skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends on your definition of value. Aho Sethi Ullman will teach you rather more about compilation of programming languages than 2000 sheets of paper ;-)
Privacy is not the same as anonymity.
Does a Cassandra cluster stay write-available in the event of a network partition?

If so, how does it reconcile writes when the partition heals? Last I looked, Cassandra doesn't use vector/logical clocks - doesn't that potentially cause data loss when the partition heals if you're using a simple last-write-wins based on physical timestamps for a reconciliation policy? Does Cassandra use merkle trees for anti-entropy?

From what I can tell, although Cassandra claims to be write-fault-tolerant, the dependence on physical timestamps and the lack of the self-healing properties that merkle trees provide make me nervous about data loss and inconsistency when deploying it at scale.
Body size varies more within dog breeds than between them

I have never understood what this means. "Within-group" variation can be quantified as standard deviation (among other metrics). How do you measure "between-group" variation? Sample the group means and find the standard deviation? But that's obviously meaningless.
The article talks about how they plan to use the optical sensor for programming and so that bursts of light could control or reprogram an entire swarm. Here is the key:

"Unless the swarm goes all killer-bee and turns on its creators. Just in case, I’m learning how to use a flashlight to say, “ctrl-alt-del.”"

Might be a good thing to keep in mind!
If you can dedicated an entire disk to OpenBSD the installation is amazingly simple; I highly recommend going that route.
I cringe every time I hear "violating Google's terms of service." What service? The one where they index your site at your cost so they have something to serve their users?

This is starting to sound more like the RIAA complaining about a new business model undercutting its revenue. Google is not keeping up with people or technology in this case. People have figured out how to exploit (to a great enough degree) Google's ability to tell a spam site from an authority, and their response is to declare that people are in violation.
So, you wouldn't buy a copy and yet you claim others have never read it?

My parents buy it, so I've read it fairly often at their house, but, no, I wouldn't buy it myself. So yes, I have read it on many occasions, while most of those who bash it do so without having ever read a copy.

To put the guardian and the daily mail in the same column is doing serious injustice to the guardian.

I didn't put them in the same column: as I said, the Mail is a tabloid. All I said is that both are heavily biased, which is true. Each writes with its own audience in mind: Guardian readers won't like what's written in the Mail, and vice-versa. Accusations beyond this, such as yours of "wildly inaccurate journalism", are more exaggerated and sensational than any Mail headline.
It's too bad that RDF has been tainted by the W3C's pipe -dreams and been bludgeoned with a terrible XML serialization.

EAV is by far my favorite data model.
Yeah, i got a new server recently that comes with centos 5.3. When i ssh'd into the box i saw about 15 services running. I was like wtf why does a server need gpm and avahi ??
Wolfram Research, on 9/9/2009 and almost integers (.9999)
Doloto: Javascript download optimizer
No. NoSQL gives you memcached on a disk, which sucks a lot. SQL is good.
From msdn: http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/09/04/doloto-on...

And the doloto site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/ee423534.aspx
Security from external threats is what most people tend to look at, but OpenBSD takes security of local users just as seriously. Personally I would feel very uneasy about giving other users accounts on most *nix machines, but I wouldn't worry much about making an account on my OpenBSD box.
5 Financial Rules for Startups
The terms you agree to when you use Google properties. I don't like it as much as the next guy; but in the environment they are in (capitalism, public company etc..) they have to do what they can to protect their ranking method.

Were they supposed to foresee people buying links back in 2003/2004?

You have to have new policy or terms for new use cases.

*the article feels like a bit of a 'hit job' on conductor / I would like to offer up that things might be at least a little different than they seem from one side/point of view.
It would also never hurt most users at all, as the standard configuration (no file) is the same for both.
This is all well and good, but to get that kind of quality out of film you have to shell out for a drum scan or a professional C or R print with an enlarger.

You'll probably spend about $10 / roll for a contact sheet, and $40 / frame to get a print / scan that shows off this quality. Plus, your time, going down to a lab, dropping off, and picking up film. Then, you'll spend more $ on top of that archiving your film (and that expensive scan) perfectly for 20 years when ultra-super-drum scans are available at $2 / frame. In this fictional world, 20 years from now, if you're a pro your client no longer cares whether your image now looks better, they're done with it. If you're a stock photographer, you'll have to forgo the $0.001 iStockphoto is now paying out for full rights, and if you're an amateur your old photos are good enough.

Worse is better, digital is better at the things almost everyone (including 99.9% of pros) care about.
I would love to look for "DEFROST", but I'm not given the choice.

In my car I know the location. In a new car, you try it out. In no case does the icon help very much.

Try figuring out the difference between the icon for the front vs. the rear defrost.
I use a desktop feed reader and I don't see this as being useful.

If I am worried that nothing has come in for 5 minutes I can always hit refresh.
> Does a Cassandra cluster stay write-available in the event of a network partition?

The client can specify whether it wants consistency (refuse writes if not enough write targets are there) or availability.

If it chooses availability, then Cassandra sends extra copies to nodes it _can_ reach, with a tag that specifies who the "real" destination is. When that node is reachable again it will be forwarded. ("Hinted handoff.")

> how does it reconcile writes when the partition heals?

As you said, last-write-wins. The experience with Dynamo showed that most apps don't want to deal with explicit conflict resolution, and don't need it. (But, I suspect we will end up adding it as an option for those apps that do. In the meantime, if Cassandra isn't a good fit, we're not trying to hard-sell anyone. :)

> Does Cassandra use merkle trees for anti-entropy?

Not yet, but my co-worker Stu Hood is working on this. Should be part of the 0.5 release.

> the dependence on physical timestamps and the lack of the self-healing properties

Whether the first is an issue is app-specific. As to the latter, I'm excited to get the merkle tree code in, too.

In the meantime, Cassandra _does_ do read repair and hinted handoff, so in practice it's what I would call "barely adequate." :)
+1

I still had no idea what it was or why I'd want it after the first paragraph. If you have to end the first paragraph with "keep reading", you should rewrite the first paragraph.

Ideally, someone says, "OMFG I want this!" after reading the headline. If I'm two paragraphs in and wondering why I'm investing my attention here... that's bad!
I agree.

It started with the whole nofollow issue.

To be fair, the post misquotes Matt Cuts. He didn't say terms of service. He said:"paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google's quality guidelines"
Transforming vs overcoming is NOT just a game of words. When you overcome fear you do something despite your fear. Transformation can make you do something because of your fear.

In this case the act of having told people the course he was on transformed his fear from being a barrier pushing for giving up right away to a motivation to work hard and succeed. Instead of being something that saps motivation, it provides more motivation. And this switch tends to be quite rapid.

For a contrasting case of overcoming fear, a firefighter rushing into a burning building has to overcome fear of the danger from the fire. Even after the firefighter is in the building the fear still pushes for leaving the building. The lessons of experience may help with managing the fear rationally, but the fear will always push the firefighter to leave.
Oh, I think we're using the word "hard" in two different ways. I'm sure it would be very hard for me (or anyone else) to do, I'm just saying that it would be many orders of magnitude easier than building a true AI. Furthermore I don't think that one would be much of a step on the way to the other, since I really suspect that building a true AI is best done via either:

a) Reverse-engineering a human brain at the neural level, or
b) Some kind of evolution

whereas I'm reasonably sure that the Loebner Prize could, given enough money, brains and time, be won by a large bag of special-case tricks based on careful observation of how the judges tend to behave in practice.
Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?
(Read the last bit to skip the story)

I'm planning on going to grad school to study AI because I think it is very interesting. For a very long time it has just seemed natural to me that computer scientists would eventually discover a way to make computers appear as intelligent as humans. Since it wasn't done yet, I wanted to work on this problem. I had no thoughts of solving it, but perhaps help it along.

However, I recently had the scary idea that machine consciousness may not be possible. I've thought this before, however this time it really hit me and scared me some. Considering I'd like to devote much of my resources to the problem, I'm now a little concerned that it may all be a waste. I'd prefer not to waste my life on something that turns out like the phlogiston theory.

Therefore, because it may bring good discussion and for my own benefit I'm asking:

Do you think machine consciousness (or at least something that looks like it) is possible? If not on current computer architecture, which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it?

For extra credit:
Do you think the Church-Turing thesis (anything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine) indicates that machine consciousness is possible?
Why not outsource the designer and find someone who has UI down?

For many applications, design is relatively small as a portion of the project. UI, however, is ongoing.
I wouldn't quite call it grotesque but it does not quite seem like it was "Designed by Apple of California". It has a bizarrely excessive 3D look that reminds me of the default Firefox OSX theme, much less subtle than previous versions. It's also has more of a plastic look than a metal look.

Other items of note (if you care about these things):

* They fixed the "zoom" button (no longer toggles the mini player, which always irked me as being wildly inconsistent)

* They now use a white background instead of a black in many places.

It's more Macbook and less Macbook Pro.
If you're having to debug something carefully with malloc, the readability of a list of single-letter flags is probably not a big deal. (I'm not sure why the symlink filename is used, though.)

The code is in /usr/src/lib/libc/stdlib/malloc.c . I didn't know OpenBSD's malloc was under the "beer-ware license". :)
While I mostly agree with you, Google could easily say: "Fine, then we won't include you in our index". Such an action would easily cripple thousands upon thousands of businesses. It also shows how important it is for Google to have a legit search competitor.

Danny Sullivan's comments below the Business Insider article are spot on.
Yes, this page makes more sense. Now I understand better. But I am not sure users will like anonymity. The whole idea of microblogging appears to be that it is ephemeral. Who would bother to delete a post. And paying for this type of service appears to be self-defeating. Good luck.
Thanks for the feedback. The idea is that the charge is small enough to not matter for legitimate transactions, but would matter for people who are wishing to bulk-broadcast.

Good tweaks, thanks.
Make the product first, then buy the domain outright.

If I recall correctly this is what Facebook did. They started out as thefacebook.com and then made the switch once they had money/success.
What is the tell between a spam site from an authority?
Download Time Optimizer
It seems he has never heard of film grain.

Film has a definite resolution. It's not as easy to measure as digital, but it's there.

I looked at film in a microscope, and the grain looks like colored clouds, i.e. instead of square pixels, you have roundish blobs, but they are certainly there.
I worked in a film lab in college, around 2002. We had one of the first machines capable of printing digital images to photographic paper in the state, because the lab owner had a hankering for tech. The first week the machine fired up, we compared a digital file brought in from a pro studio and printed at a larger portrait size, 16x20 I think, with the same image taken with a medium format camera.
We all agreed the digital image was at least on par, if not better than, the medium format print. The digital image was sharper and every bit as colorful as the film, but the film image grain was clearly visible.

I don't know what camera was used to take it, certainly not a D1H, but I do know it was of the studio, tethered-to-a-computer type, so I want to say we were looking at about a 10 megapixel image.
You left off an odd but plausible option:

* Port iTunes to Webkit

WebKit's native plugin system is fantastic for doing this kind of stuff -- it's expressly for embedding native code as elements that are fully interactive with the rest of the document (though it's awful for implementing the average FF extension). They could use WebKit as the majority of the GUI without having to ship very much inspectable JS.
I'm actually in a university program that is focused on those two fields. It's called "Interactive Multimedia and Design".
There is a huge barrier between free and 1 cent.
"light is analog" -- Einstein is rolling over in his grave.
Forgotten memories are still in your brain
Paxos and consistent hashing on top of BerkeleyDB? This is getting old. 3-way replication levels at 12MB/s? Have they heard of replication pipelining?
Another neat book is "The Elements of Computing Systems" (http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/)

It is basically a really high level overview of a whole bunch of stuff from EE/CS, from logic gates through VM design through compilers (and sort of OSes, but not really). Each chapter is a project and build on each other (but you can actually do them in any order).

It isn't as in depth as many of these other books, but might be an easier first book.
Variables and the roles they play
Pretend I'm impatient - oh wait, I am impatient and I don't want to read all that text as I have better things to do. You just lost a conversion.. uh oh!

For real, you didn't captivate me and I am captivated by a random butterfly's. (not really, but I think you get what I mean). That's something to work on. On top of being impatient, I am also cheap and I won't pay for this. Something else to reevaluate.

Overall, good concept but it still needs some ironing.

</brutal honesty>
Facebook has 40TB on a 150-machine Cassandra cluster

So why did people stop using mainframes again?
thats easily a million dollar question; figure out how Google could flick a switch and clean their index with out noticeable false positives - I think they would hand you a check :)

* i would assume that the problem parallels with spam emails. i think webpages offer more clues to what the page is about than emails though.
Here's a cool one from 2007: http://lifehacker.com/317125/set-up-vnc-on-ubuntu-in-four-st...

Then just open firefox and type in [computer-ip]:5800
You aren't using any of Google's properties simply by being indexed by them.
Google Book Downloader
Here is an idea.

Why not make this a twitter app - seriously, integrate it with twitter and when people tweet in the particular geographical area via your app it is then attributed to that geographical area. However, much like your application, you can pay to remove a tweet attributed to that geographic area, thusly, generating revenue.
Barrier, yes. But maybe we can use that to our advantage?
Their service is sending lots of traffic to your site.

Their TOS is more of a spec than an agreement. It says that if you sell links, they may flag you as a spam site. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
My Life With a Hackintosh
There have been many threads recently about this exact theme, http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+a...
should turn up some results.

My personal take on this is that I'm really not sure.

There are some pretty clever people here that are sure it is possible, 20 years or less.

There are others (of which I'm one) that think it may be possible but either devilishly hard compared to what has been achieved to date or beyond our abilities, figure at least 20 years, probably much more, if ever.

And then there are those that think that it is impossible.

I'm an absolute nobody when it comes to stuff like this but it interests me greatly. When I was 15 or so I envisioned a world about 2 decades away where computers could be taught. We're 30 years down the line from that point and we're still programming computers more or less the same as back then.

But that does not mean that things can't change overnight, and who knows, maybe you're just the guy for the ticket and you will be the one to crack this nut.
Ken Rockwell is once again being Ken Rockwell. He is just so full of confidence and spews such large overgeneralizations that any little kernel of truth he may have started with soon disappears in a pile of bullshit.

No film is not forever, film stock goes bad too. One very good example are the dozen of famous classic movies for which no good quality print remain (i.e., many of the hitchhock films). Digital formats may change often but digital data is much easier to copy and transmit between formats which makes it much easier to protect and store without losing quality.

And film is not inherently more truthful than digital data. Film also depends on sensing and is subject to sensory errors. For example different types of color film can render the same scene very differently. Currently, digital sensores are not as accurate as film in terms of details but this may change.

One ironic thing is that one of the main reason raw formats are not "truthful" as Ken Rockwell says is actually partially Ken Rockwell's fault. See reviewers like Ken have been so obssessed with noise in digital cameras, that camera manufacturers have started to use noise reduction algorithms before the raw stage so that their images will show up better in online reviews (such as the ones that appear on Ken Rockwell's site). This of course is not good news because almost all noise reduction results in loss of detail, and a raw image should be free of noise reduction because it should be the image provided by the camera sensor as faithfully as possible. A user can always apply noise reduction later.
In general terms:

Spam: thin site, lacks original content, few pages indexed, crawled infrequently, ranks for a small selection of keywords, weak backlink profile

Authority: many pages indexed, thick site, loads of original content, crawled frequently, ranks for a variety of keywords, diversified backlink profile

Page Rank used to be a strong indicator of this, but currently a better indicator is how often your site is crawled. That's why one authority link can do worlds more for you than hundreds (or thousands) of spammy/low quality links.
(if (and (not (null suggest-key-bindings))

My C-oriented brain screams bloody murder at this. (I still want to learn Clojure.)
I print upwards of 20"x30" with my 8MP DSLR. That's significantly larger than most people ever get prints done in their home. Shooting digital also greatly reduces my packing load when travelling. I have 16GB of CF cards, taking up less space than a pack of cards. I struggle to fill 8GB in an entire week of shooting while travelling.

At a certain point "more detail" is just wasted effort. You're not going to stand right on top of a 15' tall blown up photo, counting film grain OR pixels.
I had plans to integrate with twitter, I think it's a good idea. I was worried that API limits for twitter would be reached, so came up with a way around that, but haven't released it yet...not that api limits would be an issue at the moment.
You'd be surprised. There was a story where I live about a guy who got busted on a drug charge and fled. Changed his name, got a British passport, successfully lived in the UK for six years. He was found by local authorities on Facebook. He is now in jail for 25 years.

http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/s/2055728_us_drugs_fugitive_...
Coffee mug. Man, I need to go to better trade shows.

Oh wait - I once had my photo taken at a trade booth with a mermaid. But it wasn't a real mermaid, so that probably doesn't count.
Hubble returns. Nasa: 8 new images since servicing mission in May 2009
I'm pretty sure the author does develop Mac desktop software.
Rockwell is a known troll in photography circles.

I don't shoot jpeg since I don't always trust what the how the camera is going to boil the image down and would like option of going a different direction later.

Raw just gives you a bit more latitude than jpeg and a hell of allot less hassle than film.
AI will be achieved -- over a period of decades and by brute force. At the end, I can't say whether you'll have machine consciousness or not, but you'll have something that is indistinguishable from it. And that's good enough.

What we call consciousness is probably very closely tied with having a physical body perceiving things it the outside world. So I think for a long time there will be differences between machine and man, but machines will eventually win out and become vastly superior to people. I just wouldn't count on it in your lifetime.

The really interesting question is: if we can quantify consciousness, what happens when we create something that's more aware and conscious than we are? Would we be considered sentient by a being that thinks a thousand times faster and in hundreds of thought-trains, lives for a million years, and can converse millions of ways simultaneously at bandwidths millions of times greater than speech?

We would be like insects to something like that, and it's not such a far-fetched idea or that far off.
Pandora Gets A Hole In The Head
> Safari.... not really sure why Safari is there other than to try and support Windows developers of iPhone-targeted web-apps (before there was an official iPhone API).

My impression was that they ported Safari to window after they saw how much cash Mozilla was making from the embedded search fields.

Probably doesn't hurt to also have one more way for potential Mac customers to dip their toe in the pool...
With apologies to Sigmund Freud:

Google forbids us to sell links not because it wishes to do away with linkselling, but because it wishes to monopolize it.
Lessons Learned - Again and Again
Doubt it, but then I'm not holding my breath for a personal helicopter either.
Google has no problem with link selling--Google has a problem with PageRank selling. Sell all the links you want, just use nofollow.

If someone wants to buy a link but isn't interested in only receiving the traffic it brings (and not any pagerank), they are probably up to no good anyway.
It seems prudent to note that, though I described the theory, I do not subscribe to it. As I said, it's based on a lot of assumptions that its subscribers don't like to talk about, and most of them are not well founded assumptions.
An Elevator Pitch in 5 Minutes