, and business ideas don't pop into my head by themselves. So I'm turning to you for suggestions.

(Personal background: the HN community may remember me from my project http://openphotovr.org that was discussed on HN a year ago or so. I know my math and can program passably well in most languages used in the industry and some exotic ones.)
>but that isn't counting a complete datacenter failure

I believe that S3 replicates to multiple physical locations. So, while you might experience downtime, you probably won't experience data loss.
Perhaps what he's saying is that folks use the term "technical debt" as a fancy way of getting away with writing crappy code. When in fact technical debt is the stuff you couldn't have avoided if you wanted to, because you didn't know then what you know now.

Ok, I'll buy that. But to me, from an external point of view, my developers have all this extra work to do which doesn't have to do with their backlog. So who cares what the term they use is?

I think he's just mad at sloppy coders co-opting a favorite term. I see so much muddled language it doesn't really bother me. As one other poster noted, it's not like when you coin a term you get to define what the term means for the lifetime of the universe.
On the power of checklists, see also Atul Gawande's article in the New Yorker (10 December 2007) (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...).

The article describes how medical checklists, especially when nurses are empowered to force doctors to follow them, can improve patient outcomes.

The article also mentions an interesting example of checklists in aviation history.
"encouraging a two-child limit"

I intend a self-imposed 2 child limit, we have 2 boys now. However, for those families or groups who appear to espouse drowning out other genetic variations by prolific reproduction how do you suppose we "encourage". That's kinda the hard part isn't it.

For me, in the UK, I'd stop any improved child allowances beyond the 2nd child. Give council tenants triple-bunkbeds (2 to a room if necessary) rather than a bedroom for each child (! which means having lots of kids can get you a huge house payed for by the taxpayer) - that may suck but reproducing beyond your means to support is socially irresponsible.

One might consider limiting to 2 maternity leave periods, child taxation (!? eg to account for education costs), ceasing all state sponsored IVF, ... what else?
I do something similar, maybe it will help.

Go to Settings->Accounts and Imports

There you can configure other POP3 enabled mail systems and retrieve mail as well as send email as if it were from that system.

In that way google (and the gmail repository) becomes your single mail interface. I have five email addresses (the limit for free gmail) configured this way including work email, home email, other domains etc.,
One thought I had regarding that -- their client talks to a "main server" management system, which talks to each pod on using the tomcat layer. The "main server" then replies to the client with an IP or similar to send data to directly. Since this goes over the web, https is used for security. Since https is already being used, it is not so difficult to use it all the way for authentication etc.
How do you replace a drive? With so many drives it seems like a lot of effort to pull the entire server out to just access one drive.
I don't agree with "5. Charge early, charge often." as being one of the things a startup SHOULD copy from 37Signals. Sure, it has many benefits, but it's just not feasible for websites that heavily rely on 'network effects' or user capital to provide value.

The chicken and egg problem is hard to overcome already, and charging for access early obviously doesn't make sense for these types of websites.
What i wanted to know more about is (and i do now thanks to you): what does someone can sell, what does a business needs so bad that it reaches an outsider and pays him to get.
Also interesting, your take on the "consulting ladder", when i think about doing consulting, i try to find what could i offer, but i wasnt seeing it as a process to find your place.
Thanks a lot Daniel, as usual i got to learn something of what you say.
That's funny, I have the same headset and consider the audio quality just barely usable. In any kind of noisy environment I have to crank the volume all the way up and jam the earpiece in, and even then it's still hard to hear and be understood.
It is called a fuse.
Agile Web Development with Rails. I'm up to Chapter 11 or so, if I remember right. Took a break to solve some puzzles for something completely unrelated. Hopefully I can get back to a chapter a night.

After that, I'll probably crack open the Flex 3 Cookbook that Mike Potter sent over. I still feel awful about not having read through that one yet, as Flex 4 is almost ready to be released.
Re. geographical redundancy, see comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422574 :

"Amazon keeps at least 3 copies of your data (which is what you need for high reliability) in at least 2 different geographical locations. "

I can't find the original source supporting that statement, but I also know it to be true based on direct contact with AWS team. (I'm using AWS since private alpha of EC2 in 2005)
Somehow, testing for above average intelligence in children all of 5 years old seems akin to trying to figure out the best wines by tasting them 3 weeks after you've picked the grapes.

I would hazard a guess that at 5, the kids who score high on these "IQ" tests correlates strongly to their environment at home. i.e., the ones with the most involved parents do best.

The child's mind is not properly developed yet, and the best way to continue to develop it is to challenge it at the fastest pace it can handle. That has nothing to do with intelligence. At all.
I don't think screening would be very succesfull, few posts after this there's one about a lab creating fake DNA http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797657
It's addressed in the section "A Backblaze Storage Pod is a Building Block"

From the article:

When you run a datacenter with thousands of hard drives, CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, you are going to have hardware failures it’s irrefutable. Backblaze Storage Pods are building blocks upon which a larger system can be organized that doesn’t allow for a single point of failure.
Can I assume by the lack of response that no one has insurance? This might not be an issue for a fresh college grad, but unfortunately I have personal liabilities I have to protect.

Being 40, I have a house and family I have to protect from any mishaps that might occur.

Am I being paranoid or is it not an issue with software development?
chcheck is designed first and foremost to be useful for individuals, small teams and small businesses.

The current interface is in the process of being given a more understandable and inviting initial user experience to accomplish that.
Yes I've written most of an XMPP client from scratch. It's a disgusting wart of a protocol over engineered by insane people.

My previous comment on the matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581

Extensibility is really trivial. Human readable is trivial. Protocols based on XML solve neither of these well at all IMHO.

If XMPP ever did take off, we'd see a large increase in bandwidth usage everywhere. No doubt though they'd then just wrap it all up in another layer of complex compression to compensate for a ridiculous protocol.
What terrified me was the number of low-level issues they had to address. SATA protocol problems, custom-designed SATA cards? Wow. I'd have no idea how to begin with that stuff. As other posters have noted, this company's business is storage. How many PB must one host for such specialization to make sense?
Technical Debt is accepted by many as a natural part of the development process.

If you don't know how to avoid it, then calling it "natural" allows yourself off the hook from getting any better.
What a pity, I'd like to have a way to store just a encrypted backup directly (via ssh) instead of installing a app which crawls my system. Oh did I mention I use Linux? sign

Does somebody know any other company which provides this solution? I don't trust other people to crawl my system and to "encrypt" it for me.

EDIT: Added Question
Own a piece of Internet history: early URL shortener (humor)
Yes and no. The core market was indeed still there, and there is in fact still a very significant core market for print products. I don't think the sales channel was 'murdered,' and frankly, telemarketing (and 'house ads,' for that matter) are not the only sales channels. Radio, television and outdoor advertising are all channels that newspapers, in my experience, are reticent to utilize, preferring their own in-house methods instead.

Also, the one major flaw in this argument is that the article states: "As a result of the registry, newspapers have cut that figure down to 50 or 55 percent..." from 60-65% Significant? Sure. Dead? If newspaper executives let a 10-15% drop in ONE method of obtaining subscribers kill their business, they probably shouldn't be a newspaper executive.
1. Incorporate

2. Pick up a million-dollar liability policy

That's about it from a bare minimums standpoint. You can go into errors and omissions insurance and a lot of other stuff, but I've never really seen the value in it.
They have three raid-6 volumes per machine, so they probably leave it in the rack until two of the volumes are unusable and then refurbish the machine.
build something to alleviate annoyance in your everyday life. even if someone else already has a product in that space, do it better.
Thanks for posting this. I wasn't aware that Apache 2.2.12 supported SNI out of the box. SNI is kind of a big deal. It means that you can have multiple virtual hosts running HTTPS on the same IP address.

mod_proxy_balancer is also a very nice feature worth some attention.
You are right, it's not really square, but the rounded edges can be chiseled away fairly easy, especially if the drill bit has the chisel built right into it as jacquesm's earlier image showed (http://www.machinemart.co.uk/images/library/range/large/0104...). although if it's hard wood, you may need to use a solid chisel and a hammer to pound the heck out if it.
You probably mistook thousand for millions, I can't imagine Compete.com failing at such a high profile site without them noticing and fixing it.
I can't use Opera because I rely on 1Password so much now.
OK, so I've landed on the login page, logged in, and now I want to say - "I'm getting a new washing machine - what's my checklist."

Alternatively, I've had a bad experience getting a washing machine, and I want to add the item:

"When buying a washing machine, make sure it can accept mains pressure hot water."

I can't see how to do that.
Huh, they changed their Python style guide to be essentially Pep8 - it used to be two spaces, all CamelCase, very nasty. Anybody know when they did that?

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht...

EDIT: Hurr, source control. Looks like in July.
Guy Steel's take on Java language design
Having never done this myself, I have to ask: Shouldn't the normal order of process be: 1) have an idea, 2) quit job to work on it full time, 3) profit! It seems to me like your #1 and #2 are swapped. That doesn't mean it won't work out for you, though. :)