skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think everyone agrees the Backblaze (bb) has no performance - and that's fine.

But a lot of his complaints are about reliability, and thats kind of a moot point since Backblaze (and anyone sane) stores every piece of data on at least two (and ideally 3 or more) separate bbs. I would argue if you don't need performance (i.e., no huge database), but you do need a lot of space, you're better off just setting up two 'mirrored' bbs (so that when one goes down, the other takes over) than almost any 'enterprise' solution.

He does have a point about ZFS though - I'm sure at that kind of scale eventually the RAID 5/6 write-hole is going to bite you in the ass.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. If something exists, it's part of material reality, whether or not we've detected or explained it.
Node.js: Event-based I/O for V8 javascript
I am not a lawyer, nor am I deeply versed in the nuances of GPL.

That being said, I believe the intention of the Affero clause was to close the loophole in the GPL which allowed companies to keep their products closed source as they never actually provided the software to their customers .
I'm quite sure that there is a lot going on that we haven't figured out yet. Key word: "yet".

Isn't there some proof that it's impossible to fully explain a system (e.g. the universe) from within?
IANAL but your understanding is correct.
There is no reason to own your own servers. Putting them in EC2 saves you lots of money and more importantly time, and allows for scalability which would be almost impossible with physical servers. Additionally, there is no large up front cost, it requires no physical presence at a data center to manage, and there are no hardware issues to resolve, be it failed drives, UPS fiddling to keep power use evenly distributed, it goes on forever. The advice given in the parent post is, frankly, uninformed (or at the very least 5 years out of date).

For a startup, you don't want to blow a bunch of cash up front because you don't know what your requirements are going to be in the long run. It is very common to blow a bunch of cash on equipment and have it sit idle until it is obsolete, or realize later that it is not what you needed.

Finally, an NDA does basically nothing for you. 'Great ideas' are worthless, and most source code is worthless as well. It's all about execution. If you had every line of source code ever written for youtube.com you would have no advantage whatsoever, it would get you nowhere. Companies that do create code that is very valueable can often give it away for free, see danga interactive and memcached, or the reams of code facebook and google give out, and these are not open source companies.

Very, very occasionally certain very difficult problems will be solved, and that code is valuable (for example, suppose fedex developed software that routed packages with 10% greater efficiency than anyone else could achieve) but here again the code is worthless, the algorithm is what is valuable. The algorithm can be patented, so here again, the code itself is worthless to competitors. Example: Adaptive Replacement Cache

"Also, varying degrees of attention are paid to things like vulnerabilities and stability as well as standards. If your relying upon yourself to do IT, then you're automatically setting yourself up for connecting ten different computers in 15 different ways. This does not scale." -- This doesn't mean anything as far as I can tell. I honestly cannot figure out what your point was here, or if there was one beyond fitting as many words commonly used in technology discussions in a single paragraph.

If you can't figure out source control, you might as well give up now. It is a basic, entry level task in software development.

"... rules like "a server is a server" and "a desktop is not a server"." -- Yep, you've lost me. Either you are saying something super obvious, equivalent to "a door is not a window", or you are speaking the gibberish.
Anatomy of a Scientific Fraud
Hacking a New Apple
Also Apple/AT&T does basically take this approach with the iphone. Cheap phone if you sign up for service.

BTW this is more traditionally called the Razor blade (or Razor and Blade) model (cheap razor, expensive blades)

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/razor-razorblademodel.as...
Google’s plan to create a vast digital library should be given a green light
"For the most part Music is timeless."

I think music is, speaking generally, a product of its time. Most remaining music from past centuries is the small portion that was timeless. That doesn't mean that the majority of music through history was timeless.

Edited - no need to be rude
Same thing that makes a great lottery winner - luck.
> Given the reliability info he cites, the fact that backblaze is still in business must mean their usage-to-storage ratio is small.

No, it probably means that they get their reliability at a different level, such as simply storing the data on a number of machines. Systems like glusterfs make this completely transparant.
Kevin Mitnick: collected speeches and interviews
Is this a clever way to get karma?
Put together an awesome slide deck for investors.

For yourself? Put together something that's more of an execution plan, than a "business plan". Cut out the bullshit speak most think they need to write for b-plans. No one else besides your team should be the target audience. 10 pages MAX. Main focus? Customer acquisition.
Fascinating read, and its nice to see he brought up a lot of the concerns that were mentioned here. A few things that I noticed:

He mentioned that 1 Disk uses 120 MB/s, so 5 of them is 600 MB/s. He then says that converts to 6 GB/s. Now, I'm not all that familiar with speeds, but I know 1000 MB is 1 GB, so shouldn't 600 MB/s be .6 GB/s?

Other than that, he raised a number of valid points. The Backblaze system is NOT general purpose. Its designed to take a bunch of data (Backups) and hold on to it for as long as possible. In that situation you don't need high Throughput, or even all that reliable hardware. Once the drives are full, their usage will drop, and as long as the RAID can be kept up to keep the data secure, as long as costs stay down they're fine to keep replacing hardware.

One thing of note, and something I never saw in the Backblaze article: Their service promises to hold your data for 50 years. Assuming that one of their pods is filled, what is the estimated cost to keep that data over the course of 50 years? I would assume they calculated that out, and that the data showed to go with the consumer grade parts, but I would really like to see the numbers.
Functionally, it doesn't. You can get the same effect by repeatedly hitting "undo" until you have a blank screen. Then you can play it back using "redo" until you reach the end.

The big features are the nice GUI for it and the persistence of the history.

This would be like saving each "undo-able" action with the document. Though, you could also do this by using log-style persistence, saving only the accumulated changes and playing them all back to get the final document. I assume thought that their 'bookmarks' are snapshotted complete copies of the document to limit the 'playback' required.
Ok I must be missing something. Everyone is knocking this backblaze thing because it doesnt do ZFS or because it is not a "super duper high end san replacement" or because the components are not rated for enterprise level work. It seems to me that a company whose product is personal and small business backups does not need any of those things. They have software to do mirroring. Why would they need any fast network filesystems if all data comes and goes via the internet? Will the hard drives see that much data I/O, or will they mostly just fill up and sit idling with the very occasional read for restore (i strongly suspect the later)[1].

Of course on the other hand, there are the poeple touting it as the end all be all, a solution to kill NetApp.

I guess what Im wondering is: how did so many people get the idea that this article about a specific solution to a specific problem was actually some sort of general purpose solution attacking all the big name people? What am I missing?

[1]A huge chunk of this article is about the hard drives and PSUs not being enterprise ready, but for an enterprise load, but I just don't see it. I bet a lot of these boxes run idle a large chunk of the time. I have 10 year old desktop hard drives running just fine in a file server, because it has a similar load: mostly idle most of the time.
Snarge
The idea of diagnosis by phone is pretty amazing. But how many people in third world countries have cells phones?
I've seen some nice articles in LWN, but I'm not interested in Linux news per se. I'd suggest they drop the subscription model and narrow the focus, or move on to other things.

It's not just LWN that needs to change; the big question is how do writers get paid when 'information' is free?
tortoise and the hare
IPhone MMS Coming Out on September 25
Global Warming Could Forestall Ice Age, Study Finds
Found a number on the amount of money such a scheme would require: "Although Afghanistan's overall economy is being boosted by opium profits, less than 20 percent of the $3 billion in opium profits actually goes to impoverished farmers, while more than 80 percent goes into the pockets of Afghan's opium traffickers and kingpins and their political connections."

So 600 million dollars, give or take, to replace the economic incentive.
Gmail GFails, Internet Survives Again
MMS launches September 25 for iPhone 3G and 3GS
What you're looking at is a fake blog or "flog" and the FTC in the US is starting to zero in on this type of testimonial.

http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/03/26/bullshit-acai-berry-weig...

Not to mention the lawsuit and Oprah and "Dr. Oz" have taken against diet supplement makers for using their names without permission.

The Obama Administration has also targeted flogs that used the president's name to hook people into "stimulus" check scams.

http://www.financialreflections.com/beware-of-economic-stimu...

The flogs may go away eventually, but these sort of scams all rely on one thing: the ability to hook a consumer into a regular billing agreement while making it look like they are making a one time purchase+. Ringtones, diet pills, teeth whitening, government grant searches and more rely on that to make huge profits.

+ or enough consumers learning how to spot that type of scam (i.e. reading the fine print).
Woah, you weren't exaggerating.
New album from TMBG: 'Here Comes Science'
Microsoft Rejoices: Windows XP Usage Declines
Who hasn't editorialized on whether certain code belongs in its current location? It's just a note to say that we need to revisit this later and decide if it should be refactored.
The Onion Beats Investigative Journalism On Google News
EtherPad Launches A Virtual Document Time Machine
"That's a pretty weird analysis, comparing a system that is special purpose with a general purpose one."

I think that's why he says right at the beginning:

This device is that cheap because it cuts
several corners. That's okay for them. But
for general purpose this creates problems.
I want to share my concerns just to show you,
that you can't compare this to a X4540 device.
College, all you can learn, $99/month
Here's a data point refuting your theory: I openly mock the Snuggie and I live in Maine. To me it just looks like an impractical sweatshirt.
Microsoft Wants People To Throw Windows 7 Launch Parties
The stealth launch
And I bought my macbook there! Man, I remember when the only place worth stealing from in Marlton was K-mart...
In applications? Sometimes.

The kernel is a different matter. Speaking generally, the BSDs endeavor to not commit "revisit this later" code to the kernel at all. In the idealized development approach of the BSDs, it's either done right, fully analyzed for performance impacts across the usage spectrum, long-term API maintainability, security, et al, or it's not done.
700,000 members and still 'beta'?
...coding combines several other things that I really love. There is a bit of math, a bit of writing, a bit of puzzle solving, etc...

That's what does it for me.
You got confused about the GB/s because he uses the capital "B" at some point where it should have been the smaller 'b' for bits, not bytes. So, 600 MB/s is 600*8 = 4800 Mbps.

I hope that clears it up.

Please note that this is the guys private blog, he definitely does not speak for Sun in that spot and to label the article "SUN Engineer responds" makes it seem like the response is an official one but it very clearly isn't. The text is full of other mistakes as well.
He also leaves out that you could buy 10 of these Backblaze things for the price of one Sun X4540. So with a distributed load, thats 10x the performance, 10x the reliability, etc... I'm not an expert on storage, but I'd be curious to see how that stacks up, never mind the comet-proof redundancy by placing your storage in datacenters across the world.
I ate all my business cards again. :(
Unpredictability (or randomness) does not preserve the possibility of free will. One must have control over the process. That's really the basis of why we care about free will in the first place -- control.
I think the can of worms is that Backblaze themselves compared their system to more general solutions. While they were doing that for their own purpose they weren't so explicit with that point that many people (such as GigaOM, etc) took it as a general comparison.
From the article:
"600 MByte/s, a little bit less than 6 GBit/s."

bytes vs bits.
I wish I were that creative. I am working on a project and part of the plan is contingent on ad placement on "developer audience sites." My assertion to the team was that ad blocker software will negate this. Need quick and dirty data.
thanks for the pointer...am trying to understand the usage level in the developer audience.
The Linux kernel is a fantastic resource. Any time I need to do some systems programming that I haven't done before, I check to see how it's done in the kernel.
That mirrors how I hack. I like to think in terms of the changelog message, what I want to say about the current snapshot, front and center. The fact that the snapshot is saved at that point is almost implicit.

http://akkartik.name/codelog.html
(from 2005; now I use git instead of darcs)
What a tricky spot to find yourself in. Time to get the R&D department cranking.
He did a good job explaining why one should shop around and weigh their options... Such that it works for backblaze but that doesn't mean it will work on other applications especially concerning power failure and vibrations. He did a very good job of objecting to there message professionally regarding its use for others.
Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is "difficult" and declined to comment further.
"It's the same with this storage, this hw needs the parachute in form of the software in front of the device."

Yes, software on (relatively) unreliable hardware is exactly how Google has been able to scale to such an immense scale.
My pseudo-code looks a lot like a mix of Python and Ruby. One thing I like about Python is the forced indentation, which allows skipping any closing braces or "end"s. But Ruby tends to be closer to the way I think of OOP, and is closer to English.

I've also been known to write out in mostly English sentences as comments, then fill in the code that implements that explanation.
Why leave your browser at all, in that case? I just have about half a dozen desktops, and instead of closing an application I move to a different desktop. With suspend-to-ram and/or hibernate, I never have to worry about restoring application state.
The article says they intentionally did not count the iPhone in the iPod numbers.
I love Snuggie. Their video makes me want to buy one because of it's "emotional" marketing. All of the circumstances they're showing - getting up to grab drink, chilling on the couch while watching tv etc..I can see myself doing.
10x the rack space, 10x the cooling, 10x the power ...
http://thefunded.com
Four full courses in 2 months... amazing. I wonder how many of these credits are transferable?

Edit: It appears there are currently nine courses that can be taken for transfer credit. http://www.straighterline.com/courses/
Yeah, but not everyone wants to have their commit logs full "testing sample code 2" etc. Maybe you're profiling and you're trying out different pieces of code to see which ones might be faster -- happens all the time in javascript because browser implementations of javascript aren't identical. I don't do these intermediate commits otherwise my log would be a pain to read and 95% of the commit messages would be me testing out random code samples.

Another useful case for it is when you're just putting in a bunch of debugging statements that you don't want to be committed later. I find myself doing undo/redo all the time for doing stuff like this. I think a more advanced undo/redo would definitely help out.
This is why I use Linux 2.6: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/

To summarise: Linux 2.6 scaled O(n) on almost every benchmark, and OpenBSD was called a "real stinker".
Wow, I think it says a lot that the MS publicity people have stopped even trying to make Microsoft look better in comparison to Linux but are trying to split the camp between Linux and BSD.

As far as the comparison between BSD, it is clear why most people prefer Linux, it works with more things than BSD.

I think that at least one of Theo's complaints is completely meritless -- that Linux developers are being exploited in some way. First Linux developers do their work on their own free will, nobody tricks them or forces them to do the work. Also, Linux developers are getting treated better than BSD ones, because Linux has the GPL. So IBM can use the work of Linux developers, but if IBM has to have something done in house, they cannot keep it closed, they have to submit their own code to the community just as any Linux developer would.

This of course is very different than BSD where companies like Microsoft and Apple and Sun routinely take code and use it for their own close sourced projects.
6 year old benchmarks? Here's more complete/balanced/nuanced information: http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/smp.html

This sort of thing is complicated, depending on OS, workload, application design, etc, and your mileage may always vary.
It gives undo a 'performance art' aspect. Watching PG write is valuable.
Those costs are minor compared to the hardware solutions being discussed.
People often forget that the rack space, the actual physical space, is very costly. Depending on the datacenter, the power might run you just as much too. Last company I worked at was essentially forced out for using too much power per U.
This is still saving. It just saves (onChange).
Okay, thanks everyone for the wonderful advice. I have decided to tell him in person when he comes to the office again.

I will not judge him and I will clearly tell him that he has not performed to my expectations. And no, I don't think it's going to be a surprise to him; I have given him ample ways to figure out that his ways of doing things (or not doing them) is wrong.

By the way, just to clarify, I am not from the Valley (I wish), and the place is not that small :)
I think his 'DC-3' analogy is valid - BB has a decent system if you don't mind the risks, Sun is selling peace of mind.
Dad’s Rants Become a Twitter Hit
Gluster is broken. Hadoop is pretty proven, but I haven't heard of single, non-academic Gluster deployment that worked. From personal experience I can honestly say that software cost us several customers, and caused a support nightmare for a good month before we bought a SAN instead.
You're probably experiencing the placebo effect.

If you care there's software that will let you double-blind test yourself to see what bitrate is transparent for you.

LAME above 165 should be transparent (i.e. sound the same as the source) for most people even with good equipment.
( ahhh I deleted my post before I saw the response )

From the numbers he cited I got the impression that the drives they are using would fail 3+ times more often than enterprise drives (lower MTTF + speced at low temps). The cost of replacing the drives (even if they are 1/2 the price) would make the system uneconomical.

Also: because of their case design (non-hot-swappable) the cost of human replacement is higher too.

Thus they must have a low usage rate to have a low failure rate for their system to make business sense.
It seems as foolish to declare there is no mystery at all as it does to identify with a particular belief system.
AppsAmuck iPhone Development Tutorials and Examples
I read that as "every piece of data on at least two (and ideally 3 or more) separate bbs", meaning BBS as in a bulletin board system. Wow, that caught me off guard.
Microsoft XBOX360 720p Requirement For Developers Dropped
For loops aren't as magical as "break" or "continue". They are just a particular client for iterators. C has hard-coded for loops. Python's for loops do almost anything you want or need them to do, and indeed, coming at them from a C point of view is really missing the point. Anything conforming to the iteration protocol can be used in a for loop [1], and indeed, if you're feeling evil, code in the for loop can even manipulate the iterator as it goes. Not recommended, but it would work.

"with" is a special statement, yes, but the specialness is all stuff you can access from a first-class point of view, up to and including dynamically creating a class that implements the "with" behavior you want, then using that with "with". Yes, you can't create your own arbitrary special-purpose statements the way you can in Lisp, but neither is it true that "with" is cast in stone such that you can't do anything with it. Write anything that conforms to the "with" protocol [2] and it'll work.

Also "first class" in the sense that you can program them are . (the attribute retrieval operator) and [] (usually the dict-lookup operator, but it can be rewritten to do anything you like for a given object).

Mind you, I'm not saying that Python is as flexible as Lisp, it clearly isn't. But it does not lead to understanding to say that "with" has no "first-class" aspects to it. It occupies a middle-ground between C and Lisp. Python has chosen this approach with due deliberation. You might still not like it after you understand it, but let us damn it for what it is, not for what it isn't.

[1]: http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#typeiter

[2]: http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#with-stateme...
My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality.

I completely agree with patio11's comment about the other half of the population being under-served.
Zune Is Dead, but Zune HD Is Born
Regenerating Brain Tissue
Too bad that there was no URL of StraighterLine on the first page of article. In a quick glance, it was hard to find which site/service they are talking about. Here is it for your convenience - http://StraighterLine.com