skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> MTBF is a factor of the number of parts in your system.
> A single machine will have substantially less risk
> of breaking down than a complex setup

A. The probability that a single component in your system fails increases as the number of components increases.

B. The probability of the entire system failing decreases as the number of components increases.

Where (B) goes wrong is if the system is designed in such a way that components are dependent on each other.

Imagine you have a system containing 4 parts, all of which have to have at least one operating component for the system to remain operational. The components are:

WS = Web Server
DB = Database Server
AS = Application Server (executing long-running tasks)
LB = Load Balancer

Each component has a different probability of failure on a given day, given here:

WS, AS = 0.001
DB = 0.002
LB = 0.000001

If you do this:

10 x WS = (0.001)^10
10 x AS = (0.001)^10
1 x DB = (0.002)^1
10 x LB = (0.000001)^2

Then the probability of failure is 0.002, because if the database fails then the system fails. To increase redundancy you need to increase the number of DB servers too. If you have two DB servers, then the probability is 0.000004, 500 times lower.

I believe that you really did experience a problem with your setup: and I'll hazard a guess that the root cause is nothing to do with the architecture of your system but everything to do with the exponential increase in SNAFUs cause by the extra complexity.

Hardware failures are rare, people failures are common.
I'm not the one who said "If you're streaming weather data into a SQL database, it could be ok to drop inserts here and there to gain throughput for the data analysis operations. SQL has no abilities to express such a thing (except in db-specific hacks)."

I can understand wanting an unlogged table for the speedup (missing the last sec of weather data won't cause huge problems and I'm more forgiving of missing data when a whole machine fails), but just to be able to randomly drop things seems scary.

Also, I thought you were joking, but you're not http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blackhole-storage-eng... bu
Per Microsoft: "App contracts and extensions" have existed since day one: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh46490...

Per Healthcare: that is a really exciting new feature and there is a LOT of potential here. But I wonder how successful it can actually be in the grand scheme of things. I.e. not everyone can have or wants an iPhone.

Edit, expanding a bit:

On the flip side, I am huge advocate for personal health records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_health_record), but no one really knows about them and no really uses them because they don't work with your doctor. I don't think Apple has even remotely come close to solving the overall problem of integration and usefulness, but maybe it will get more people interested and thinking about the concept of a personal health record.
They've optimized the living daylights out of the whole thing.

Well, I'm sure the savings free up money for other, more valuable purposes.
You can finally leave group MMS! That is awesome.
Abaco (the web browser shipped with Plan 9) already does what you're suggesting, using webfs and an HTML parsing library.

It might be possible to replace that parsing library with a version of Webkit or Gecko ported to Plan 9 in order to achieve "modern" web standards support while sticking to 9P and such for the actual network portion of web browsing.
When design of an _Operation System_ boils down to just how "truculent" and "flat" (but with "a bit of depth") it is, you know we are talking less about the Operating System and more about the GUI/Window Manager.
I don't have an iPhone, but I just can't understand why the keyboard cannot be lowercase when you're writing in lowercase. I just don't understand the motivation.
What about RAID? If I follow your logic, you're claiming that by adding more harddrives to a RAID cluster I'm increasing the risk of data loss?
Widgets, translucency, and animations...

So... OS X 10.10 is... Windows Vista with Aero Glass?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a3/Windows_Vista....
Could you explain that, please? Hacker News has a policy of preferring that articles are submitted with their original title[1] (which was manifestly NOT done here), and to me the article is a lot less interesting than its submission title promises. I am a Wikipedian, and once in a great while I see an article on Wikipedia that is actually well written enough to be worth submitting to Hacker News, a community of thoughtful discussion that prizes submissions that "gratif[y] one's intellectual curiosity."

But most submissions from Wikipedia to Hacker News, and especially the submissions that are submitted with heavily altered titles, don't gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity so much as raise all kinds of questions about incomplete research or writing in the original underlying Wikipedia article. Here, the description appears to be of a very low-energy system that occasionally halts entirely and may not really be doing anything very remarkable. It's hard to tell how the energy flows or steadiness of motion in this system compare to other electro-mechanical systems that just weren't made quite as long ago, and that weren't judged by such relaxed standards.

[1] "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Plan 9 doesn't seem to have any compelling articulated arguments for any use cases that make it worth looking at beyond mere academic interest.

If we want to look at it from a non-academic standpoint, the lack of these tools makes it unpleasant, and the lack of use cases makes it seem a waste of time to investigate.

The argument of "If you want these features, write them yourself" is not wrong, but it ain't winning any friends either.

A simple thing that the Plan 9 fans could do would be to explain what cases would justify picking it over some other *nix--that alone might be enough to get some of us busier programmers to justify sinking our (small) free time into adding stuff to it.
Congrats to Yash and the gang, great to see some GT grads doing exciting things!
what's your thoughts on chemicals like nicotine, which could be a powerful nootropic?
I am currently living in Austin tx
I am will willing to relocate for a good opportunity
I am seeking full time or contract work
Stack: java,python,javascript,sql,html,css
Resume: http://42lublog.com/Resume.pdf
Contact: sbforman@gmail.com 512-589-3550
Im looking for a place where I can start my career and the work will be challenging.
Yes, I agree. I think the current OSX UI has timeless quality and this new design feels like a fad design that will look dated in no time. Fixing finder doesn't make for exciting headlines I suppose, and that seems that's what Apple shoots for these day, trying to maintain the innovation image at all costs.
Thanks! It would be nice to see support for real languages.
I have not, but the only reason for not trying it is because of my increasing use of RAID in hardware and VMs, I wanted something that was completely agnostic to disks, which is something ZFS delivers but JFS didn't seem to when I checked.

Basically I wanted something that doesn't intertwine the concept of file-system with the concept of disks or partitions, but as space. So changes to the underlying pool of disks (or partitions, or loopback files, etc) don't mean so much painful rebuilding for me, something I spent many hundreds of hours on in the past, often at stupid o'clock in the morning. Did I mention how much I hate XFS? That's why :)
I've been an Alfred user for the last few years.

Recently, I started using my old PC with Windows XP to play a few older games. Goodness, using the Start Button again feels so clunky, slow, and inefficient. I can't imagine why so many people made such a huge uproar about the loss of the Start button in the recent Windows when typing an application name is significantly faster and more efficient.
IOS 8 TestFlight Will Finally Give Developers Beta Testing
Sherlocked again.
I suppose once you have the basic mechanism working at a few different scales it's not such a big deal to hang the battery off the center of gravity. It's true that this project was about finding good 'leg' designs and balancing mechanisms; at the same time I'll be more impressed when they present a free-standing version that be taken to an athletic track.

I think it won't be long (<5y) before someone does this with Usain Bolt or whoever else is the fastest human at the time. Shades of John Henry.
Fortran, Clojure, Haskell and Julia are not at war
Well if the site turned out well and you liked the experience of working with them, give the contractor some love! Who are they?
The original reason for that was simply because they hadn't thought of that. The ongoing nominal reason was that it was a continuing nod to skeuomorphism. But given Jobs' passing, and the otherwise massive ditching of skeuomorphism since then, I do not begin to understand myself why that's the still the case. I'll hope that iOS 8 might introduce that mode as we get closer to shipping.
You're right, app contracts have been there since ages, just not really used as much as they are on Android.

Re. Health: it can fly in the US, and if it does, then they've got the momentum to port the stuff to other mobile OSes. Health itself is such a big industry that they might not want/need to use it just as a promoter for their devices.
I was going to argue that the vastly improved Unicode support in Py3k would be reason enough to use it. And this is coming from a person who is bilingual with both languages using different, non-7bit-ascii alphabets.
WWDC on social networks
does anyone know what a bare minimum monitoring setup for a single server having nginx, postgres and rails ? I'm far too intimidated by nagios to do anything significant.
I hope the NSA will do the same and also open their datasets... maybe someone could catch someone who plans some "terroristic" actions before they happen...
Video: Node.js Asynchrony, Control-flow and Error handling with Adam Crabtree
I interpret it as using translucency to add depth instead of adhering to true flatness doesn't have gradients or shading.
Absolutely - There are some great tools out there too for showcasing the work done in online courses. Accredible (my startup) lets you build portfolio credentials designed for showcasing knowledge from online courses. There's also Pathbrite, GitHub, Dribble, etc. for less online-learning focused portfolios.
Washington DC | Remote / Local | Part-Time / Contract / Volunteer

Stack: Linux, Windows, AD/Exchange, AWS, VMWare, Netapp, Python, Shell, Networking

Used: Ruby, Objective-C, Ansible, Chef

Enjoy / Learning: R, GCE

Resume: Email for resume.

Contact: hn.incision ‘at’ gmail.com

----

I've been working in technology for going on 17 years, primarily in system administration with coding, management and writing as needed. I've held senior positions in multiple 10,000+ internal user environments where I've successfully completed several infrastructure projects in the 1M+ range. I can and have done something of everything - implement virtualization infrastructure one month, mock up a mobile app the next and write-up an Executive overview contrasting various migration paths the next.

I’m looking to for a change from the comfortable, but heavily political, glacially slow pace of consulting in the public sector. Education and machine learning are of particular interest to me and I would consider volunteer work for the right organization.

This isn't a throwaway and I'm an open book so my post history on HN wouldn't a be a terrible indicator for how I might fit.
Sounds like something that could be rolled into the intel driver at least.
The best sub-cancellation form I ever come across was designed in a way which will provoke you to either fill the feedback form or drop the plan to cancel.
It said " {{{We must have done something bad. We feel sad you are leaving. Tell us where it went wrong, we will improve to get you back. <Form Link> . You can also give us a feedback and choose to stay till we get back better."}}} It was appealing, communicative and gives and option to stay. I was tempted to give feedback and stay..
Usually the time preceding launch of nutritional products is less than a day, was my point. So, the project could have been "in development since I learnt of nootropics several years ago" and I'd be a bit more inclined to trust the parties behind it [assuming that was true] even if they'd only cemented the final form of the project in the last weekend.
From what I can see, it looks like Spotlight is becoming smarter and closer to alfred than ever. It dosen't look like the dumb file finder they seem to present it to be.
Immobilier Maroc
Ceux qui réussissent reçoivent d'autres questions du même type, jusqu'à ce qu'il n'y ait plus qu'un seul gagnant. Mme Baudier se réserve toutefois le droit de clore le jeu prématurément s'il n'y avait pas assez de participants.
Look at all the hype 0x10c got on here because the ship had a programmable computer.
Give the players some emulated low-spec hardware they can use and an API they can use it with.

Even if it doesn't appeal to everyone, it might keep the worst of the botters away from the games that don't want them.
Depends on tolerance for failure. Take a heavily trafficked area like time square, what is the probability that your 100 pictures would capture a clean pixel for a spot across the square even once, let alone enough for it to "win". Say lots of people are wearing black coats, black might accidentally "win" a few pixels here or there.
However, it works great if you just need to put up a façade.
Do you still have to style the knowledge base to match your site's design or use a layout?

We've been working on a hosted knowledge base that you drop on a page and it inherits the design you already have. Our editor supports both WYSIWYG and Markdown too. Looking to see if people are interested and get feedback. http://userdeck.com/guides
To be honest I like this type of thing and I would have impulse-bought this on the spot if it weren't for the fact that it's a pre-order, and now I just looked on amazon for a competing product and got it shipped to me prime.

I understand how in these days of crowd funding everyone wants to eliminate all risk in launching new products and I'm sure it works sometimes and when it doesn't you the product-launcher don't lose much. But these are also days of consumer impatience (at least with me). This isn't a video game or a robot or something you're making, why not just order some powder and make an initial batch before launching this? The cost of doing so can't be that big relative to the cost of getting the site up.
Ouch. Big blow to OpenGL by Metal. It's iOS hardware (A7) specific.
The money being spent of driverless cars is chump change compared to the amount that public transportation costs. It probably wouldn't even be enough to build a single light rail line.
Apple announces HomeKit, an SDK for controlling your home from your iOS device
Announcing Sysdig 0.1.83
At the very least it seems to me like the average value is roughly balanced. Anecdotally, people seem to change their eating/exercising habits more frequently than they undergo dramatic shifts in their weight.

In the long run, you can expect your net calorie balance to be zero - you'll lose or gain weight until your BMR equals your net calories. Based on that, and using [1], a 5'10", 25-year-old male weighing 150 pounds would have a BMR of ~1720. If they add 250 calories (approximately 1 snickers bar) per day, they would initially gain about 2 pounds per month and asymptotically approach their new, heavier weight (~190 pounds, >40 pounds more!). If instead they added 250 calories per day worth of exercise without compensating with more food, the opposite would happen, and they'd eventually lose 40 pounds.

It's not like you never see this sort of thing, but it seems to me like most people tend to maintain a pretty stable weight, which makes me think that on average we have some natural inertia when it comes to weight loss or gain.

1. http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/
I work in a news organization. Seating is scarce, the environment is loud and distracting, and going on vacation means you just might be moved to a new desk when you return. Fortunately as a developer my computer is off limits to most but the open office layout completely wrecks my anxiety and pushes my stress levels through the roof while my productivity plummets from distraction.
I think by availability he means uptime. Whether your site is always available, or there are times when your site is down, and how long are they.
> this extensibility stuff might be enough to tempt me back to Apple from Android, at last.

I am not sure if you are serious or not.
Really happy for you Jared! I'm a full-stack Rails dev in Boston and posted in the new "Who's Looking?" thread. Wish me luck.
Why crash the machine when you can use it? Let's say someone wanted to run a ton of background processes to make a ton of requests to some server for whatever reason.
That's what they're doing on iOS7 also.
> Insane 3-value boolean logic.

What? Not having a value is not having a value, it's not false. It's also a fairly standard concept. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThreeValuedLogic

> The fact that the result-set must be in the form of a table instead of a graph

Don't use a hammer to screw in a screw. There are graph databases (which support ACID, btw) out there for a reason.

> A fantastic invention of a bygone era that has stood the test of time... but is stubbornly resistant to real improvement and shows too many warts of its age.

I don't get this. It is improving and it's stood the test of time because it solves a problem and solves it well.

> And again, as the grandparent said, the cases where the abstraction fails and you end up having to figure out how exactly it's implementing your query. Abstraction failures make a tool worse-than-useless, because it means I have to not only understand the problem the tool is trying to solve, but I have to understand the tool and the quirks of its handling of the problem.

I don't quite get you. When a SQL query fails, it's not because you need to understand the database arch better. It's like when a C program fails, you don't need to understand GCC to fix it. You do however, need to understand how things are being used to pull the most performance out of it as possible, just like a regular language and a compiler.
Ask HN: How the heck do you reach Quora with feedback
These mothers are so closed, I can't even find anything about them or how to raise a concern, on the site. And that's what I wanted to raise a concern about.

Well played, Quora. I can see someone there knows Godel.
DigitalOcean Raises Referral Payout to $25
Apple releases Swift for iOS Dev
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s1r1fql1qx8vspm/Screenshot%202014-06-02%2011.47.03.png
Yes. A measuring cup that aids 10 million people in saving 10c is more valuable to society than a specific person becoming a nurse [who makes you sick].

Obviously if you need a nurse then 10 million measuring cups won't make you better. But if you need a measuring cup, a nurse won't really be that helpful either.

The world needs both, but generally we don't need people who have inventive ideas to shun them in favouring of doing things they are ill-suited and unmotivated to do.
San Francisco - Full Time - International Candidates Welcome!

Scribd is now a top 10 app in the eBooks category, and we've grown our installs by a factor of 10 over the last 6 months. We also recently brought our app to the Kindle Fire, and we're so far from done, it's not even funny.

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Our goal is to invent the world's best reading experience for mobile devices. To do that, we need to make an amazing reader for all kinds of written content, get offline & syncing exactly right, and build a content discovery experience that always finds you something you actually want to read. We're also working on analyzing data so we can enhance our recommendations to our readers.

As an Android Engineer at Scribd, you'll have the opportunity to learn from our small but excellent (if we do say so ourselves!) team and solve real challenges for an app that is more than just the hottest game - we truly believe that we're building a meaningful product, and that we can get people to read more by making reading easier and more beautiful on mobile devices.

Our Ideal Candidate Has:
* A CS degree or an equivalent background in software engineering prior to moving to mobile.
* At least one year of Android development experience.
* Solid understanding of Android technologies and development.

Bonus Points For:
* An impressive Android project - in the play store, open source, or something you can share with us.
* Great design & product sense.
* Experience in areas besides Android - iOS, web development, etc.
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* International candidates willing to relocate are welcome to apply!

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1500 Year Old Bible Claims Jesus Christ Was Not Crucified – Vatican In Awe
And the keyboard on Windows Phone is also really great, especially in WP8.1. So Apple needed to improve the keyboard, they were already far behind the competition.
I was really hoping for split screen multitasking (which Windows 8 on tablets does a good job of). I heard it was possible, but was having problems getting it out the door in time. I really hope it comes out in the final version of iOS 8, because that's the one thing that would tempt be to get a Surface over the next iteration of the iPad.
Why? The intends system of Android is amazing, and I use it heavily. It was absolutely a blocker for me switching to iOS.
I haven't used either but they seem pretty similar, how does atom compare to light table?
Sounds minor, but I would have loved to have been able to change the SMS screen so I could have a black background instead of a white one. Is it that hard to do?
bull pens? I assume this is the name of some office arrangement. It isn't very inspiring though.
Bitcoin-only art platform: Cointemporary
Apple introduces new programming language: Swift
I don't see how that's relevant. If it were true that driving is more energy efficient than walking, then if all you cared about was energy efficiency, you'd prefer to drive the shorter distance, assuming the result holds even when driving short distances (which it very well may). (Though the author of the article is suggesting instead that you may want to somehow increase the energy efficiency of walking by more efficiently producing food.)
Joel, this work appears to be heavily plagiarised in places. I've only had a quick browse, but it looks like you've cribbed content from UX textbooks and online sources. Some people would consider this unethical, particularly since you have something to sell on your site (your book on 'Persuasion, manipulation & brainwashing.').

The solution is simple, you need to clearly cite and link to your sources.

As well as making the source authors happy, this will be very helpful for readers who want to do further research.
Swift Parallel Scripting Language
Apple Introduces Homekit To Securely Pair iPhones With Smart Home Devices
Doesn't seem to work on Windows. Links resolve to http://localhost:3000/C:/Users/... i.e. full path to content directory.