skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience as we use SSDs for our embedded solutions and sometimes have very frequent writes is that when it goes the whole partition is pretty much hosed. I'm not sure what exactly fails but it seems like the file system index or journal goes and then the whole partition is mostly useless. We use a write filter to avoid writes to OS partition (writes redirect changes to memory) so it is mostly readonly but it still can fail and and when it does the system is unrecoverable. Other partitions may still be seemingly okay but we just replace once a failure is spotted. Disk based drives usually don't fail as catastrophically in my experience but do have more errors.

Having said that we have been using them for past 5 years and only have had a dozen failures in that time over probably 500 deployments. And I think several of those were service replacing because they could not determine a root cause. Fortunately, we don't really have to try to recover anything from the drives but it does cause downtime when they fail.
I think what bothers urbanists the most about self-driving cars isn't the fuel efficiency versus public transit. It's that they perpetuate the isolationism that's deeply embedded in American culture.

My parents grew up in Bangladesh, my mom in a fairly large city and my dad in a village. When they moved to the suburbs of D.C., the biggest culture shock they encountered was the intense isolation of American suburban life. Even in rural Bangladesh, you'll encounter dozens of people in a typical day. But in the U.S., you have to go out of your way (i.e. drive) to see other people. You can go days without seeing anyone outside your immediate family unit.

Self-driving cars address certain problems with a car-based society, like congestion and safety, but they perpetuate the model of driving around in little steel bubbles where we don't interact with or even see other people. That's the biggest difference between a car-based lifestyle and a transit-based lifestyle.
Oh, once the DOJ came knocking, it stopped being an opportunity real quick.
Just out of curiousity, what is your favorite editor?
that's a pretty small list... blah blah blah...
Sorry, but the death of suburbs will have to wait.

Efficient, automated, probably electric, personalized transportation is going to enable my exurban lifestyle 45 minutes from Boston pretty much indefinitely. I'll have a lo-opex electric lawn mowing robot for my two acres of lawn, too.
> It's funny to start seeing more and more questions from people who started using computers with Windows 95.

I don't know why they stuck with it!

C64s and amigas.. when computers were cool before microsoft ruined it! Now we've been saved by apple, hurah
_If_ we could achieve largely car-free cities, and the few journeys for which cars are necessary were carried out by self-driving cars, then I'd agree with you.

But I don't see it. The seductive argument is "hey! Google's technology makes cars all right! We don't have to invest in public transport or bike lanes!". It's what's going on right now with electric cars here in the UK: the Government investment lavished on them is disproportionate to the pennies spent on cycle infrastructure.[1]

Self-driving cars are a great excuse for politicians not to make their cities as good as Groningen.[2] But maybe you're lucky enough to have better politicians than we do!

[1] https://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/cycling-gets-weak-mention-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen#Transport
Amazon's API doesn't let you access the ratings as a number. You get an iframe to their reviews page. Its a total pain.

You could scrape the ratings. But being on Amazon's naughty list is a bad idea for any affiliate.
a driverless car is called a bus...
There's a 30 minute Q/A at the end of the presentation, interesting bits about where Scala is heading and divisions in community (vis-a-vis scalaz, shapeless, etc.).
You're forgetting legacy and history. Many Java programmers came to Java, myself included, from C (or C++). The == operator in C is a simple register comparison. If you compare two ints the the == operator will return true iff the two int values are the same, but if you compare two int pointers, then equal integer values may or may not be stored at the same address, which is exactly what we're seeing here. Since Java references are pointers, this behavior -- while probably not the right choice -- was less surprising to us, C programmers, than the alternative. Of course, auto-boxing made this behavior even stranger, but autoboxing was added to the language much later.
His personal possession is still taking up a vast area of a public space

While true during the time the car is transporting a person, self-driving-cars-as-a-service requires fewer cars in total, and need not be parked near the destination (or at all during high-use periods).

Many US cities came in to existence or experienced major growth during the age of the car. They are built for people with cars, and would be quite difficult to convert to an effective public transit system. Consider Jacksonville, FL as an example. It has a population of less than a million and it's sixty miles wide. It wouldn't be terribly hard to make a strong case for building new cities differently, but causing Jacksonville to have a usable local rail system would be considerably more expensive than deploying self-driving cars there.
The Indie Box – retro-style indie games delivered to your door
If I am on 3270 or 5250 I have 80/132 but for the most part even when using the PC based editors we have I find no issues with 80 columns because even on the wide screen monitor I have information panels and such taking up space, plus I can easily side by side code.

I am also of the opinion that like names, when the line gets too long the readability goes out the door
SEEKING WORK, New York City, remote or onsite

I've been a full-stack web developer for the last four years. Before that I worked as an accountant, a bass player, and even built point-to-point tube amplifiers. These days my main tools are Ruby and the Rails ecosystem with some work in iOS and Clojure. I've built analytics systems, consumer-facing health care sites (not the big one that failed!), and enterprise-oriented education products. I'm also good with APIs and infrastructure.

My main strength is the combination of humor and empathy I've developed throughout my diverse experiences. The code needs to work, but it's a pyrrhic victory if the complementary human realities of the stakeholders and team members involved are ignored. Before I program anything, I listen, ask questions, and think.

Available for part-time engagements (20-25 hrs/week) involving development, project management, or strategic planning.

https://github.com/desmondmonster
https://www.linkedin.com/in/desmondbowe
Some of the largest causes of accidents to my knowedge are all due to human error (ie drunk driving, texting while driving, speeding, blind spots, etc). This is all something that an automated system will eliminate entirely. For every one of these unsafe drivers you replace with an automated driver, you make the road safer.

(that said, I don't think it makes the car itself physically safer, that is up to the manufacturer)
You have to add 1 to either the first or the second 2 or to the sum of the two.
lol @ "they should sell hard disks with 10^15 reliability instead of 10^14!" This is the funniest outrage I've seen in a while, just because the suggested fix is so specific and (relatively) low for the huge amount discussed.

It's like saying, "It's an outrage that this drink holds only 37 ounces! For this kind of money I expect it to hold at least 38 ounces. I would pay for that."

-

My 4 downvoters are clearly a lot worse at math at I am.

Let me spell it out for you:

"Reliability of 100000000000000 is unacceptable! I need exactly 1000000000000000 of reliability (a factor 10 difference only)."

If you don't see how that is funny, the problem is with you, not me. That's a hilariously specific, and small, change.

"Man, having a 30% chance of a bit flipping if I read 4 TB is unacceptable. I should have to read like...40 TB for a 30% chance of a bit flip!"

It's particularly funny because in the face of this being unacceptable, I would expect a solution, like error correction, that adds 5-10 orders of magnitude (many bit flips have to all happen in the same sector, by coincidence, at the already low 10^14 rate), for it to make it past the error correction layer.

The other thing is that given that we're talking about ERROR RATES, I cannot possibly believe that they have it down to such a specific number as 100000000000000. It would have to be a range. You should target more than 1 order of magnitude to get something more reliable (like ECC RAM versus regular RAM). [1]

Just like the error margin on 37 ounces must be like 37-40 ounces anyway.

[1] first reference I found: http://lambda-diode.com/opinion/ecc-memory-2

"I computed that if you have 4 GiB of memory, you have 96% chance of getting a bit flip in three days because of cosmic rays. SECDED ECC would reduce that to a negligible one chance in six billion." That is, for example, a change of

1 per 34359738368 bits (rounding 96% to 100%) to 1 per 206158430208000000000 bits (multiplying by 6 billion).

34359738368 bits is 10^10.

206158430208000000000 is 10^20.

That's the kind of change (give or take) that I was expecting parent to suggest - not one order of magnitude!
Because it's not as funny, and because this functions as an alert to tell everyone when you lose awareness of how far you're filling it.
You asked if something was wrong with your post. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but IMHO it's vertically longer than it needs to be. I suggest reducing the number of links at the bottom (the one at the top is good) and using commas instead of lines to separate items in your lists.
The Microsoft Puerto Rico tax dodge really irked me- by moving the build servers there the software becomes 'produced' in Puerto Rico? As if software R&D didn't have a large enough tax loophole.
Hey, while we have you here, nicely buried at the bottom of the thread where it's safe to go off on a tangent:

What would it take to convince you to post the Hiring thread on the first weekday of every month?

A hiring thread posted on a Sunday seems like a waste to me.

Thanks for keeping up with this stuff, by the way!
Remembering Andrei Mironov, the interpreter who tried to save Russia
Yes, it's also based on communicating vessels and syphon effect.
Yes, you need to write continuously. Basically you need a transaction log. Redis unfortunately botches that part a bit (it has no performant and reliable way of persisting every change before acknowledging a "commit"), but that's roughly the idea.

However not all of your state will be persistent, so you write only the persistent parts.

For example, if you need to have an index for quick access to items based on some criteria, you don't need to store the index on disk, you can always rebuild it on startup from the rest of the data.

While there's an upper limit for the amount of data you can store this way (it has to fit in RAM), it fits very favorably in web scenarios, where you have read-heavy write-light data access patterns, and you never have to touch the disk in order to read a piece of data (guaranteed).
driverless cars are such a dopey idea... money would be best spent to improve public transportation.
I feel your pain buddy.

A lot of good advice given so far.

Perhaps I can add another perspective to it.

Relocate to where demand outstrips supply by a big amount. Relocation is tough, but if you pick the right spot, you will get a job by applying some of those networking principles others have mentioned.

Cities/Areas I'd consider (where you will find it easier to get a job and do interesting stuff) in no particular order: Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Berlin, [insert city name here], etc.

I can't think of anymore right now, but those are great places to look at (unless you have enterprise-knowledge, in the form of C#, .NET - which changes things).

It's ironic that programmers use technology everyday to eliminate inefficiencies, yet nepotism in hiring is something even programmers face. Based on this, consider your CV dead for a little while and hustle till you find something.

Good luck!
I'd rather take mass transit than drive through traffic. But in Seattle, taking the bus will take twice as long as driving. Some sort of rail system would be vastly superior.

The tube system in London, for example, is so quick and convenient I can't see the point of having a car there.
Cars aren't going to simply disappear anytime soon. They're already entrenched, and they have been from almost the very beginning. What you're describing isn't so much an alternative as it is a wistful dream of a completely re-engineered human condition. And I say this as someone who loves to bike, has high hopes for future public transportation changes, and believes that we'll come to see many of the changes you're alluding to trickle into the world. Even then, the sort of revolution you're describing wouldn't be one that simply swaps out the car, but one that would necessitate changing everything from cities to suburbs to everything in between. Cities don't change overnight; they change over decades.

The implications of self-driving cars go well beyond simply cars "twirling the steering wheel themselves." From huge boosts in efficiency, to decreases in city congestion as people abandon the always exciting practice of circling the block for a parking space, to better traffic flow and decreases in traffic accidents to almost nil, self-driving cars are going to be revolutionary in ways that many can't even imagine.

What's more is that they won't be limited to just private vehicles. Autonomous taxis will combine door-to-door service with the Zipcar sharing model together and turn the current system on its head. The same goes for buses and even subways and trains, where the ability to run unimpeded 24/7 will make mass transit options that much more flexible and easier to expand. All of this while minimizing congestion on the roads.
Here's a pretty good talk about restricted Boltzmann machines by Geoffrey Hinton. He explains the concepts and problems very well and basically without maths:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M
SEEKING WORK - Remote, on European hours

I'm a full stack web developer with nearly a decade of experience. I generally work with Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and/or PHP, but I've used several other languages professionally and would welcome the chance to pick up something new if the project required it. I'm fully booked right now, but am available from the end of June. I generally take on one client at a time, so I'm looking for something full-time or close to it.

I spent 4 years at Last.fm developing software used by millions of people, worked at a similar scale at Sun Microsystems, have helped small teams fix their legacy codebase to escape their technical debt, and mentored developers & businesses. I particularly like small teams/startups, and like shaping the product/business direction too.

You can find out more about me at http://alexpounds.com/cv.
Electric does nothing behind the source of power generation; if you're still generating electricity on fossil fuels that's not a net gain.

Recall that the trend in the past decade in the US is that of reurbanization; youth are simply not interested in owning cars or suburban houses, and not just as a cultural statement, but because heating large homes and filling up gas tanks is becoming a proportionally larger expense as energy costs go up.

It is reasonable to assume that eventually we'll reach a plateau in that trend when renewables become competitive against all forms of fossil fuels, but reurbanization doesn't have to do so much with large cities as it does with residencies clustering around small city centers, like much of Western Europe.
IMO a superior version of Evernote.
https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/learning/xss/index....
That will be the simple average rather than the median, so it's biased by crazy oligarch prices. Here are the median house prices:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Most recent data is £315,000 for the whole of London. Outer London is £276,000. In Croydon, for instance, it's £230,000. Still pretty rubbish, but probably ok if you're earning £40k and above, especially in combination with a partner's salary.
100-120 is definitely a lot more comfortable for most situations. It's good to have a width limit, but sticking with 80 for tradition's sake can often be worse than having none at all.
Seems like this guy can't see the forest for the trees. Does he really think that this technology isn't going to get applied to mass transit? Buses are an obvious next step, but making a driverless car is the relatively easy first step.

If we don't get started on the first step, we'll never solve the second, or the third or the thirtieth.

He complains that Manhattan would be better if it was pedestrianised... really? Does he think that they're going to knock down buildings and remove the roads just so we can all have a chat in the street? And has he ever been on mass transit like trains or subways? I dunno about the rest of the world, but I can guarantee there's almost no "valuable, often spontaneous social interaction" going on in London. You sit/stand quietly, generally in some discomfort due to overcrowding or tiny seats, maybe talk to a friend (if there) but probably not. They're anything but sociable.

There's always some complaint that you can raise about any future technology project, but sometimes you just have to get it done using what you have. Those dense pedestrian friendly cities in Europe didn't get that way by design, they just couldn't be knocked down to expand the roads for cars, so they made do with narrow roads. Likewise, US car friendly cities aren't going anywhere, deal with what you've got.

On another note, he seems to be ignoring the growing trend in renewable power sources around the world. There is a big push in Europe to switch to cleaner energy sources, thus making electric cars a great idea. eg. Combine the solar panels of the Tesla charging stations with automated cars that can drive in and charge while you're at work and you've got a revolution in how we get around.

Not to mention that there are countries like France that have 75% nuclear power, thus making the electric car almost emission-free from the very start.
The main Linux raid impl (md) probably handles failures more robustly than dm-raid.
Clearly math isn't your strong suit.

An order of magnitude change is nothing minor. It would take the 32% chance and make it a 3.2% chance.

Maybe you don't know that ^ means to the power off?
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco Bay Area (remote or local)

Full-stack web developer with half a decade of experience looking for small to medium projects (approx. 20 hrs/week). Keywords: JavaScript, Node.js, Responsive web development, Backbone.js, WordPress, CoffeeScript

Specialties: Responsive web development, single page applications

I help startups build their MVP, prioritize features, iterate fast, and "ship early, ship often". I like working with graphic designers to implement their Photoshop and Illustrator mockups using responsive web development techniques to adapt their work to all devices seamlessly.

GitHub: http://github.com/cmwelsh, http://github.com/learn2d/learn2d

Resume: http://cmwelsh.com/cmwelsh-resume.pdf

Contact: chris at my username dot com
Related is the question of why newspapers arrange their text in columns. According to another stackexchange thread†, studies as far back as the 1880s indicated that the optimal width for reading prose is 3.5 to 4 inches.

Of course, code isn't prose, but I'm still a fanatic about the 80-character limit. To assist with keeping lines of code short and sweet, I will often introduce aptly-named temporary variables and let the compiler sort out what's actually to happen.

I can easily fit four 80x84 windows on my external monitor (DejaVuSansMono 13 pt).

†http://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/3553/why-do...
A truly good compiler would replace that printf by a call to putchar or pass a constant string to 'write' (gcc almost (?) does that. See http://www.ciselant.de/projects/gcc_printf/gcc_printf.html)
The trouble is that even if driverless cars are overall vastly safer, in today's litigious environment it just takes one fatal crash to derail (!) the whole concept when the car maker is sued out of existence. Whereas suing individual drivers doesn't take down the whole system.
Bullshit. The massive holes in Android security are caused by the inept app permissions system. Restricting hackers that jump through hoops to get access to their file system even more is not going to stop the thousands of apps that spam all your contacts, etc.
Thanks! Sorry for not using Google.
A bus will drive you on a fixed itinerary...
This guy just stole pi, and Zazzle helped him do it
Raid is no replacement for backups in any case!

For most people it's better to make a nightly copy to other HD. Raid is for saving downtime on HD failures, doesn't save you from accidental rm -r, word processor corrupting your thesis, GPU driver crash corrupting your filesystem, box getting owned, etc.
Asker of the question here, you are indeed spot on, Windows 95 was the first OS I used!

The train of reasoning here reminds me of another story (which I think has been on HN before): Why is a space shuttle engine 4' 8.5" wide?

http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html
I'm probably an idiot, but I don't understand how it was ever an opportunity to refuse to comply with a government order whose existence you're legally forbidden to reveal. Which opportunity are you referring to?
Reminds me of the habitat in Cowboy Bebop

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090805152551/cowboyb...
Technical Analysis Of The GnuTLS Hello Vulnerability
Doesn't a flush require that water be added fast enough to eliminate all the air from the bend? Otherwise, water will just trickle out at the same rate it trickles in.
Add to the list:

* alleviates parking issues because the car can be told to go park somewhere 1) less congested and 2) less expensive.

One of the problems in cities is the complete lack of temporary parking being consumed by all-day workers, especially those with handicap placards who are not handicapped. 95% of the time I see someone getting out of a car and hanging up the placard they are not disabled (ie, not in a wheelchair or seem to have any handicap at all).

The lack of parking around businesses is a huge problem. Around my office, where there are lots of restaurants and other businesses, most of the parking is taken all day by handicap placard using commuters. This means there are fewer parking spaces for people to park and shop. That decreases sales in the shops in this area. Bad for everyone.

Basically, I won't even shop in areas of restricted parking availability. It's not worth the 30+ minutes of hunting for parking.
Everyone wants to build an ipad these days. General computing will be harder and harder on commodity hardware.
Yeah, now I've near 120 tb of data under ZoL (ZFS on Linux, currently on master as time of writing), replicated at 5 min interval between two datacenters...

Zero corruption, zero problems.
SEEKING WORK, Atlanta GA or Remote

I run a small boutique consultancy called Polyglot Programming. We are both experienced software developers who have been in the industry for a while. Our strengths are Ruby/Rails, AngularJS, D3JS, Java, Responsive Design/Mobile Applications, Google Glass, Development, Scaling/Service Oriented Architectures, Analytics/Big Data, Rescue Projects.

We regularly speak at conferences http://www.polyglotprogramminginc.com/presentationstalks/,
and contribute to open source. You can read our blog to get an idea of what we work on and how we think. http://www.polyglotprogramminginc.com/blog/