skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, so what I say in follow-up it that it IS offensive stereotyping, but it's stereotyping a subculture almost entirely confined to inner-city african-americans of the 1970s and not to any particular "race" in general (whatever that word means).

My personal impression is that most people are quite blind to these subtleties. That's what prejudice is: Seeing something like this and assuming it applies to everyone with the same skin tones whether they are a wealthy, LSE-educated Ghanaian businessman or a crack dealer raised in the inner city.

The people making the movie may or may not have such prejudices, but certainly stuff like this doesn't help. Then again, the movie probably wasn't trying to make fun of african-americans. My guess is that the movie was probably spoofing was the genre of Blaxploitation films that were popular at the time.
AT&T rolling out MMS to iPhone on September 25, tethering 'in the future'
The Surprising Physics of Pipe Organs
Rails Security and Government Adoption
Ubuntu running on a Kindle 2
A 48TB Sun X4540 is 50K (list price, sun.com) (2x6core, 32GB RAM, 4xGigE, 4U, 2 year warranty).
Going faster in the right direction is a sign you've made the right choices -- not a way to get more options for the choices you make.
More seriously, "Deliberate is the new fast."
Story of Harmonix: The creators of Guitar Hero
As an entrepreneur you never want to lose site of the mountaintop you're trying to get to, but you have to remain incredibly flexible about the path that you take to get there, which often needs to change direction.
"StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and--most importantly--fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge."

This is the opportunity for Web-based services hackers in this industry. There are huge amounts of spending devoted to "education" (currently defined mostly as school attendance), and anything that can make that massive spending more efficient has got to be good for society, and good for the early promoters of the new efficiencies.

Especially anything that reduces the expense of higher education should be appealing as student debt continues to pile up.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405297020473180...
This reads more like 'How to get lowest common denominator dates'.

If someone I write to can't be bothered to read ~700 words I'm fairly certain we aren't going to get along too well.
Written by Dan Lyons, AKA The Fake Steve Jobs www.fakesteve.net

Not that it validates/invalidates the article, but just to keep in mind.
Definitely. My wife was a early member of ravelry, and watching their success made an impression on me. Before it existed, knitters were mostly members of some vbulletin-like board whose name escapes me. I suppose that a good way to identify these underserved markets would be to look for popular vbulletin/phpbb sites aimed at some particular hobby, and try to think of ways to make something more useful for those hobbyists.

Also, you don't have to limit yourself to the female half of the population. There are lots of industries with a significant male presence that use some crap software. I can't believe how bad some of the software is that I've used working for non-technical companies.
ASM Layer 7 DoS And Brute Force Protection
The BackBlaze device is $8K for 67TB.
I guess Jim Collins wasn't a good example.
I recently introduced my wife (a crochet-addict) to Ravelry. The result? She's now a Ravelry-addict. I can hardly get on the laptop myself these days. She's taking photos, queuing up projects, checking out patterns and even going as far as entering her "stash" of wool so she can track it all.

The one problem is that there's no api so it's a walled garden... and my wife really wants a public portfolio site. If Ravelry could fulfil this need, I'd pay them money to get it off my todo list!

I often wondered about the business model but after seeing it in action, the advertising fits quite well.
I don't look forward to the rolling outages due to the fact that they underestimated the amount of MMS traffic that will occur when this goes live. I really wish their network was better.

I mean, most phones have MMS, so why is the iPhone going to change things, other than the fact that a huge chunk of people will be added.
Somehow I don't think that information could be "balanced" coming from the freebsd.org domain.
EDIT: accreditation via some partners, varying flexibility: http://www.straighterline.com/about/partners/partner-college...

Personally, I don't care too much - this is very interesting to me. I have thought about completing my education for years but been put of by the time commitment and cost. For me it's about gaining academic and self-disciplinary skills, not so much about the letters. I am bad with long-term horizons, so the ability to focus on the goal rather than the time commitment - and save money while doing so - is huge to me.

Thanks, sethg.
I'd want all of them on my team, but #4 makes the big bucks. (Looks like I'll never get rich :-)
There is a firefox addon that colors tabs according to which tabs you opened them from, which is not exactly what you want, but still useful nonetheless.
Hmmm... Well I agree with you about him taking it to far. I know monster cables are bull, but true audiophiles ($25000 and up per system) will use non-monster oxygen-free cables, and they swear by them. I will give it to them, some of those systems really sound great. I don't know if it's due to the lack of oxygen in the lines though.
Troll troll troll.
I'd also say "If it sounds corporate, change it." Leverage, solutions, circle back, ping, value add, methodologies, goal oriented, etc etc etc. I cringe every time I hear a friend say one of these.
well I think rphillips has proven his point with these replys
I've done ABX testing with cd and mp3s and I always choose cds correctly
those that can't tell the difference i suggest you stop using your ipod earbuds and get something better
I think their use case is sufficiently a-typical to get away with this.

They're primarily write-only, only when a customer retrieves their data does stuff get read.

If they spin down the drives when the volume is not being accessed the mttf for a single drive goes up a lot, possibly beyond the point where it matters.
Ask HN: What are your favorite / least favorite site layout styles?
I'm a coder, not an artist. I find myself spending too much time agonizing over how to make my sites look. I thought I'd ask folks what they preferred.

For example, what width? I've recently begun using the 960.gs grid system (960 px wide). I notice that most new sites are still using something narrower. Is 960 still considered by most to be too wide?

How about framing the content like hacker news does, vs an open format like Google does? Again, I notice that most new sites seem to be abandoning the framing, in favor of the open style, or a hybrid style, where the header is open, but there is framed content underneath.

Then there's the whole landing page business. Do you clutter up the landing page with information like 37 signals, or do you leave the landing page uncluttered, with a prominent link to the "sales page" like dropbox does?

I know this is all just personal taste, opinion, etc, but I'd be interested in yours.
And then he goes and does the comparison anyway...
How much performance do I need?
Does anyone have any links to scientific papers or other quantitative results about how fast web interfaces need to be to keep users satisfied? What is acceptable latency for a page refresh? What is acceptable for a Flash application download? I'm not sure what the correct terms to search in ACM are but I've found some material on progress bars.
to each his own, but what okcupid might be aiming at is something similar to comments-->leading to blog posts (if I strike a chord with your concise comment at HN, I would be more inclined to check your profile and follow links to say your blog etc and read more.. similarly for dating sites). this is like the trailer->movie effect which is an effect of short attention span and saves time.
A doctor and a lawyer are at a party and someone comes up to the doctor saying "I have this small problem that ..."

The doctor answers curtly, tactfully, as politely as possible, finally getting rid of them, then turns back to the lawyer and says "I hate that. Do you have the same problem with people constantly harrassing you?"

"Yes," said the lawyer. The doctor replied "What do you do?"

"I give them short, simple but accurate advice, and then the following day I send them a bill for my time charged at my usual rates."

"Fantastic!" said the doctor. "I'll try that."

The next day the doctor gets an invoice from the lawyer ...
If "doing backups" is your business, then "look how cheap our kit is!" probably isn't the best marketing strategy. A "small business" is someone's bread-and-butter, they don't care that their backup needs aren't sexy to storage geeks.
I think that's an unfair judgement of what I've found to be a very high level of professionalism FreeBSD in general, and Kris Kennaway specifically. Kris is the author of most of the work there (done as part of his work on performance improvements in FreeBSD).
True. The gist of the question is whether you personally believe anything about the nature of reality that isn't flatly deductible by science.
That may be true, but many people like to start off a little slower. If you write a lengthy essay about yourself, the other person might feel like it's too much too soon and they may feel pressured to reveal more about themselves than they're comfortable doing on first contact. It's got nothing to do with their reading ability.
Is it very ignorant to say that I don't even care? I am not very deep into OS internals. I want an open source UNIX on my computer. Currently Ubuntu does it nicely. If there was a BSD distro with a nice GUI and everything, I might use that instead. I don't really care if it is Linux or BSD under the hood.
Its not though. Both devices are 4U rack space servers. This actually sticks 67TB in one 4U rack the X4540 gets 48TB in 4U.

This is less space rackpace per TB maybe more power.

Even if you need two of these for redundancy the cost savings is significant.
Exactly.

Social exchanges aren't graded test questions. You don't need to be perfectly accurate or precise. Best to keep things high level so the conversation only goes to the level of depth in a topic that the participants are all interested in.

As a stereotypical socially stunted geek, I was late in figuring that out. And it still takes effort to practice.

E.g. Initially I had my whole 'conversation is a pathfinding problem through a social graph of interests' theory typed out in this comment. And that's far too much, too fast.
So the summary is that a longer message has a higher chance for a response, but it's more efficient to just spew out a lot of shorter messages and spam everyone.
Ask HN: Correct Abstract Verbalisation for Bachelor Thesis?
Hey guys,

English is not my mother tounge, so I need your help to write a correct version of my abstract. Please keep in mind, that the abstract should tell the reader, what was the problem, the idea for solving and the success rate of the project. If you can't find any of this, tell me. If something is written incorrectly, please correct me. If you find American and British English, please help me to find the British pronunciation (my professor was some time in GB).

The actual text:
"""
The company ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG heads a big step in its evolution. The supplier of technical solutions for selling tickets in any way wants to create a Germany wide web portal to sell tickets of regional events. To measure and increase the success of this web portal, there was created a tool in the time of this Bachelor thesis. It will concentrate on increasing the coverage and conversion-rate of web users and is called ENTREE©-marketeer.
Increasing the coverage of web users can be accomplished through Search Engine Optimization, information exchange with web-databases and -catalogues and integration in webcommunities. Conversion-rates can be increased by adjusting the design and usability to the needs of the target audience. Aiming this goal creates the need for extensive and detailed analysis of the users behaviour and therefore for a good measuring.
How the marketeer helps ticket-web to create a successful and sustainable web business will be shown in detail in the following chapters.
"""

best regards
erikb
PS: An advisor tells me, that the german version might help:
"""Das Unternehmen ticket-web GmbH & Co. KG steht vor einem großen Entwicklungsschritt. Der Anbieter technologischer Lösungen zum Ticketverkauf jeder Art möchte ein deutschlandweites Portal zum Vertrieb von Tickets regionaler Veranstalter einrichten. Um die Erfolge dieses Portals messen und steigern zu können, soll im Verlauf dieser Bachelorarbeit ein Tool zur Steigerung von Reichweite und Konvertierungsrate dieses Portals erstellt werden: der ENTREE©-marketeer.
Steigerungen der Reichweite werden vor allem durch Search Engine Optimization, Informationsaustausch mit Webdatenbanken und -katalogen und Integration in Communitys erzielt. Die Konvertierungsrate lässt sich durch Anpassungen in Design und Usability an die zielgruppenspezifischen Bedürfnisse anpassen. Um diese steigern zu können, muss das Besucherverhalten auf der eigenen Seite detailliert gemessen werden.
Wie der marketeer ticket-web dabei hilft, ein erfolgreiches und dauerhaftes Geschäft im Online Ticketverkauf aufzubauen soll in den folgenden Kapiteln erläutert werden."""
Haha! Unexpectedly needing a new cage at your DC, or an extra 50kW power, or being told you can't put anything more in your half-full racks because you've exceeded floor loading gets expensive real quick.
They explicitly said that it was a storage unit/$ comparison, not throughput, not reliability.
Well, if you want to get technical, even those two sentences are out of context posted here.

Nevertheless, my point still stands, which is: it doesn't seem like that list has a lot of substance, given it took the author merely 15 minutes to think about it and then write it down.
I agree that what the article misses is that Backblaze is spending the money on software rather than hardware, since the price difference is so huge (and the software solution is a fixed cost).

What I'm more interested in is whether the lower MTBF of the cheap drives and home-brewed chassis ends up with a higher cost per year due to higher failure rates. If a desktop drive costs $100 and fails three times a year, but a server drive costs $200 and fails once every 2, the initial cost savings is moot.
What's that in Watts/U?
Sure, there is no need to tell your life story on first contact. But at least learning about interests is nice.

You can find out commonalities (as well as incompatibilities) sooner, and then shape the relationship along those lines.
Backblaze is making a backup server. They don't need to handle power supply failures. If one goes down, you'll replace it long before someone needs their backup. They don't need to worry about disks failing while writing (zfs and battery backup). Hell they can restart from scratch any one backup that encounters disk failures. They have all the time they want to do a backup.
With 1 processor and 4G RAM.
What sorts of things do you think might be going on that we don't understand yet?
> Gluster is broken

Agreed, but I do know a few situations where it is being used, the 'stack' has been undressed to the minimum and tested to the hilt before deployment.

Still, I would not risk my company on it. I've been a big fan of their architecture from pretty much day 1, but so far they seem to be feature oriented and not stability oriented.
At first don't compare the mentioned list prices with the street prices for components.

This is why small companies, startups, and people new to the storage world hate working with storage vendors. I understand the economics, I get why they sell storage the way they do, and I like my 70% discount off list price, but it makes for a horrible user experience.

If I were a cleverer person, I'd apply an every-day low price model to "enterprise" storage.
I used to work for a large consumer photo site, and we wished we could trade speed for lower cost or lower power consumption. Forget SCSI drives, SATA disks were 10x faster than what we needed for long-tail storage. If a photo became popular, we could cache it forward. The parato-ization of the photos was probably 99.9/0.1. I'm actually surprised that drive manufacturers haven't come out with a slower disk that is cheaper, lower power, and/or more reliable. We could find a zillion places to hide latency from our users.
All validation aside, it does explain why that was one of most factually sparse articles I've ever read.

I can't imagine that Theo is going to take kindly to OS X and Solaris being cited as "two of the best operating systems in the world" in an article in which he was extensively quoted.

Theo's personality and opinions aside, I've been a fan of OpenBSD for a long time, and it really is a solid operating system.
No, he contrasts them :)
Sorry, karma is a stupid thing to be caring about.

There is a url for creating polls here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

But it's high karma caped...
I dunno, it made me consider them. Instead of "we spend $2m on storage, and someday to hope to make enough money from people like you to not go out of business", its "look we aren't charging you much, and we are promising you 50 yrs of storage, this is how we can actually do that and stay in business".
No, it's incredibly condescending and leaves no opening for further questioning. What sort of response could a non-technical person have to that question: "So uh... how's that going then?".

I can't believe that everyone here is so well versed in delivering the elevator pitch for their new iPhone Web 2.0 social scrapbooking app but can't describe what they do succinctly in a social context. Is it that hard to say "I write software for [insert type(s) of clients/employer] that [insert function of software]"? People have seen The Matrix, they know what a computer programmer is. If you say "I do computer stuff", you deserve to have them ask you to fix theirs because it's one of 3 possible ways to respond to that statement.
Let's not forget that BackBlaze started this, by making a graph that compared their prices to S3, etc. (and were also criticised for that in the previous HN thread).
Vocoso, Online Conferencing for Gamers and Techies
There's an incredible amount of books which are nothing more than a collection of known stuff. Still, the time it takes to gather all the stuff, research it and put it together in a meaningful way, is what gives the book value.

Take the "marketing bible" for instance: "Principles of Marketing" by Philip Kotler. When you read it, everything in the books seems obvious, but that doesn't stop it form being true, and being one of the best regarded marketing books.
Of course nothing is really free, there's always a cost somewhere. Maybe we the audience need to make a change and help support the writers and programmers who supply us with info and code that we like. You're not 25 (http://tomatonation.com/?p=838) anymore, right? Or maybe you are.
I'm not talking about randomness (in fact, I specifically excluded that). Anyway, it's not really meaningful to speak of a process having control over itself -- it is itself.

Free will either is defined in such a way that mind must transcend physics to have it, or it's defined in a way that is meaningful inside the laws of physics. I have nothing to say about the first definition, but given that most here would agree that minds are constrained by physics, any remaining question about free will must refer to whether we can predict the actions of an agent, and since it's obvious that we can if we have a sufficiently detailed simulation of the agent, the only definition in which "free will" is still a useful concept that meshes with our intuitive understanding of self-determination is the one I mention in my earlier comment.
Thanks for the good reply!
10x the capacity though - what's your point?
I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?
The article says, "a Red Hat coder published an essay criticizing IBM's Linux programmers". Where is this essay published? Is it online somewhere?
Editor integrated version control is what this is talking about, though.
ACK. Additionally, FLAC is perfect for future-proof archiving. MP3 is already declining (thanks to Apple) and while you will probably still be able to play MP3 files in twenty years, it will hopefully not be the format of choice. Other formats are superior to MP3 even today -- not only in sound quality, but in other areas like gapless playback and metadata capabilities as well.

But hey, Jonny is still one of my heroes. :)
I would think Amazon would buy it.
OpenBSD has done a lot of interesting work with networking software over the past few years, too:

OpenSSH - No explanation required

pf(4) - A fantastic stateful firewall.

CARP/pfsync - Zero downtime automatic router/firewall fail-over.

sasyncd - Zero-downtime failover of IPSec tunnels.

relayd - layer 3/7 pf-integrated load balancer

OpenBGPd, OpenOSPFd - Free BGP/OSPF implementations.
"Is mozilla liable due to promotion?"

Liable for what?
So if you normalize this a bit, for around 50K you can get 6 BackBlazes (6 processors, 24GB of RAM and 402TB of storage).

Obviously we're still considering apples and oranges to taking this too much further would likely be silly. But its still pretty impressive numbers.
New Math for Artificial Neurons
In traditional cell animation, they'd call the guys who painted the "differential" frames "in-betweeners", and I think (my memory is hazy) the reference cells painted by the master animators are called "index frames".
Here's a very brief set of guidelines (including citations): http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html

Excerpt:

"0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.

"1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.

"10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect."
I'm happy for this just so I don't have to get irate every time someone sends me an MMS which AT&T tells me I can view on their shitty "viewmymessages" portal... which renders everything in FLASH. (Which is not available for the iPhone.)
He started this series by saying that he thinks vinyl is "the best available method for reproducing recorded music."

I believe that anyone who thinks this has never bothered to learn how audio reproduction works in theory or in practice.

(I say this as someone who loves vinyl for many reasons... just not for its reproduction.)