skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually wish I could turn swap off safely on my work computer, because I actually have enough RAM for normal situations. Swap may eventually be an old curiosity for most people, and a "niche thing" for others... When I start swapping, it's a sign some application is leaking memory and I'd rather it didn't get any and crashed instead of freezing the machine up for ages while trashing the drive.

But as it turns out OS X behaves really badly if you try to take away its swap (last time I tried, the kernel memory usage slowly increased until it consumed almost all memory; I re-enabled flash and rebooted and it got back to normal. It's a bit annoying that we've become so dependent on a kludge to work around too little memory. (Brings me back to my Amiga days and the long, heated discussions about whether or not swap was a good idea in the first place)
The point is that costs are fixed, but revenues are not. They don't make a product and sell it once with a win. Of course you could argue that they have a business risk and all that, but at the end of the day, you'll have to work for every extra dollar you make and they don't.
I'm new on the boat about systemd debate so I'm still reading and reviewing the situation. But the more I read the more I'm getting away from systemd.

In principal everybody is on terms with the need for a new and modern init system. But yet I'm not even sold on this issue. sysvinit is still holding stance with extra tools and doing it's job cleanly. By introducing a fully reimplemented and still controversial system with many dependencies and with need for many reimplementation on our existing software we are not helping the issue but blurring the waters.

And What's the fascination about boot times?

Nowadays on desktops nobody boots. You just boot once and hibernate/suspend forever. And for servers, if you are rebooting you are doing something wrong. So pulling efforts from building controversial init systems to optimize hibernate/suspend in the kernel would be a better effort on this field.
Forex Scuttles, Tweets, Blogs and News – Scutify
Can anyone come up with a good reason to use this instead over, say, jinja2?
Nice idea but you're stuck with their saddle (which looks not great and vertically bulky) and you still need to carry another N locks to be safe. It'll sell thousands.
That file is probably going to stay at v1.11.1 forever now: http://blog.jquery.com/2014/07/03/dont-use-jquery-latest-js/

(The blog post talks about /jquery-latest.js, but I'd imagine the same goes for all the version-number-free urls.)
CDC EbolaResponse (ER) spreadsheet model for spread and impact of ebola
If only mobile devices supported some sort of wireless protocol for keyboards.

I agree that tablets and phones prioritize content consumption over content creation, but that's what most people want. As Steve Jobs said: Tablets are cars. Laptops and desktops are trucks. Trucks will still be around in the future, but most people won't use them. After all, what would they need a truck for?

Edit: Since it wasn't obvious, yes my first sentence was a joke.
I found the link above to be a bit useless as it jumps right into getting answers with evidence. Here's a better overview link: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...
Why Businesses Can’t Ignore Organic Search Engine Marketing
PostgreSQL Allocation Set internals
In practice the only time I've ever heard of something like that bite are serious firmware bugs (i.e. a counter overflow causing drives to cycle after 45 days of uptime - source: I work for a major CDN with a six figure drive count).

There are some statistical properties I recall that will make mechanical failures spread somewhat nicely, maybe someone can elaborate if they have a background in stats.
Various units. You can get an idea looking at Snapdragon graph: http://www.gadgetfreak.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/snapdra...
I've heard the turnaround for a Watson implementation is about a year. IBM is just too slow, that's why the flood of apps isn't yet materializing.
Fair enough, but what about stuff like google analytics or other legit third-party scripts, or ads god forbid? Seems like the problem of pulling third-party code may be bigger than laziness.
Year 2016: Made for iPhone, Made for iPod, Made for iPad, Really?
Aggressive caching might not be such a good idea - if someone figured out how to create a collision, he could replace all those ga.js / jquery.js / ... calls with his own scripts. The attacker doesn't even have to be "man in the middle", he just needs to get victims to his site.
How to Start a Startup by Y Combinator
When bringing up OCZ' notorious high return rate, and using that to indicate a high failure rate for SSD's, bringing up the IBM DeathStar is a very relevant counterpoint.

Larger cross-batch samples is absolutely a good idea, but the dig at SSD's applies just as much to regular harddrives.

[For those who don't know, DeathStar was a nickname given to the IBM DeskStar line of harddrives after one of the models had a problem that gave them high odds of catastrophic head crashes - so bad in fact that they'd strip most of the magnetic material off the glass platters when they crashed[1] -; out of 10 IBM DeskStar drives we had at the time, all 10 failed within a week or two of each other, under a year after we bought them. The problem was is often considered to be one of the main reasons why IBM unloaded their hard drive business to Hitachi]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:...
I guess if you need to interface between C and python ... so it's for a different purpose as far as I can see.
Great mail, but the line "...is one of the most leveraged investments you can make" makes my skin itch.
If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys...

This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page: https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis...

Edit:

No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer.

Edit2:

Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with. I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to that.
If the chance of a drive failure scared the shit out of you, it is an indication that you don't trust your recovery processes... Drive failure shouldn't be more than a minor annoyance.
The downside is of course that if you crash hard, the most valuable log entries are the ones least likely to be on-disk afterwards.
I accidentally downvoted you when attempting to pinch-zoom on my phone. I'm sorry! I didn't mean to make that mistake. I wish we had the feature to undo things like that.
How about content producer insanity and entitlement?

1) Content producers make a movie and want me to watch that movie (out of the few million other movies released so far) and expect me to play with their terms and pay whatever price they've set? Oh, how entitled are they. I'd have to live at least a few hundred years to watch everyone's movie, and I have no clue how I could afford it. The supply is greater than I could demand in a lifetime.

2) Content producers make movies but don't expect me to be able to pay for it and watch it. Via copyright threats, they also send me the very clear message that they don't want me to watch it unless I can do it on their terms. Why would anyone spend time and effort making a movie and then not wanting people to see it? Oh how insane are they.

I don't really want to disrespect authors' wishes, so if they really want to tell me to f__k off and not watch their movie, that's exactly what I do. And through that selfish, entitled and insane attitude they discourage me from even wanting to pay them when I could. I think it's their loss. I don't watch their movies.

But I can't say anyone's in the wrong for disrespecting such insanity and therefore making copies of said movies (which comes at no cost for the author).
How about installing a SIGSEGV, etc. handler to do the fsync (and perhaps even print a stacktrace)?
I'm guessing that the reason that you've been downvoted is because sometimes the simpler program isn't "right-engineered".

I was working on a project where it was pointed out that our code could be written in a simpler way. It would take up less CPU cycles and, more importantly, use half as much storage.

The optimization proposed: stop the background script that makes backups of the data.

It's absolutely true that not having that script running in the background would use less computing resources and lead to a simpler program, as well as saving nearly a terabyte of disc space. However, I don't suspect that you would ever recommend performing that simplification.
Hazelcast raises $11M in funds for further NoSQL expansion
okay, so who pays for the exchange access?? Because NYSE haven't been known to let people connect and get their data for free, ya know?
Normally I hate glib citations of Betteridge's law[0], but in this case they really ought to unequivocally state right in the headline "No, jquery.com was not compromised". Anything else seems like they're hiding something.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742893

ninja edit: qwertial aphasia
Crescent Bay- New VR Headset Prototype from Oculus VR
An Updated Mars Exploration Family Portrait
Libertarians claim far too much as "the product of their labor." Firstly, they immensely overvalue their individual contribution to a product and undervalue the contribution of all who came before them. Secondly, the finite natural resources and space (land) of the planet can NEVER be considered the product of anyone's labor, and thus can NEVER be treated as private property in any strict sense (exclusive ownership in perpetuity until sold, zero property or inheritance tax). The later point is conceded by Geolibertarians[1][2] and Georgists[3].

The notion of perpetual ownership of any finite resource is antithetical to the principles of the free-market, because it allows one to purchase an infinite amount of something (i.e. perpetual rights to a piece of land, including perpetual rent collection) for a finite sum.

If as a libertarian you cannot concede these points, we cannot have an intellectually honest discussion of what a libertarian world would be like.

-

[1] http://geolib.com/welcome.html

[2] Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7076632

[3] http://povertythinkagain.com/controversies/a-word-from-the-s...
Matthew Garrett: My free software will respect users or it will be bullshit
Google / Wolfram Alpha / Watson are great at answering broad questions.

1. "Who was the 12th president?" - Zachary Taylor
2. "What color wine is cabernet sauvignon?" - Red
3. "Is a ferret a rodent?" - The ferret is the domesticated member of the Order Carnivora, Family Mustelidae and Genus Mustela. A common misconception is that ferrets are rodents.

The real challenge is answering niche questions:

1. What size are the OEM rear wheels of a Honda S2000?
2. How can I fix MySQL error 1064?
3. How do I remove wine from a macbook?

These types of questions aren't answerable by a simple mining of Wikipedia or Encyclopedic knowledge. They represent niches within our society (S2000 owners, programmers, people who spilled wine on their macbooks). Google provides excellent links to pages that contain answers to these questions, but it cannot deduce a single answer or common response. This is why sites like Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers, StackExchange, etc. can flourish, but it's also why an NLP question and answer system is very difficult.

I've been working on a system to mine existing responses to questions - http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu - I only have a small subset of programming-related questions (~10M), but you can get an idea for what I'm trying to do by searching for "How do I remove wine from a macbook?" You'll see that there are results for removing wine the liquid and WINE the windows non-emulator.
My first 48h with Nest (and its API)
Hacker News London Meetup, Thursday 9th October
> Then you could run the raspberry pi or other system as the server itself.

Or use the router as the server too. A $50 router will have a USB port (higher quality than the RPi's) and a 500MHz MIPS cpu that is not too far behind the antiquated ARMv6 core in the Pi.

I've done a little similar work with using routers off-grid: http://kmkeen.com/chatbox/
T-h-a-t is awesome if it is true. Soon spacex will outsource satellite building to india as well :P
To be fair, nobody can say they weren't compromised. At best they can say "we did our best and couldn't find any traces of compromise".
Explaining banding in a scatterplot of Goldbach’s function
The set quota of Canadian-specific content being required to sell to Canadians seems like a good idea.
Wouldn't most storage types, including regular hdds and optical media fail this test though? I am not talking about complete data loss, but some data would be corrupted after such time.
Create links that look like pipes in JointJS
If someone could create a SHA256 collision just for that, we'd have bigger problems.
> People were gathered from the streets, from their homes and their workplaces.

Please do us all a favor, don't smoke that ever again.
The 100 "GB" OCZ Vertex LE in my laptop has 27,834 hours of power-on time. This is the only drive in the system, and it houses several always-on encrypted swap partitions. I'd be surprised if you could purchase a new one at this time, though. :P

I can get back to you in a little more than a year about the 750 "GB" Samsung 840 EVO in the lady's laptop, and 6->8 months on the Crucial M4 SSD in my gaming PC. :)
IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part of BlueMix (https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/ - the IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform. Ask me questions!
Is the Information Technology Revolution Over? (2013) [pdf]
The point is, that (hopefully) your doctor knows where his expertise ends and when to refer you to an expert. I'm not sure Watson could reliably do the same.
Rust is not more complicated than C++; you actually have to be thinking about the concepts (ownership and lifetimes) in C++ too, there's just no compiler help, so it seems like you don't.

(Well, you get some help: the compiler inserts (arbitrarily expensive) copies of your data for you.)
That's called YouTube :-/

It's not that simple. QC for a film is complex, and it has to be done because when someone watches something on Netflix they expect a minimum amount of technical quality even if the creativity is entirely absent.

I mean stuff like no messed up video frames, audio glitches, consistent volume levels and so on - it can be the worst film in the world but people still expect it play back properly and will blame Netflix if it does not, just as they would blame Netflix for an improperly encoded DVD that failed to play back.

Everything that gets uploaded by Netflix has to be passed by a broadcast engineer first, and while they are not paid massive amounts of money they are still paid and films have to be watched, QCed and cataloged in real time. No matter how crap it is, any film that's available for streaming on Netflix/Amazon has taken at least half a day of skilled labor.

It would be nice to think that if something gets as far as being pressed onto DVD it would meet minimum standards of technical quality but the reality is sadly different. You would not believe the appalling quality of the stuff that people try to sell.
I've always been curious - I understand that memory cells have their own durability, but how about the controllers that are used to transfer that data? Do they wear out too? In fact, can a CPU fail after having exobytes of data sent through it?
Weird. My opinion is that he is a fantastic teacher. I did his Stanford AI course online and it was by far the best learning experience I have had.
What are you doing when the Internet connection goes down?
Say for a reason your connection goes down. It could be a device (Router) malfunction or a problem from your provider. How do you spend your time after that, assuming that there is no way to fix the problem or find any (other) hotspot :) ?
I think the key part to take away here is that the filmmaker is the one who desperately wanted to make it. The audience wasn't desperately waiting for him to make it. Just because he pours lots of effort in it, doesn't mean that the movie has intrinsic value.

edit: typo
Woman undergoes surgery to add third breast
Conversation you will never hear in a Dr. office:

me: i have pain in my side
dr: 25%: something you ate 22%: appendicitis, 18%: kidney stone...

Conversation you will never hear in a lawyer's office:

me: am i allowed to...
lawyer: 42%: Maybe, 38%: Yes, 20%: No
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Gets Past the Big Blues
> you'll have to work for every extra dollar you make and they don't.

You don't have to work for every dollar either, just invest your money and collect dividends from your investment.
Decent quality hard disks and DLTs will probably be fine. I've had DLTs survive 100oC for over an hour inside a fire safe in a fire and some old Seagate Cheetah 10K U160 SCSI disks in an external SCSI case with a dead fan running at 80oC for a month quite happily. The latter was actually running and operational which is remarkable.

Some optical media will fail. It doesn't even have to be kept at 75oC from experience.

Flash will almost certainly fail (leakage increases with temperature). I've had dead CF cards, USB sticks, SD cards, the lot and corruption after only a couple of years stored in ideal conditions. Then there's the old Sun PROM crapfest to consider as well...

These are all anecdotes, but there is data out there to support this as well.
Reading this news, I was wondering, whether from a security POV, including jQuery from Google's CDN rather than jQuery's own would be better.

My reasoning was that Google is bigger, therefore probably has better security. They also need very similar technology for securing the AdSense includes. Finally, if someone manages to compromise Google, there might be bigger problems than hosting a malware-d jQuery (although that would be pretty big).

It's not a very convincing reason, risk-wise, IMO. I'm assuming that jQuery should be pretty on top of the security of their CDN. Also that proposed new hash/integrity attribute for the SCRIPT tag seems way more promising.
... tablets just mean less competition.

I already observed this effect with laptops. While most people enjoy tiny screens and questionable ergonomics, guys with normal workstations are 5x more productive.
I doubt it. Jinja2 is a templating language for generating web pages. CPIP is a means of understanding what the C/C++ preprocessor is up to. These are unrelated.
Awesome comment.. LOL
Go is a slower C[1] with worse syntax and oversold ideas.

Stockholm syndrom is a builtin feature that comes with it and not much else. It doesn't provide basic stuff like generics, warnings, or exceptions because the authors want to make a bold statement about how they are in the Right and their potential users are wrong.

Meanwhile system software will continues to be built in C and C++ since Go addressed some real problems with system programming but created new ones.

Go was explicitely created for the average programmer like is said in videos talks. It is a dumbed down language to address the maintenance problem through tools instead of through better craftmanship. Go isn't very successful at Google but in startups who could do technically anything and still have the same outcome.

As always with the HN hype: Do. Not. Listen.

[1]: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/go.php
Sorry, is your first statement a joke? Modern phones support Bluetooth, and here's a link to keyboards for iOS: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4112

I disagree that most people want to consume rather than produce. After all, more people are "producing" more than ever, especially with non text content like images. What is lacking is depth. As the author said in his final sentence, 140 characters and images won't really spark much discussion.

Of course authors who used a typewriter probably complained about lack of depth when you didn't have to use white out to fix mistakes.
This is only true when there isn't enough information supplied. You can't expect the doctor to figure out what the problem is just by telling the doctor you have a pain in your side, same goes for the lawyer's scenario.
The way I see it is if it takes me longer than 30 seconds to search-buy-start download of your media... Then your business failed.

Music and video games have this figured out. Movies need to catch up.
> treat all data stored on SSD's as a cache, and do regular backups, RIGHT?

You meant: all data stored anywhere, RIGHT?

The best way I've heard it put: data that is not backed up is implicitly classified as "nice to have".
Fed with enough medical knowledge, Watson would be the expert.
Right, Dustin assumes a 0.1% grant for employee #100 and a 0.01% grant for employee #1000, but

* typically at that stage those levels of equity are reserved for highly desirable hires that would otherwise be tough to get

* this discounts the effects of dilution that each new investment round (as well as IPO) brings along

I think his point was to provide a ballpark figure to illustrate the main idea - you might have more impact (and receive appropriate compensation) even when joining a late-stage company, so don't dismiss that opportunity without at least considering it.

Taxation rarely plays into such arguments, since by the time the company reaches employee #1000 it's likely to be global, and similar employees with similar compensation packages in California, Washington, Canada or Switzerland are likely to see substantially different after-tax amounts.
You don't need 100M to make a good movie. You need 100M to make a movie that is trying to hide its own inadequacies by spending an insane amount of money on special effects and well-known actors.

That is not to say that there aren't movies that are worth spending 100M to make - but the market-driven talentless big budget movies that are coming out of Hollywood? We could well do without them.

That being said, most movies that have a 100M budget earn back their money in theatres, so I'm not convinced that with a downsized copyright system (no copyright whatsoever sounds silly, considering the term covers quite a few different bases, many of which are not impeded on by person-to-person sharing) they would run into big problems.
Présentation.app: a presentation tool for beamer/pdf slides on the mac
Really? 10 years at one of these companies (AmaGooBookSoft) and you're a millionaire?
Advanced tech earplugs designed for optimal listening
Is the parent comment a sarcasm ?

If not - then it's completely incorrect description of how Netflix works. They have one month for free - so you can check for yourself how exactly it functions, before commenting.

(disclaimer: I'm a happy streaming-only Netflix user for several years, and I do not own a TV, my cable subscription is internet-only).
> My understanding is that 4 is a relatively sweet spot for allowing efficient consing/deconsing of the finger nodes.

I doubt it. For the persistent data structures I've implemented a branching factor of 32 or 64 worked best (persistent hash maps, vectors, and b+ trees). A high branching factor keeps the depth of the tree very small. Copying a block of memory a few times is cheaper than copying a little memory block a lot of times.