skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I missing something? The holes can't be square, because of the rotating motion required to create them they will always have rounded corners.

I'd like to see pictures of the holes created with this bit.
I think she's presented for programmers to drool and think "how cute" and admire her as a great wife rather than judge.
I also do not believe that the Taliban are completely without a trace of Nate's description. I just think that, as a rule, they'd see things in general as either good or bad, but not really as a mix of good and bad. I grew up in a worldview that was similarly inflexible, where an action was either a good action or an evil one, but never "kind of good" or "kind of evil"; we might be uncertain about which side it's on, or wrong about it, but the fuzziness isn't ascribed to the action or the Deity's view of the action. Possibly for this reason, I don't actually view the Taliban's beliefs as "alien", or hard to understand. I just have goals that conflict with their goals.
Exactly, if people want this enough, they'll go to another country for the service. And if so many people start going abroad, their influence might spread through Europe. If that continues, a critical mass might be reached where eugenics becomes less taboo and more accepted. There are a lots of "if"s there, but it's possible.
JavaScript based Interaction Design Tool For Webpages: IxEdit
How useful would it be if users make checklists for themselves because the tasks involved are likely to be repeated many times (e.g., going on a trip)?
A faster javascript engine (v8) is nice for mobile devices, and who knows, maybe it's more portable to the Cell SPUs.
Great stuff. Would anybody care to clarify why access is through HTTPS and not HTTP?

I presume all accesses to these pods are from within their data center? Or do they directly expose these boxes to clients (whoa!)?
Comparing TechStars and LaunchBox "Demo Days"
Ask HN: Is there a way to do this in Google Apps email? If not there should be
I want to be able to link all of the dozens of email addresses in one place. Is there a way to add some sort of dropdown to the interface to quickly change between emails?

If not, I see it working as follows:

1. You link your email addresses and verify each of them by loggin in. vaksel@domain1.com, vaksel@domain2.com, vaksel@domain3.com.

2. On the email, you now have a drop down box. With all the emails and number of new messages for each.

vaksel@domain1.com(3)
vaksel@domain2.com(1)
vaksel@domain3.com(0)
Link another account

3. When you select an email account, it seamlessly switches from one account to another.

Something like this is necessary, I have way too many emails and its next to impossible to check them. Yeah I do the ghetto thing and forward them to a single account, but this way would be way more organized.
I've worked a lot with XMPP in a professional capacity and I have no idea what his complaint on that front it. It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town. If you don't, you have to coordinate on the protocol, but XMPP won't get in your way. You can't do that with any other IM protocol that I know. (Which isn't all of them, but I do know a lot about a lot of them.)

There are other criticisms that make more sense, mostly to do with the annoyance of dealing with XML (especially for people that don't actually understand it; there's a bit more than meets the eye and XMPP actually uses thing like namespaces) and some valid complaints about verbosity (which mostly only matters in a mobile context), but there's a lot of other "standard" criticism that come more from ignorance than understanding, the biggest one being "complexity"; XMPP is modular, and if you just want to pop open a connection and send a message that's hardly a day's worth of coding starting from nothing more than a socket and an XML parser. If you don't want to be in a conference room, you don't have to worry about the conferencing standard, and so on.

There pretty much isn't another IM protocol that's even in the running for this sort of use, because XMPP is the only one that actually is extensible. The only alternative is specifying a protocol from scratch, and of course that hypothetical protocol is perfect and awesome... what with it not existing. Of course XMPP can't compete with the perfect protocols that exist only in people's imaginations (and note the plural... no two of them are the same). But XMPP actually exists, now.
I had the same idea !

Hunch.com inspired me for a website like that.

It could be really useful to solve basic car troubles or anything technical.
Well, to be fair, Backblaze is using consumer-grade hardware here. No redundant PSUs. No mirrored OS drives. Cheaper components. Etc.

They're going Google's route, which is fine, it's just... a whole different direction than a Sun Thumper. I'd be interested to see how their costs per petabyte stack against Google's.
67TB of storage, with 4GB of cache. I'd really love to see some performance numbers versus the way-too-expensive competition. If the systems are being used as tape drive replacements, I could see this working well, but as an actual NAS-like device, I can't imaging how it could perform acceptably. Of course, if those Intel motherboards have the dual 1Gb/s NICs that Intel boards generally do, it will probably take a while to fill the drives anyhow.
Thinking the exact same thing! While technology isn't more than any typical hacker can slap together in their apartment (minus maybe the case fab), I think the application is ingenious and the full blog post about it, like dmillar, pointed out is rather awe-inspiring. And I was all happy because my new Core i7 box has 2TB of space and 6GB of ram... sigh

That being said - did seagate ever fix their firmware issue on the 1.5TB drives that would cause random corruption? (heard about it maybe 6 months ago)
I would need to dig for the article - but recently some doctors have radically reduced the mistakes made in surgery by utilizing checklist procedures - you are on to something here.
Try http://www.longfocus.com/firefox/gmanager/
Electric Vehicles: Setting the Record Straight on Lithium Availability
I will be putting up a directory of public checklists in the near future.

Isn't the idea posted above more focused on the crowdsourcing/directory aspect of this, and not so much the "I've created a great checklist creator!" part? It's not "EXACTLY" what s/he's talking about by any means.
Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
Shantharam - Gregory David Roberts
They might have missed a trick here.

To address vibration, acoustics and gyroscopic effect, what I've seen done in highly dense enclosures is to rotate every second drive around 180 degrees in a bit of a shotgun approach to balancing stuff.

Still, awesome.
Who says that the person who originally came up with a catchy expression gets to decide what it means for all eternity?

To me, the difference that Norton makes out between "technical debt" and "messes" is at most one of degrees and in no way fundamental.
I do what you call "true" consulting -- I deliver value by being a trusted advisor to folks. I was really good at working on my own. Then I got really good at working in teams. Then leading teams. Then training project managers and architects. Then setting up program offices. Along the way I got a patent on measuring agility in teams -- and did a lot of hands-on startup work.

Now I'm the guy you go to when you have a dozen or more teams and somehow your performance tanked as compared to when it was just you and your buds in the dorm: I work on how large groups of developers can play together with maximum efficiency.

It's not a solved problem by any means -- it's tough, intractable in some cases, full of varying forms of opinions and expertise which mostly conflict with each other. But it's possible to fix things, or at least make them a lot better.

I've found that as I've worked my way up the consulting ladder the situations get more vague, the problems much harder, and the politics a lot tougher. Lots of folks want things to get better, as long as nothing much changes. (grin)

My advice as far as making this a career? Read voraciously -- much more than the other guys. Avoid conferences and other forms of "feel good" knowledge acquisition - focus on what works and what doesn't work. Learn to differentiate the idea-of-the-month books from books where the author is exploring what he knows. Learn about five years ahead of where you think the market is going to be. And the one thing I wished I had done better: network. All the time. At some point this business becomes about who you know. The better you network the quicker this happens.
Wow.

Do they offer S3-like storage? They should. If they can offer something like S3, but at one third of a penny per gigabyte per month (heck, let's splash out - a whole penny per gigabyte per month) I know quite a few people who'll be interested in talking to them... (including myself)
Ahhh, upgraded to this from the 10 beta and my biggest gripe is finally gone!

It USED to be that if you clicked a right-click menu outside of the control it was opened in, it wouldn't execute the action of that click.

(For example, if I right click in this textbox and "copy" is outside this textbox, it wouldn't copy.)

Now? Fixed! Proof?

Now? Fixed!
How I do it: settings > accounts > get mail from other accounts > add a mail account you own

Then select: label incoming messages, archive incoming messages, and Yes, i want to be able to send mail as x.

To read messages from another account, click its label. To send mail as another account, click the From dropdown.
that seems out of date, here found the updated version: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320
Agreed. I have to use Dreamweaver every day (so the static HTML stuff I do is usable by our web content guys) and I'm amazed at the number of bugs that make it through version after version. Not to mention some of the sh%&ty workflows that they implement...
A One-Way Ticket to Mars
A mathematical model suggests a new way to allocate vaccines
EBay Sells Most of Skype to Private Investors
I used to find that I'd get slow downs when performing requests because the ISP wasn't answering the DNS query in a timely fashion. This would usually resolve itself in half-an-hour or so, possibly a load issue. But with OpenDNS I've not had those problems, my ISP nameservers are there as backup however if I should need them.

Also OpenDNS optionally does filtering and allows reporting of lookups made. As my kids grow and explore for themselves I think this will be useful.
Why?

Much of our non-.NET code adheres to this convention, and I've found I kinda like it. We don't require it for .NET code (C#, primarily), simply because that would require tweaking the IDE's default formatting behavior.
I'm curious, why use URL shortners on HN? It's not like you're constrained to 140 characters. (I'm not trying to be a jerk, just trying to understand your reasoning.)
It's probably a play on The Time Traveler's Wife.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Now that I have my Kindle, I find I can "parallel read" instead of sequentially reading. It's really easy to flip between several books, and the Kindle keeps track of what percentage I have completed of each book.

I'm finding that the Kindle might not be so good with technical books -- why, I don't know. But for fiction and "light" books it's great. I wished I had read Tolstoy many years ago. That guy can really write!
I apologize if that seemed like an exaggeration. The directory is why I created this product, that feature is just not out-the-door yet. This post was a little earlier than I was planning.

One of the intentions of the product is to handle these large distributed processes with the management of a Master Checklist that can be diffed with other masters and instances. I added that feature to facilitate those sort of crowdsourced checklists/processes.
effing love this.

I wonder what the reliability stats on this setup is, though. Is it really cheaper to jam all those drives in one unit without redundant PSU's, MB's, or a boot drive?

I'd guess you'd have to build at least 2 of these units and mirror them to get any sort of reliability. And, at that point, how long does it take to copy 58 TB across https?

data is hard.
Skype: A new chapter
That's exactly how I think about "technical debt": it is a marketing buzzword invented by consultants to justify higher rates.
What you are likely to have is something like this: 1000 users and each voted between 0 and 100 times with 10 votes average. Yet with this approach all you have is a bag of 10,000 votes. It does not matter what you do with this bag - all the information on how the individual users voted is lost.
Depressing is someone equating 'vacuous' with the lack of technical interest.
"The Multicultural Mystique," by H.E. Baber

"Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World," by Jack Weatherford

Both interesting, although in that "factual book designed for mass market consumption" bread-y kind of way.
EBay signs definitive agreement to sell skype
Backblaze $117,000
[...]
Amazon $2,806,000

I cry foul. Backblaze's "67 TB" pods actually only hold 58.5 TB, so their hardware cost per PB of storage is $134k, not $117k; and that's without any high-level redundancy. Servers fail -- both catastrophically, and by silently corrupting bits -- and Backblaze's $134k / PB doesn't have any protection against that. Datacenters also fail -- power outages, cut fibre, FBI raids, etc. -- and any system which stores all of its data in a single datacenter lacks any protection against that. Store each file on two different servers in each of two different datecenters, and suddenly Backblaze's $134k turns into $536k. The price for Amazon, in contrast, is based on the assumption that their prices remain fixed for the next 3 years -- which seems a rather radical assumption.

Is backblaze's solution cheaper than S3? Absolutely. But they're also twisting the numbers a bit.
Consider reading the originals upon which she almost certainly based her ideas: Plato "The Republic" and Nietzsche "Human, All Too Human"
BackBlaze runs online, off-site backups (like Mozy and Carbonite) at $5/month for unlimited storage. HTTPS is used to keep client data protected, I assume
I've never actually understood the thinking behind V8, particularly as it's original pitch seemed to include being directly targeted at X86 and yet Google was developing browsers for both the desktop and Android (mainly ARM-targeted).

They've added ARM now I believe but Apple obviously had SquirrelFish on the ARM chip for iPhone from wayback. Maybe they committed before it was obvious that SquirrelFish could lift some ideas from Lua and be competitive with what V8 was planning.
"The", as an article, is applied to individuals in all sorts of situations. If, for instance, I say "The apple is red," I'm probably not making an assertion that should be generalized to all apples, but rather speaking about a specific one.
Disease, famine, and war seem to be the methods nature favors.

The end result of working to support an excessively large population of humans is an increase in the severity of these methods when they take effect.

The logical way to avoid nature's culling methods would be to decrease population by providing cheap/free birth control and encouraging a two-child limit.
I would assume they don't care about any of the hardware, just the data. If you look at the setup, and how the drives are raided, there 45 drives are sub-divided into 15 raid arrays, of which it would take 3 to die before they lost data. Essentially, they would need 20% of their drives to die simultaneously for them to lose data.

Now, for the rest of the hardware, its not that important to if it fails. If one of the other components die, you're only looking at some down time (and a possible dead hard drive or two from a PSU dying, which I assume they monitor regularly). As long as the data is secure and in one piece, it doesn't really matter whether the pod is up or down, until someone needs the data. Just send out your repair guy to replace it and reboot it, and its fine.
Ginos Bears For Anything Teddy Bear
I propose you create a BrainTrust with your most trusted advisors -- http://AskMyBrainTrust.com. Having one can immensely help you not only get past loneliness but also get advice and outside thought on your strategic decisions.
I see this as a step in the direction for Skype to move towards IPO, otherwise it doesn't make sense that any VCs would be willing to invest in it.

As I see it, take a profitable company, with 600M in revenue, spend some time destructing and reworking it internally while private (possibly launching new features), then make it public so the VCs get their money back.
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http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(67+TB)+%2F+(2*(1+Gb%2F...)

It'll take 3 days at the theoretical max of the networking equipment to read/write the 67TB. The overhead of HTTPS constrains the networking so this is too low.

I'd expect that their internet connection (i.e. in/out of the data center) is the real bottleneck.

I believe that the system is being used as a tape drive replacement.
First link's first joke,

"By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself".

Okay, that's a non-joke that you'd expect from a 13 year old. But he's setting the context, and maybe the best foot was not forward, so let's keep listening...

Okay, he keeps at that theme for awhile, repeating himself, and then uses the phrase "Satan's little helper" which I'm pretty sure he got off the simpsons, which he presumably was familiar with.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22satan%27s+little+helper%22...

(I could be wrong, as the vid isn't dated.) He then repeats himself a few more times and then says, "There's no joke coming" which I suspect is true. He then repeats himself a few more times adding the word "fuck" which is a word that stopped being daring on the stage right around Tennessee Williams' mid-career.

He then reiterates the past theme, as well as correctly stating again that there is no joke involved.

But then he gets to the first joke, about how the marketing people in the audience are probably interpreting his anti-marketing bit as in fact being pro-marketing. Okay, not funny, but at least it's a joke. He then performs several variations on that theme. End of bit.

.......

It doesn't do much good to critique comedy, but the point is: He's repetitive, he has an anti-establishment shtick that I find trite and unconvincing, his jokes are punctuated with gratutious vulgarities which are as informationally valuable as "hmm", "uh", "umm", "whu?", etc., and I sit there watching...and not laughing...ever. Which is the final test. It is possible to do blue comedy right, you know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H94jAkaTqQ
I can't believe it! This annoyed me so much and I could not find the culprit. Installing it right now. Oh happy day.
Dig through ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/ to find your file.
Somehow I had this really deep feeling of ambivalence come over me reading this article.

You did something, the customer is happy, but now you have to do something more because the first time you didn't do enough.

This author says wait! It's not because you made a mistake, hacked up your code, or changed done. That's some other thing, but not technical debt. Technical debt is when your understanding of the domain evolves and you have to refactor.

So who cares? From the customer's standpoint it's more stuff you have to do. Stuff that doesn't involve getting useful work done (in their eyes)

I believe he made his point, but I don't understand what kind of difference it's supposed to make. What? Are we supposed to invent yet more terms for messy code or redefinitions of acceptance criteria?
In the comment stream Jeffrey Tranberry (from Adobe) is saying a new font, Menlo, is causing at least one of the problems. How can a font cause a serious problem?

Also, following someone's Twitter stream for information is fail when it's a ton of @ messages.
It would be really interesting if, once the designs are open source, someone has an "aha!" moment and discovers why hard drives fail so much.
I should think so - I have 4 of them in my ZFS pool, and scrubs are turning up no errors.
My wife codes, and reads HN, and I'm waiting for her reaction to this article.
this is a dupe of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797995

Also, the article seems to have been written mostly to pimp a report that you can buy or some subscription.
Also, did you just take those URLs from the last page of the article, and if so why not just link there:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...
Interesting overview, however he fails to address scalability issues properly. Some of the algorithms presented need to periodically recompute each item's score - this is a drawback if scalability is what you are looking for. A scalable algorithm will compute each score on write and will not require batch updates of previous items.

See: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/overheard.html
See http://www.ehow.com/ they have a wiki-enabled process description model: they are a decade old and have a large set of checklists.
http://www.enleiten.com went for that approach, but hasn't really gotten over the chicken-egg problem wrt public user lists. Still, might be interesting.
Are E-Readers Greener Than Books?
I really wanted something like this for going hiking. When you go on a four-day hike it really, really sucks if you forget something important. But there are about 20 important things, so you can't rely on remembering them all. You need to build a checklist. But this process takes a while and discourages casual hikers from going on longer hikes.

So I would love a checklist tool that I could use for this. Right now I am using jottit and just making a list; if your system worked better I would use it.
Interesting, but Amazon doesn't guarantee most of those things. They guarantee a 99.99% uptime, but that isn't counting a complete datacenter failure. In fact, it sounds to me as if they have a similar set up to the backblaze people.

99.99% uptime means roughly 1 hour per year of downtime. I don't know what the specific failure rates on the components are, but it seems reasonable that A) the data drives are hot-swappable, and will not cause downtime when they are replaced and B) the rest of the components fail once a year (or less) and take ~10 minutes to replace and reboot the system. With 4 main places of failure (PSU, Boot Drive, Motherboard/Ram/CPU, Drive controllers), as long as you have staff constantly on call and they can respond within 5 minutes of a failure, 99.99% uptime seems reasonable.

I don't know where you got the idea that your data was on 4 different servers when using S3. I can't find even the slightest amount of information on that. Yes, that would be nice, and it is cool to think that, but its rather doubtful that they're actually doing that (or they could probably add another 9 to their uptime).
For some value of "soon"
7 Things Your Startup SHOULD Copy From 37signals
I see where he's going but I'm not sure I agree.

It's more like there's two kinds of (technical) debt, one kind that you take on with a solid plan to pay it back later and the other kind, e.g. most credit card debt or programming messes, where you're just getting yourself into trouble with no plan for getting back out or realisation of how much interest you're going to accrue.

Yes you shouldn't do the latter, but it's still (technical) debt and the phrase is a handy tool for explaining why you shouldn't do these things to less technical folks.
> the article seems to have been written mostly to pimp a report that you can buy or some subscription.

Hi Jacques, meet the "IT media".