skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Building the complex, scalable systems demanded by todays highly connected world with such weak guarantees is exceptionally difficult.

So is building a complex scalable system that break the laws of physics or theorems. The world is eventually consistent. Some business domains can handle that. Even some banking operations are eventually consistent. You can get to an ATM in Australia and one in US at the same time and overdraw your account. That is eventually consistency. Banks see it better that way then expect you to wait for half an hour until they can decide on a global shared consistent state of your account.

> Essentially, that engineer needs to manually do the hard work to ensure that multiple clients don’t step on each other’s toes and deal with stale data.

Sometimes that is not that hard. Sometimes business logic allows for a custom (user-based) reconciliation of conflicts. In some cases that engineer has to rely on magic unicorns that another engineer (who build the DB) put it in the product to make it beat the CAP theorem. Or the administrator needs to handle global restart of all the servers because the global cluster has become unavailable because say one node has blown up or got partitioned. That is not _always_ in all cases better than the case of eventual consistency.

> Google addressed the pain points of eventual consistency in a recent paper on its F1 database

So the answer is installing expensive GPS receiver on the roof of your data-centers and running wires down to the cluster of machines? Yeah that works better in some cases. But it is not the best answer always.

> Vendors should stop hiding behind the CAP theorem as a justification for eventual consistency.

Vendors should lie and market-speak their way out of a theorem? This has been done before with other database products. So maybe FoundationDB is choosing that path to follow...

> Dave Rosenthal is a co-founder of FoundationDB.

I don't know. As I often say, sometimes the biggest enemies of a an idea are its most ardent supporters.
Question. How are vaccines different than "over-use of antibiotics" that we always hear about?

Are the constant use vaccines creating superbugs?
If you use clang, blocks are another approach.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)

[1] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.html
I hadn't thought about the NSLocale but that sounds like something that would suit well, especially since another guy mentioned the currency at "first launch".

Tag editing is something which is in the works.

I use, as you might read, a plain text file now. But I do miss writing queries and I am looking at SQLite.

I've mentioned this a couple of times now, but where I'm from we don't have bank APIs. But I wish we did. I kind of like manually entering things though, keeps my mind on "what am I spending money on".

Anyway thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Saw your input view and that does look nice, especially the + - buttons, smooth. I might implement this actually. It has happened once or twice that I wanted to do some addition.
I actually didn't knew about PH till they picked up on my HN submission (namegrep.com), I must say that I really like their daily links, some great stuff there - for instance, how awesome is this http://theorangechef.com/? :O

I do have to agree with @willu tho, their commenting system is way too elitist. =(
Great so who do you think is reponsible? The current executive? Previous executives under whom this would still have been a problem? The IRS head? Previous heads? Managers? Congress?

Again: my exact point was that the last thing anyone involved in this inquiry is going to do is actually pass specific legislation to address the actual problem, and mandate/authorize spending to do so. Instead we'll get calls for political bloodletting, for all the effectiveness of its name.
Interestingly, one of the few databases that did better under his test was Riak, with explicit sibling handling. It is funny because it is an eventually consistent system.

http://aphyr.com/posts/285-call-me-maybe-riak

see at the end:

---
Writes completed in 80.918 seconds

2000 total
1948 acknowledged
2000 survivors
All 2000 writes succeeded. :-D
---
I like this talk http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1287-rubyconf2012-y-not-adve...
> elected officials voted in by citizens

You can play with words as much as you want, the substance here is that citizens are purposely kept uninformed, and without information there is no such thing as informed consent, a core principle of democracy regardless of the technical details.
> But in all likely-hood I can see easier laws being passed that might exclude un-vaccinated people from various venues

Duty of care, maybe? The school has a duty to protect kids from potential carriers. They know if you admit unvaccinated kids, then herd immunity is lost.

Also, maybe anti-discrimination laws would protect kids with genuine medical reasons from being excluded.
My favorite comment was the user who was so worried about the danger of drones falling on people in Yosemite that he/she would throw a rock to knock the drone out of the sky. Solid logic.
You can be allergic to certain common components, e.g. egg albumin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_allergy#Vaccine_hazard
Great work, it's always nice to see more Asm projects!

"Bare Metal" - does this mean the RPi can run blob-free?

A possible improvement I suggest is to gfx_draw_line in gfx.s - using a fixed-point algorithm could be simpler and faster: http://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/faster-than-bresenhams-...
Interesting: how little was said about AWS.
This is great and might just replace my trusty Moleskine.
"The deniers and their think-tanks would be exposed to the sun; they’d lose their thin cover of legitimacy."

Don't we have the ability to do this now by visualizing or analyzing citations? A set of "fake" think-tanks which promote bogus ideas should be identifiable as a mostly-disconnected component of a graph today. We don't need to get each think tank's explicit opinions about the others. Aaronson points out this single-purpose inquiry would encourage gaming, but analyzing a graph built for other incentives may give more "honest" results (at least for a while).

And we have, at least five years ago: http://arstechnica.com/science/2009/01/using-pagerank-to-ass... . You can follow links from there to a project called EigenFactor, academic research about shortcomings of PageRank in this application, and more.

Results of such analyses should be used as input to human thought processes and not some sort of legislative robot.
American Apparel Ousts Its Founder, Dov Charney, Over Nude Photos
Interestingly is that a check-mate for people who don't want to vaccinate? Since kids have to be in school But, I guess it forces them to home-school, move, or go to private school that don't have such a requirement?
I thought those were only available on OSX and iOS.
I am sure that is not the reason most people don't vaccinate their children. Maybe, some vaccines have alternative formulations. At least it shouldn't be hard to document and make exceptions for those few cases.
SnapUser
Vaccines are very different to antibiotics. Antibiotics are agents which kill bacteria, whereas vaccines train the body to respond to infection using its own antibodies. Vaccines do nothing once you've been infected: they're about increasing your body's immune response to an infection down the line.

Additionally, most of the diseases we vaccinate against are caused by viruses. Whilst it's possible for viruses to mutate, this isn't a huge problem because we can simply modify the vaccine to use the new strain (hence why the flu vaccine is given annually). This doesn't apply for antibiotics: we need to find a new agent, which may not exist.
Groupon. I bought a few online classes there.
You wouldn't need full blown closures. Inner procedures that can't escape their scope, like they had in Pascal are already useful but don't come with the extra memory management requirements of closures.
In the majority of states these laws apply to both public and private schools, so home-schooling would be the only option.
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement (2013)
I believe people with severe egg allergies avoid some vaccines because of the presence of egg protein - eggs are used as bioreactors to grow the vaccine.

However, it looks like that's only the influenza vaccine, and that's not how the MMR vaccine is produced.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/should-not-vacc.htm
New New Fatherhood in the Inner City
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) [pdf]
It's a long piece, so one might wonder why I found it interesting; I've excerpted some of the interesting parts at https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/Ez6Xh8Ha... - I particularly found interesting the discussion of how egalitarian tribes regard politicians & power.
I'm impressed first year students can write such clean assembly. Also that they can write both driver code and a higher level rasterizer.
AWS was 4% of Amazon's revenue for 2013. I think about 4% of the article was about AWS too... Seems appropriate.
> Be the user

I actually have a couple of more products that I made to scratch my own itches, so I definitely agree with this.
You mean you've not rifled through her bank statements!
/sarcastic

Thanks for telling me, appreciate it. I know salaries vary so much between countries and universities, previous experience and what not, but its nice to get a ballpark figure.
I don't really think surge pricing poses a conflict of interest for Uber. If I were running the company, I'd hate surge pricing. Who wants to pay 2 or 3 times the normal rate for a ride?

I would imagine that when surge pricing is in effect Uber comes away with less revenue than periods where fares are normal.
The easy response is, "What? California wants to tax something? And at a high percentage? How is this news?"

I don't get the vitriol against the flippers in this scenario. Don't they provide a valuable service? I've seen the HGTV shows that have "flippers" coming in and spending (a) $400,000 cash for a foreclosed house, and then (b) investing another $150,000 in renovating the house, bringing it up to code, and adding designer touches. How is this not a good thing for the community? This is not something that a "normal buyer" could do. Most people can't buy foreclosures - you can't get your bank to approve a loan, for example. And even if you could buy a foreclosure, you need to have lots of dry powder to handle the unexpected. This is just not what most people can do.

Seriously - I don't get why people would be against this sort of thing.
It was done almost 40 years ago [0]. It never caught on, though I'm sure there were a few people who liked it.

[0] http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41951/AI_WP_12...
"This list indicates a correlation between an investment announcement and the company being added to ProductHunt BEFORE announcing funding, but it does not describe causation."

In other words, it means nothing. It's pure speculation shrouded in what purports to be some sort of statistical analysis. Which isn't surprising given some of the previous "analyses" from the OP's company.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7473904
Jim Weirich was an excellent speaker, and this was one of his best presentations. I thought his method of building up to the purpose of combinators (not just the Y) was much better than just an explanation. He references [1] (note url change) which does something similar and is also a good read/view.

[1] - http://codon.com/programming-with-nothing
Fighting Spam – What can I do as an: Email Administrator, Domain Owner, or User?
Vancouver is a great example, but the evidence doesn't seem to back it up.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/scant-e...

I think you could argue that foreign money is driving up home prices in Vancouver, but it's certainly not the main factor raising home prices.
They're entirely different. Simply put, all a vaccine does is stimulate antibody production to improve immunity against a given disease. What you're effectively asking is if the human immune system itself is creating superbugs.

So the simple answer is "no."
Another problem is that C has strict contracts on how parameters are to be passed through, and combined with separate compilation units, this hurts compilers when they try to optimize things

Calling conventions can be a bottleneck but this is not unique to C, any other compiled language allowing separate compilation units to be linked together has the same issue. Techniques like LTCG can avoid it.

But given that C is almost always at or near the top of benchmarks both for size and speed, maybe it's not that much of a bottleneck after all.
35 Growth Hacking Tools For Marketers Who Don't Code
That said, AWS has something like 80% profit margin [1] vs almost no margin for the rest of the business :)

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/05/amazons-mountain-of-margin...
Different scientists approach the marriage problem in different ways:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/08/better-tha...
Bah. We only need three more states to have 53. One nation, indivisible...
According to CNN:

What about the other missing emails? Did six other hard drives also crash?

The House Ways and Means Committee says that this past Monday, the IRS told them that the agency also lost emails belonging to six other IRS employees whose hard drives had also crashed.

One of those six employees was particularly important: Nikole Flax, who had worked as chief of staff to the former head of the IRS. Flax was known to be involved in discussions about the tea party targeting.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/20/politics/irs-emails/
many states also have exemptions for "religious"/"personal" reasons etc.
Why did you give him 5 stars if he was pitching a MLM company to you. That is pretty terrible service.
What's the point? I think California is united as a signature identity at this point.

I'd kind of rather live and die with what we have now.
Simple/common ideas should require terse syntax. Complex/rare ideas should require verbose syntax.

Prefer "x = y + z" to "ADD y TO z GIVING x".

Prefer "[[NSThread alloc] initWithTarget:t selector:s object:o]" to "pthread_create(&p, &a, &f)".
We should acknowledge the second edge of this sword. When a company invests in its employees' networks, it not only expands its ability to recruit more people directly, it also expands its employees' ability to find new jobs.

This may still be a net win for everyone, but it's complicated. Imagine you run a company and have identified a few bad employees. Surely you should not reward them by sending them to conferences, right? But wait, maybe you should, because then not only might they spend time learning, recruiting, and doing other things that might be more productive for your company than whatever they're currently screwing up, but they might also find a new job which is both better for them and solves your problem of how to get rid of bad employees without undue liability.

So send your best, most loyal, most enthusiastic employees out into the world to meet other people and spread the word about your company. And send your worst ones too!
Nice work.

I have tried heaps of apps for this, 'cost' and 'spendee' are the ones I found to be the best so far.
Will give yours a try soon.
There's also not a market for things that are hard to explain like multilateral trade agreements.

It's much easier to shout, "It was Bush's fault!" or "But what about Benghazi?"
Not Aphyr himself, but FoundationDB did it:
http://blog.foundationdb.com/call-me-maybe-foundationdb-vs-j...
The IRS does a lot of moronic things. Keeping overpriced outdated technology is one of them. These types of improvements can and should be self paying. When you require that citizens keep records for many years, you should do the same.

Targeting organizations based on political affiliation is even worse than general incompetence.
A closure is syntactic sugar for a function plus a struct. Sometimes I think they would be a useful addition to C. But these kinds of things never turn out to be as useful as they seem at first.
Yes, until I outgrew my egg allergy, I could not take certain vaccines. I was too young to remember which ones I could not take. I suppose that I relied on herd immunity for those specific diseases.
I agree that AWS almost certainly has a great profit margin.. but that article includes no details. He says AWS has X in costs, trust me. I have no idea how he arrived at that number.
I am guessing:

Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon

http://austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artis...
Those are the ones I liked the most also! But not enough to keep me away from Xcode. Let me know what you think.
>If the client is partitioned from the majority of replicas, it's game over. At that point, the system has to give up either consistency or availability from the perspective of that client.

It sounds like the article's author simply shifted the problem from "eventually consistent" to "eventually 100% available to 100% of the clients" -- e.g. when fiber optical cable is repaired.

That can be a perfectly fine tradeoff but it would be clearer if the author spelled that out explicitly.

I believe his more notable point is that the current crop of immature databases push the logical reasoning about "eventually consistent" too far up into application layer which in turn causes unnecessary pain for developers. I think focusing on this one concept would be a better blog post because it addresses many real-world requirements of "eventual consistency".
Sure. A business should always be prepared for outside interest meaning that you should have up-to-date financials that you can give-out anytime which show the summary information and overall financial trend, have no unusual liabilities like a unpaid tax liability, systems in-place to automate business functions (so a potential acquirer can see an efficient organisation), all employees/customers on some kind-of contract, no IP issues (all B2B relationships under contract).

So any business with interest can spend a minimal time in due-diligence and see an efficient, professional organisation with no skeletons.

At the same time, the goal of business is to exit, either via a buyout, or IPO, or whatever. No one wants to own a business that is unattractive for acquisition or investment, since these businesses just fade-away over time.

So the directors need to continually look for potential strategic relationships; a) because these are obviously potential customers, and b) because they are potential acquirers who will pay top-dollar for your business. This means that they will forget any standard valuation formulas ('X' x sales, 'Y' x EBITDA, whatever) and look at their overall strategic need for what your business will bring to them. And, most importantly, you need to communicate with them on this strategic level... so you need to do your research and keep your ears open to understand their pain points, and strategic needs.

By keeping your house in order, looking at the strategic level, and trying to elicit the interest of those businesses who 'need' you, you may get yourself in the perfect situations where you have competing bids, or the interested parties start to think (with your gentle prodding, of course) of the pain if you were bought-out by their competitor, etc. These are the ideal situations. But they don't happen by themselves, hence my line: always be exiting.
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Cronyism is the main problem. How do you solve it?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

Employee referrals: may be slippery when wet
As long as the stack frame is still active, the local variables are still alive and valid. So you could pass a local function as a parameter, but you could not return it. I think jwz called these "downward funargs".

GCC supports it
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested-Functions.html
Voluntarily entering into a contractual agreement is indentured servitude?
Nope, clang can be used on BSD, Linux, and Windows as well.

http://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html
Looking at images on Google ... it just looks like a bigger iPhone with a slightly smooshed home button. Reminds me a lot of all those cheap knock-off things you can buy on random markets in places like Bosnia and Serbia (in my personal experience, I know there's many more out there) where they make it look off just enough to avoid being sued.

For example, Adibos sneakers: http://www.funfacts.com.au/images/fake-counterfeit-adidas-sh...

Not to say Samsung phones are knock-off iPhones, just that you could easily sell me one as such. Especially if I wasn't a techie. Hell, I'd be surprised if my mum could tell me I'm wrong if I said Apple released a bigger iPhone and showed her a Samsung Galaxy.
The problem is not that they are buying foreclosed homes, renovating and reselling them. The problem is that they are buying blocks of apartments, evicting elderly and low income tenants via Ellis Act to get around rent controls and then reselling them to those that can afford the higher real estate prices.

But I generally agree that these types of laws tend to backfire and hurt supply which is the main problem causes by decades of NIMBY activism.
> "He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."

I can't agree with this, and I have some experience with both sides of it.

I have worked at a company that does not provide much of anything in the way of perks (Amazon) and a company which is known for them (Google). I've NEVER felt pressured to put in more hours at Google, while at Amazon it was more or less a constant of existence.

As with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary, but I think it has little to do with the perks and more to do with broader company culture. At Amazon, the lack of perks and long hours become badges of honor that you share with your peers. Looking back on it, it feels rather toxic.
Bronze age gods know nothing about vaccinations. How can there be religious reasons to refuse vaccinations when vaccinations are a modern invention? Such exceptions in law are idiotic.
That's true in a hand-wavey sense, but it ignores that function+struct means you have to define new types, include those types everywhere your closure is used, manage the lifetime and scope of those types, etc. etc.

I would argue the opposite: these things are actually way more useful than they seem at first. The fewer things the language makes you think about, the more you can focus on what you're trying to actually do.
I think there's a cause and effect fallacy in that statement. C is a good representation of an abstract computer because alternative representations have died out. C (and very similar imperative languages) keep a strong arm pressure on CPU designers to work well with C.

I've spent some time working on VLIW architectures where C is a terrible abstract representation of the CPU's inner workings. Get anything done efficiently was awful and required huge, cumbersome, carefully structured intrinsics. Or raw assembly.

Is this is fault of VLIW? Not really. Its mostly the reality of a world that would rather run C code than use VLIW architectures. So we don't have VLIW or other CPU architectures that don't work well with C.
I'm aware of that, but do you get blocks?
I see a lot of this lately. The problem isn't the automation, it's that the benefits of that automation primarily benefits the wealthy few. We need a different economic system where those benefits are more equally spread around.

Basic Income + a (progressive?) wealth tax, for example.
Yeah, those would be nice to have in C.