skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Terms such as 'kook', 'bigotry' and 'f-ing offensive' will not further the discussion in a positive way. Ad hominem will solve nothing.

Maybe citing the following will be useful:

Griefers have empirically demonstrated that websites can affect mental processes by using flashing images to trigger epileptic seizures.

Music in psychological warfare and torture is well documented.

The Amanda Todd death is sufficient to show that words have the power to kill.
Show HN: Eager
By that reckoning, 40% of the world and 99% of your ancestors never "lived" in their homes.
> So at 36 square feet, this dumpster home would end up at what... $270 per square foot?

Yes, but an actual apartment building would cost a fortune and be very difficult to build, while you can get started with dumpster-homes for a few thousand dollars (which is what a homeless person might rack up in one or two emergency room visits) and don't seem too difficult to make. The fixed costs are very different, even if the apartment building has economies of scale.
http://www.quora.com/How-has-Rene-Girard-shaped-Peter-Thiels...
It indeed is beautiful piece of "UX" design. And as someone who live in NYC for quite a while: to only thing you can count on in the NYC subway system are the directions.
OP says the system was swapping.

Once your hash table and its linked lists have been swapped to disk, each pointer dereference causes a random disk access, which are orders of magnitude slower than RAM.
> The simplest comparison is another marketplace commodity which could, for all you know, be cut and low-quality all the time, but which very likely isn't: gasoline. Gas stations which sell at a higher markup go out of business. Gas stations which sell inferior product get a bad reputation, and go out of business. The market takes care of itself, without a regulator having to intercede at any point.

In most places I've been inthe US , every individual gas pump has a seal from a local government inspector certifying -- with a date -- the inspection of the individual pump. That's just one of the most visible signs of the rather extensive regulation of gasoline sellers.

To say that that market "takes care of itself, without a regulator having to intercede at any point" is simply not a factual description of the market that actually exists.
Because it turns out cp _barely_ managed to do the job, and he was almost wrong despite googling. (It did the job, I don't know about 'nicely')

Just assuming that, oh, cp copies files, of course it can copy a few terrabytes no problem... is something that you might do, but not something someone with 20 years experience with unix would do.
Be cautious about using tar pipes with compression. I've had experiences where the tar pipe will see the tarball being sent over and truncate the inner tarball. The compression in SSH tends to be good enough. My other suggestion for SSH is to change the algorithm used; rc4, while insecure for most things, is normally good enough, if not, blowfish tends to be a bit faster than AES.
Looking at the code, it looks like deallocating a hash table requires traversing the entire table, because there is malloc()'d memory associated with each hash entry, so each entry has to be visited and free()'d. From hash_free() in coreutils hash.c:

for (bucket = table->bucket; bucket < table->bucket_limit; bucket++)
{
for (cursor = bucket->next; cursor; cursor = next)
{
next = cursor->next;
free (cursor);
}
}

Whereas if you just don't bother to deallocate the table before the process exits, the OS will reclaim the whole memory block without having to walk a giant data structure. That's a fairly common situation in C programs that do explicit memory management of complex data structures in the traditional malloc()/free() style. Giant linked lists and graph structures are another common culprit, where you have to pointer-chase all over the place to free() them if you allocated them in the traditional way (vs. packing them into an array or using a userspace custom allocator for the bookkeeping).
It's a million dollars every 4 days, even assuming a generous 4b cash balance, 4000 days, or 11 years is what they'd have lasted. It's a pretty scary fine.
It's rare to see a paper by Knuth not in TeX.
I was really disappointed with the 3D when I tried it. Yes, the eye tracking is interesting and works reasonably well, but it's not in any way paradigm-shifting. I definitely didn't feel anything like I was seeing a historically significant innovation.

Most importantly, as far as I can tell, it doesn't make any existing smartphone activities easier or faster, nor does it make possible any new category of activity. Games are neat, but who is going to make games for a platform no one is on?

I agree with the other commenter, however, that Amazon is mostly interested in gathering detailed data on how people use their phones, and even a small percentage of the market is still a lot of useful data. They may learn something interesting (those eye-tracking cameras aren't there just for the sake of the UI), in which case they will be better positioned to increase their market share if they want to.
Hello there everyone! I'm the owner of the online store referenced here and would be more than happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Is there maybe an archive website dedicated to these kind of stories?
> That's assuming that consumers place a higher value on fair-trade and conflict-free than they do on getting a cheaper product. What if fair-trade-conflict-free costs 5x what the unverified stuff does?

Obviously any social system needs to deal with the realities of externalities. Simply invoking the concept of externalities is insufficient to dismiss anti-regulation, libertarian, or anarchic positions, because the literature of those positions nearly universally [0] recognizes externalities and constructs arguments under the acceptance that externalities exist.

The first thing to recognize is that government regulatory agency is not a simple cure for externalities. There is no obvious inherent reason why a government would even be able to estimate externalities better than a market, much less enforce the internalization of those externalities.

[0] My claim of "nearly universally" is mostly anecdotal, based on my own reading of prominent literature from laissez-faire and anarcho-capitalism. I am sure there are some people who use those labels yet deny the existence of externalities, but I think in principle one should argue against the strongest version of your opponent's position.
'at one point the federal government threatened to fine the company $250,000 a day if it failed to comply with the data requests'

Weren't these requests, which Yahoo objected to, intended to stay secret, by the wishes of the government?

Consider if Yahoo refused to honor the requests, and began accruing the fines. Presumably, if they didn't pay the huge bill for their fines, what would happen?

Surely, $250k/day would rack up fast... As I see it, eventually Yahoo would rack up such a bill that they couldn't afford it, and any collection of the fee by the government would force Yahoo to close its doors. At that point, surely they'd have to reveal something to the general public about said requests, and the fines, and everything else going on behind the scenes...
I don't like this definition. Having a place to live isn't necessarily about getting all your needs met in one central place, it's about having a reasonably secure place you can always go where you won't get in legal trouble for being and storing your stuff in. It's mightily inconvenient to not have immediately-ready access to somewhere to take a dump, but I wouldn't make that a precondition for saying you 'live' somewhere.
Mining for Antibiotics, Right Under Our Noses
Are you creating something of value or simply wasting your time?
I think you have a point, but note:

> The phone recieves this stream at a rate of 3 messages per second

So note that's 180 text messages a minute maximum throughput, not thousands.

I think you raise an interesting question of if it might be faster to implement a software modem over your voice connection, but I also have no idea if that's actually feasible or not.

(will various kinds of digital audio compression or filtering get in the way? I dunno. Can android apps easily get access to the voice audio stream in the way they'd need? I dunno.) (it'd certainly be a lot harder than letting the SMS network take care of the transmission layer, at any rate). (But yeah, if internet over SMS is a cool hack, then internet over software modem over audio would be even cooler!)
"Five and six year olds cannot instantly intuit that 27+38 =..."

"... before they've ever had lessons on doing math the mechanical way, carrying the one, etc."

Really? It's not OK to teach the easier way because you don't think it's intuitive (even though it is much more intuitive), but it is OK to teach the harder way that they won't use in upper level math when it's obviously not intuitive? (put one digit at the bottom, subtract one from another, and add three digits instead of 2? wtf? why can't I just add two numbers? children don't have stubborn bias' that cause them to automatically hate everything new)

I don't know if you've noticed but adding 20 and 30 is adding. They need to know how to add? You're not trying.

You're too stubborn to pay attention to yourself and I'm not stupid enough to keep talking to a brick wall.
If you want to burn even more disks, 6+0 or 5+0 can be a nice way to cut down on the worst car senerio of losing data.
Explain That Stuff: Kevlar
In most parts of the world, POTS is 64 kbit/s, over which you can reliably run a 56 kbit/s modem. Cell phone audio uses less bandwidth, but I can imagine that you could get 8 kbit/s or more reliably, compared to the SMS data rate (7 bits/char * 160 chars/msg * 3 msg/sec = 3.4 kbit/s).
The term you're looking for is "feature phone"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
Will this run numpy etc?
Funny you mention salesforce and your startup.name.endsWith("IQ"):

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/11/salesforce-buys-big-data-st...
It sounds cool doesn't it? I haven't thought about it before this thread but it sounds pretty easy to put together.
I bought a Kindle Fire used for 65, and am contemplating buying a full price iPad next instead. The little things add up.
This is system C the memory is manually managed with malloc(). You can't simply nil the reference and expect GC to come through and clean it for you, you have to issue a free() for each malloc() that was called. While it might be possible to write a custom disposal routine that does that efficiently for the structure, the simpler way is to just use the normal functions you use for removing single items and call it against everything. Doing that will not be as efficient because those functions keep the structure in a consistent state and don't perform bulk operations, but they have already been written and tested, and in normal use cases they won't be a bottle neck.
From reading the thread, what happens is that cp before it exits tries to return all memory to the operating system by explicitly freeing it (this is not necessary on modern operating systems as far as I'm aware). What I draw from it is that since it's so big, parts of the structure of the hash table are on the disk, so it will have to swap in almost all of the table to be able to explicitly free everything.
and you think the court would not have gradually increased it?
Or jailed folks?
I'd like to see the office where he keeps the rest of his stuff, like books and other tools he needs for work, paperwork, etc...
Biological evolution isn't the only kind of evolution that can be dreamed up. "Self-arised change over time" can be applied to all sorts of domains, it would be interesting to have a mathematical definition of evolution that can handle all the things. This appears to be a step in that direction.
Or even how it scales to individuals over 6 feet tall.
> This is simply a publicity stunt.

Correct. And he doesn't hide that fact at all. He says his experiment is designed to provoke thought and raise awareness, and he even checks it out to curious people for a night at a time. I see no problem with any of it.
Once you get above about a million files on NTFS, life becomes very slow. If you use a DVCS and check out a bunch of projects with a bunch of history, you can easily get to a point where you can't do too much with the drive. This was true as of 7/2008, perhaps 8/2012 have different/better tunings.
Unlimited SMS is common in the US too: But that's not really "unlimited" like you'd want to run a service of this scale. 3 messages/second is way too small. You could only host a single client per relay that way. The right way to do this is to not involve an SMS plan, and connect to a proper SMS gateway, which won't be "unlimited" at all.
Comcastify.js: Sometimes images just load too damned fast
How does the rebuild time of ZFS's raidz compare to RAID5/6?
So it was all the files in one go, presumably with `cp -r`?

What about doing something with find/xargs/i-dunno to copy all the files, but break em into batches so you aren't asking cp to do it's bookkeeping for so many files in one process? Would that work better? Or worse in other ways?
> Teracopy

I've used FastCopy for GUI based larger transfers, it's open source and can handle larger datasets well in my experience. It also doesn't choke on >MAX_PATH paths. Haven't had problems with it. Supposedly it's the fastest tool around...

The only slight issue is that the author is Japanese so the English translations aren't perfect plus the comments in the source are in Japanese.
I was surprised to see that The Onion has quite a few (serious) open source projects. https://github.com/theonion
Why exactly is it necessary to to free each hash entry instead of exiting the process?
I went to a talk by Jeff Wilson a couple of months ago. He's testing the hypothesis that you can have a fulfilling existence and actually experience more freedom through minimal living. While even he acknowledges that a 36 sq. ft. dumpster is on the very extreme end, he hopes that the experiment and the conversation around it will help us to to find practical ways for technology and culture to progress towards being more minimal.

By the way, his talk was much more interesting/enjoyable than I'd anticipated, and you can watch it here: http://creativemornings.com/talks/prof-dumpster/1. The Q&A part was pretty interesting too, but unfortunately it looks like that didn't make it into the recording.
... and both malloc() and free() need to maintain (update) their own data structures, which in many implementations (don't know about the current glibc one) are stored interspersed with the data. Walking a hash table and calling free() on each and every item, even if it doesn't seem so, actually dirties a large number of memory pages (which could be truly randomly scattered because it is a hash table), which then need to be re-written into the swap space on swap-out.
Automating My TV with NFC and Tasker
How would such a system even work? Any abnormal process termination or bugs would mean eventually the system becomes unusable.
I have a 24TB RAIDZ3 array. Losing a disk out of that takes about 12-18 hours to rebuild.
The prompt goes to stderr, the pipe only pipes stdout, so a prompt should not cause excessive bonage, as long as you're there to respond to it.

Also, don't use -z locally, or even over a moderately fast network. The compression is not that fast and almost always makes things slower.
> There is no obvious inherent reason why a government would even be able to estimate externalities better than a market

Well, assuming effective equal democracy [1] there is, given also the assumptions on which market efficiency in transactions without externalities is based [2], since presumably interest in promoting or preventing a transaction one is not engaged in directly engaged maps to the expected utility or disutility experienced as a result of the transaction (i.e., its positive or negative externality.)

[1] which is a big assumption, to be sure.

[2] which are also big assumptions, but they are also the entire underpinning for the idea that libertarian, market-based economies are efficient for any kind of transaction, so in considering regulated vs. libertarian markets, its pretty fair to assume them in consideration on the regulated side.
A few of his answers seem brief when I wished he had time to answer in full. Selling something aside, I've always wondered why people commit to an AMA and then don't dedicate the time to over-delivering with comprehensive answers? Is it just a matter of something being better than nothing?
Love how simple and focused it is. Would be great to learn more about the process you went through and the tools you used to build it!
Something that can partially implement the function of the cerebellum.
Ask HN: Do guys who hate clothes shopping ask their female friends for help?
Because the typical use case of copying a few files does not really compare to the use case of having to copy 43 terabyte of critical data that may or may not have corruptions. It's nothing but wise to double check.
Analyzing mars rover pictures with keen.io
Is this where a new cp fork comes about called libracp?
If it's the last thing you do before you exit the process, it isn't necessary, because the OS will reclaim your process's memory in one fell swoop. I believe that's what the linked post is advocating 'cp' should do. (At least on modern systems that's true; maybe there are some exotic old systems where not freeing your data structures before exit causes permanent memory leaks?)

It's seen as good C programming practice to free() your malloc()s, though, and it makes extending programs easier if you have that functionality, since what was previously the end of program can be wrapped in a higher-level loop without leaking memory. But if you really are exiting for sure, you don't have to make the final free-memory call. It can also be faster to not do any intermediate deallocations either: just leave everything for the one big final deallocation, as a kind of poor-man's version of one-generation generational GC. Nonetheless many C programmers see it somehow as a bit unclean not to deallocate properly. Arguably it does make some kind of errors more likely if you don't, e.g. if you have cleanup that needs to be done that the OS doesn't do automatically, you now have different kinds of cleanup routines for the end-of-process vs. not-end-of-process case.
The incremental option(enabled by default) introduced in rsync 3.0 greatly reduces the need for scanning the whole directory structure.
It really depends on the load and if your raidz has 1,2, or 3 spare drives. From what I've experienced, re-slivering a the new drive in a raidz seems to happen at about 30% of the maximum ZFS throughput under medium load. And even better than many RAID5/6 implementations - it only re-slivers enough to store your data and not just the entire drive.
Seems like this is actually a feature in VxFS:

https://sort.symantec.com/public/documents/sfha/6.0/linux/pr...
http://sfdoccentral.symantec.com/sf/5.0/aix/manpages/vxfs/vx...

I wonder if any modern filesystems (xfs/ext4/btrfs/zfs) can actually enable tracking this.
5 Takeaways from the Bank of England’s Bitcoin Report
That's a 'no true Scotsman' argument. After all, if he installs a bathroom you could say: "Yes, but it has no kitchen". So he adds a kitchen and then you go: "but there is no shower" and so on. There is always going to be one reason left why living in a dumpster does not make it the equal of living in a house. The final argument will be that it isn't at least 400 square feet.

The thing that should matter most is whether or not he spends the majority of the time in it that other people would spend in their homes while not living more time in another home or equivalent.

And by that definition he's living in it right now.
Cool listing, Dave. Shared it as I think it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Quick question: Do you guys have the processes for this store well documented? IE, written instructions for how to do all of the recurring tasks like route orders, issue refunds, answers to common questions, etc?
I don't see solving a technical challenge as a waste of my time, if it's fun. If someone really feels they're wasting time just because they're not solving a user problem, they should maybe consider switching professions and start doing something that they are really passionate about.
It's not necessary per se, but many programmers do it out of good habits. It becomes much harder to e.g. find memory leaks in your code if you never free the memory you haven't leaked. And normally the extra overhead it entails is imperceptible.

Obviously many programmers do not think to (or cannot easily) test their code with 40 TBs of data.
Fluttrbox: Your personal C.I.A
Take a look at at Fluttrbox, these guys are hustling with these drones.

Using various tools, they focus on providing on demand infrastructure data collection for the places you care about at the click of a button.

It acts as a lever for agricultural planners to real estate agents; whether it be optimizing productivity to help increase opportunity for farms, or providing "near real time” pictures and videos of land, buildings and infrastructure.

Here's a link to an article they were recently featured in:

http://business.financialpost.com/2014/09/07/canadian-startups-are-using-drone-technology-to-spot-new-business-opportunities/?__lsa=ecbf-d7bc
When I was using Windows, I personally used Robocopy to make to personal backups to external drives. I was happy when MS started including it in Windows.
You are right that it doesn't guarantee it, but it does allow it. Do you see the distinction?

You could have caught yourself when you said there is no correct question. Given enough questions, some are correct. And if why isn't one of the first questions to ask about anything, if not the most important one, what would you say are some useful questions to ask?

Also, you not putting much stock in notions of everybody succeeding is a statement about you, not about everybody. You don't have to want everybody to succeed obviously, but I can't imagine you not wanting anyone to succeed either. Perhaps you are ok with only some people succeeding. Like close family and friends, for example. It doesn't have to be everyone.
As someone who struggles to distill his answers, I thought there was an eloquence and wisdom in his brevity.
Stephen Jay Gould published a lot of books about evolution. "Evolution and Extinction" is a nice light read to get started (just to pick a random book of his). "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is a more formal book where he pulls together a lot of the ideas from the other books and from his research.

He develops a lot of ideas in "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory"... basically:

* Organisms are constrained by their evolutionary history... it's "easier" for them to develop in some directions than others. For example, the vertebrate body plans is extremely ancient and there are a lot of genes that do exactly the same job in mice and men, or even in more distantly related ancestors. Embryology and the field of Evolutionary development ("evodevo") has made a lot of this more concrete recently. Similarly, there is evidence that organisms draw on their evolutionary history as a "library" of possible responses to new stimuli.

* Punctuated equilibrium: the fossil record shows millions of years of little to no change, followed by sudden mass extinctions that set the stage for another equilibrium period.

* Sexual selection: if females are looking for some feature, males evolve to have that feature, even if it has no actual use or is harmful to the species. And vice versa. The peacock's tail is the classic example.

* More controversially, Gould argues in favor of hierarchical selection, the idea that natural selection can act on groups or species as well as individuals. This is something that Dawkins vigorously denies, preferring to view the individual gene as the sole unit of evolution.