skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Happy to fill in the gaps here. Building a data structure that is lock free, performant at concurrent reads and writes, and fast at scanning data is very challenging. Skip lists enable us to implement this in a straightforward way, but are aggressive with respect to random access. You can indeed leverage swap to extend a lock free skip list onto the disk, but the fact that a skip list links together nodes with pointers does not play very well with swap. Swap performance for random access is an extremely well known problem in Linux.

Disk-based databases reduce their dependence on random access by using data structures like B-Trees, which do a much better job (i.e. maintain good scan and seek performance) as they spill on and off the disk. These data structures, however, are not feasible to implement lock free.
The guy who created Postgres also created VoltDB, so I'd imagine that most of the Postgres community is already familiar with it from watching his talks. (Which are worth watching, fwiw.)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+stonebr...
> Yet when it comes to startups, a lot of people seem to think they're supposed to start them while they're still in college.

Is PG seriously implying he doesn't know where college students got the idea that they should be founding startups instead, after spending the last ten years telling them to?
Inside Google's Quest to Popularize Self-Driving Cars (2013)
You mean if the ISP's customers request enough traffic to take up any arbitrary percentage of the pipe?

Netflix isn't shoving their packets down anyone's throat here, the ISP's whining notwithstanding.
Do you mean forcing flushes of mmaped regions to disk via an fsync call? The kernel isn't really hiding anything from you there, but if you want to go to that level, then what about disk caches too? Do you trust consensus protocols or is replication also not durable enough?
‘The Innovators’ by Walter Isaacson: How Women Shaped Technology
Remote, Partner Engineer & Liaison (you love people and APIs!)

https://zapier.com/blog/partner-engineer-liaison/
> > which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in This statement is fairly unfounded

This is basically just speculation (and rather uncharitable speculation at that). And, plausibly, if the YC partners manage to increase the pool of applicants faster than they increase class sizes (which is plausible because the class sizes have not expanded tremendously), it would only raise the bar

> unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year

This is probably what is happening.
If it becomes powerful enough, you could be checked for whether or not you're predisposed to depression above and beyond what we currently have (family history, mostly), allowing you to take the steps needed and learn the skills necessary to cope with it.

CBT allowed me to beat my depression, but learning it while depressed was nigh on impossible. If I'd known that I suffered from depression or could in the future, I might have had the chance to learn it prior to my first episode, setting me up to be able to live with it far easier and with far less drama than I ended up going through.
You're right; by "better" I meant to imply "better for accomplishing my objective in this specific situation." So, your answer is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much for your input.
I think you make good points. I wanted to clarify how I used in-process DBs because it clearly wasn't obvious from my post.

I still rely on a "normal" database as the authoritative source of all data, and all writes go to this DB. But changes to the data are queued, workers pick up these changes, and update the in-process DB which handles 90% of read-requests (which, for most apps, is probably > 90% of their traffic).

In some ways, it's a cache. But, it doesn't do misses (it's assumed all the data is there), it's kept relatively consistent (you can normally propagate changes in < 2s), and you have access to much more than just a GET.

Also, about performance...this lets us handle read requests with less than <1ms response times vs say..50ms (or 200ms if we're talking about most ORMs). That can have a huge impact on (a) usability (especially for things sensitive to low latency (autocomplete)) and (b) cost (difference between $200/m and $10K/month). You also don't need to put ALL your data in this. Just the most frequently accessed.

Hope that clarifies a little.
I think you misunderstand what the openconnect initiative does. It both reduces costs for ISPs and speeds delivery of content to end users. The ISPs no longer have to pay for the extra upstream bandwidth and network equipment to handle that load. The amount saved through that vastly dwarfs whatever small colocation fees would be gained if they charged. If Netflix is accounting for a significant portion of the traffic on the internet, then it's accounting for a significant amount of traffic that ISPs must handle, and that's a large amount of their overhead.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix will/does pay some amount to colocate in some instances. The economics in some instances may cause the amount paid to be less than the cost of the CDN traffic.
This is the sort of advice that, imo, sounds great (especially to HN readers and PG fans) but isn't actually helpful or correct.

Learning is important but life isn't that simple--earning money is mostly leverage and negotiation, promotions are mostly politics, and so on. You can choose not to participate and "just learn" but you'll be at a disadvantage unless you are a truly exceptional learner.
A modest proposal would be to slowly depopulate Micronesia and store all our radioactive waste there (we already tested nukes there once anyway). It's either that or let the ocean reclaim the islands over the next 100 years. So we might as well get some cheap energy out of the deal.
It also did incredibly well on the Facebook Community Page...

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1562750133...
For a rural American, "moving to Norway" sounds like crazy talk. Like, is that in Africa or something? Do they have cannibals there? Do the Norwayish people have their own language? I'm struggling to figure out how to convey to you the level of lack of consciousness of Europe that is present there.

(You think I'm exaggerating, but I've had a couple of friends from the US — the urban US! — tell me they want to visit me here in Buenos Aires because they've always wanted to visit the Amazon. They didn't realize they're closer to it than I am.)

Consider this. Bane might be from, say, Nebraska. Nebraska is 7000 km from Norway, which is a country of five million people. Germany is 7000 km from Luanda, Angola, a city of five million people, and from Ningxia, China, a province of six million people. How much do you know about education policy and health care in Luanda and in Ningxia? Have you often considered moving to either of them?

Now, consider that you, as a German, are dramatically more international-minded than even an average USAmerican, let alone a rural USAmerican none of whose grandparents went to college, or probably even finished high school. So it's really unlikely that anyone in Bane's life ever suggested that he move to Norway or even Germany, at least before he got into grad school in the US.

I don't think there is much in the way of prejudice for or against Germans in the US right now. A master's degree in CS are a slight negative that you can probably overcome: academics will assume you gave up and quit a Ph.D. program halfway through, while non-academics who work in programming will think you're probably an impractical academic type. But both groups will probably pay more attention to you than to your credentials, except of course that there are academic jobs you really do need a doctorate for.

I haven't lived in the US since 2006 so I'm not up to date on your other questions.
Building the Hoover Dam
Box Said to Further Delay Its IPO
> The key here is to have a few drinks before clicking 'I Agree.' Contracts you enter into under the influence aren't valid.

Indeed. I am a lawyer, and this is legal advice.
Why do product videos with high production value always make me want to vomit
I'm a little shocked that out of 124 HN Comments (at the time of this writing), no one has linked to or referenced the study in any way.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3227547

Did I read it? No, but I read the abstract and intro. Study was about adults addicted to nicotine, alcohol, cannabis, or cocaine. 43k people total, about 12k people with a real DSM-IV diagnosis of addiction to one of these substances. Eventual remission rates for these things were over 90% (except nicotine, which was 88%).

The study is interesting, so let's start there. The results of the study surprised me, personally. I wouldn't have guessed the remission numbers were that high. I would have liked to see heroin, meth, or, far more pervasive in this day and age: prescription opiates.

It's certainly nice to see good news, and I do consider the study a kind of good news. The study obviously doesn't overstep its bounds or draw any big conclusions. I'm sure the people who actually did the study knew and experienced how damaging drugs CAN be in those 15-25 years before remission.

However, then we get to the article. The author runs the site substance.com and has published a book and several articles with a strong point of view about 12 step programs and the way young people with drug dependence are treated in today's society. I do think she's bending the study a little to her own aims, but I do appreciate her call towards sanity. It's a stretch, but I don't think she's being unfair to use this study to support her approach.

I don't think soft-selling the total life destroying danger of drug abuse is wise, and obviously it would suck if someone started taking drugs because they read an article or study like this, but it's possible.
I think the full quote is in order. [1] It's hilarious:

Major T. J. "King" Kong: Survival kit contents
check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber
automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days'
concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue
containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills,
pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills;
one miniature combination Russian phrase book
and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles;
one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of
chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics;
three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good
weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.

BTW since the movie was released shortly after the JFK assassination, "Dallas" was dubbed to "Vegas" in post-production.[2]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/trivia?tab=qt&ref_=tt_tr...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove#Kennedy_assassi...
Here also. It's awful UX/UI.
They are even hard to find in some parts of Germany. :(
I'll stick to ShareLatex.com Makes all of the pain of writing and compiling Tex go away and adds trivial simultaneous editing.
I should have clarified that the concern with a routine work schedule and availability only came about after people were consistently not meeting objectives, and dropping the ball without letting anyone know, or spending days toiling away at something without providing adequate updates so we might better manage that project and help with hurdles.

I'm definitely a subpar manager, it's a big area of weakness and it's something I'm actively working to improve upon.
Thank you very much for your feedback! I originally thought the first was more clever, but my friend and cofounder remembered this story from college and told me to write about it too.

I'd heard about that pudding guy, and thought his hack was awesome, but I never knew his name. Thanks for the link.
I am still showing segfault on a fully patched (through #20) copy of Bash 3.0

bash -c "f(){ x(){ _;};x(){ _;}<<a;}"

Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Thanks ! I did not know about iOS6's file upload capability.
"[1] Some founders listen more than others, and this tends to be a predictor of success. One of the things I remember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened."

- Looks like a case of survivor bias. How many founders who listened as intently did not build Airbnbs ?

"[4] What should you do if your true calling is gaming the system? Management consulting."

- Nailed it.
This is just speculation but I doubt only one side handles the regenerative braking. If you think about it that wouldn't really make sense.

The dual motor would come into play making it an AWD car instead of just RWD, that seems more plausible.
"NMR" machines and now called "MRI" machines...

(Not entirely sure if that's because people with serious illness are scared of the work "nuclear", or if it's because the President couldn't pronounce it...)
I'm saying that the physical limitations present in football that keep me from reaching mastery of the sport are fundamentally different from the mental limitations which prevent you from giving up as soon as something stops being fun. This doesn't seem like a very strange idea, are you seriously asking me to justify it?

Edit: Seriously, by your own admission, you've put in "some concerted effort [...] a few times", but never very much. As soon as it gets hard, or frustrating, you give up. And you're convinced that because you give up easily, it's impossible for you to do well, and that this is somehow something utterly beyond your control. That's just baffling to me.
You are assuming what I assume...

I think it's much easier to be forced into being a subservient slave if you are not allowed some time to explore and learn, in a general sense.

Granted college is far from a fireproof way–especially nowadays—of reaching any degree of "intelectual enlightenment", and of course you can get to "it" without stepping into a campus, but the time you spend not worrying about "real life" can definitely help.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi Launches Swachh Bharat(Clean India)campaign
This reminds me a lot of Prezi: http://prezi.com/_ueivw8ad8xx/prezi-demo/
How London’s Terminal Stations Got Their Names
Yeah I find that statement strange.

Not only that, but haven't the majority of the 'successful' founders in which he's invested either been in college or at least in their 20s?

Adjacent point: 99% of founders don't stick around with their companies for life like Mark Zuckerberg. That's an ideal scenario for a game-changing company. In the overwhelming majority of cases, you exit and move on.
"The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads? (...)

The less it costs to start a company, the less you need the permission of investors to do it. So a lot of people will be able to start companies now who never could have before.

The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. I'm not so excited about founders who have everything investors want except intelligence, or everything except energy. The most promising group to be liberated by the new, lower threshold are those who have everything investors want except experience." - http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

If PG has genuinely changed his mind in the face of new evidence, we should award him points for that. But he should also come out and admit it.
So, I skimmed a couple of the example "Sways we love", and I have to say, all the whizzy animations just make me think of all those horrible PowerPoint presentations anyone just learning does. I don't find the addition of flat UI to that overabundance of animations makes it any less distracting and unprofessional looking.
Recruiting Tech Talent in High School
I'm not assuming anything, I was just laying down my thesis, which is exactly that maybe we'd benefit more from education as a society if more people got some time to reflect on life as a whole before they get busy worrying about "real life".

There are definitely arguments against this thesis, mostly economic, but I think the non-maximizing side of the problem is still worth entertaining.
Bodybuilder de Roschdy Zem: un film musclé et doux à la fois
Google Project Zero: More Mac OS X and iPhone Sandbox Escapes
Yep, I wholly agree!

Which is why i say self-efficacy[1] is the other important half of the learning bit. Without it, learning is only just that: learning. If you don't have the belief, motivation or even the tenacity to act and follow through on what you learned, then all you have is just knowledge in your head.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy
Nice to hear from pg again. I love his writing. He has useful points, and says them well. HOWEVER...

There's a lot of prescribing of advice, but not too much explaining why it's good advice. Usually there's a few sentences of explanations, but the topic could be discussed in much more depth. I'd like to hear a more complete explanation from pg.
Google Compute Engine has sustained use discounts: the longer you run an instance, the lower the price per minute that you pay. If you run an instance for a full month, you end up being charged only 70% of that instance's price. Essentially, it's like AWS's reserved instances except you don't have to plan for it ahead of time.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use
He mentions RethinkDB as an in-memory DB, but..it's not.
>dated April 26, 2013
Not quite :)

Most bitcoin users don't see mining hardware either, though.
Improvements to Optiq's MongoDB adapter
This is interesting, but I find using a different AMI for each project to be tedious. My understanding is that instances should be ephemeral and agnostic to the project at hand. Initial bootstrap scripts should handle the installation of any dependencies and the project code itself.
Because the inmates need to convert their balance into goods in the prison. They don't have cash, just an "account" with the prison operator.
I just bought 2 and will be trying them out over the next bit. I think these boxes will be amazing to host my client static sites and basic CMS back-ends. At $1 a month I'd like to buy 20~ in the near future.
Ive heard this sentiment most often in 12 step program meetings.
Because by incurring in certain costs up front as a group, society benefits from blurry but tangible externalities.
So it's not a disk vs. memory thing, it's a B-tree vs. skiplist thing. That makes a lot more sense.
Not him, but I don't think it's in your profile (yet)
For contrast this is the reaction of a drone being flown over an American crowd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR39DErszRE
I live in what I feel is a very desirable area (West Town) and have a 2 bedroom for $1100 (it was 1000 two years ago).
Probably 50-100,000 among their employees, ex-employees, aspiring employees, partners, contractors, and people who've seen it mentioned somewhere like this (including me and you, now).
Shellshock attacks target QNAP's NAS boxes, FireEye says
I predict this will be on a same price range of the Model S, or even more expensive.

By the way, what happened to Model X?
no need to start a whole program. STEMPremier[1] is already helping companies (and colleges) do this at schools all over the country.
[1]http://stempremier.com
Looks like an evernote input to WinJS output
- Looks like a case of survivor bias. How many founders who listened as intently did not build Airbnbs ?

There were also examples of failure in their portfolio.
How Americans die:

http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d...

This shows drug deaths as comparable to motor vehicle accidents.

(This includes both legal and illegal drugs, and poisoning from prescribed medicine, but I doubt that the rise in recent years is due to worsening quality of healthcare.)
She can, but it's more unlikely that she will have the time and the energy to get there if she's preoccupied by riding the conveyor belt of our schooling system followed by the worries of the 9-5 world.
That's the one.

The moment its live ill let you know via twitter.
> And what guestimates would those be?

1gb/week with 60% traffic to the US, average 20kb size with 1000 reset requests/month. I'd love to hear some more realistic estimates. And while (server/service) price is far from the most important consideration, it sounds like they manage to stay way under 50 usd/month in hosting currently. So as anything over 30/month would be a considerable (relative) increase. Add to that doubling? the management overhead from, say, an hour a week to two -- and they'd need to see some clear benefits? And what are those?

As for "open live instance, it says "ready soon" for me - but perhaps that is because they didn't, as you say, handle the traffic after all?
I think somebody should made a coin with Mark Karpeles' face on it - will represent and sell better.
The stupidest thing I've seen spammers do (and I see a few examples of this in my junk mail folder every day) is putting my name or e-mail address in the "From:" field (sometimes followed by a few random characters).
http://imgur.com/xUOT7ja

Here are the first ten pages, I can post more if anyone wants me to.
E(final conversion rate if run another time)... Both of those have a closed form.

I'm curious - where can I learn more?

Lets say you have a free plan, basic plan, and enterprise plan...A dirichlet prior would be the natural thing to use here, IMO.

This would be handled via Dirichlet, and then the results multiplied by their LTV. I thought you were referring to multiple variants - i.e., landing page A, landing page B, landing page C.
In general, I like Ansible's concepts of idempotency, etc., and find them to be well suited for server configuration in general, but it does come at a price, both in terms of development time and speed (I actually find Ansible to be a lot slower than Fabric).

I've started thinking of server configurations in Ansible terms (i.e. "I want X module installed, Y directory present, etc"), but sometimes nothing beats a simple bash command to git pull && sudo service restart.
This is a really useful perspective for undergrads. I would have gained a lot of value if I could have read this while studying.

I started a startup during my undergrad degree, and ended up finishing my degree at the same time. I made a deal with my lecturers to allow me to skip basically everything during the term time, and then just took "holiday" from my startup to write exams. It worked out OK and we raised a lot of money the year after I got my degree. So I don't think that's impossible, but it was pretty hard work.
It seems odd not to acknowledge that most successful startups are not created like this. Very few are. Perhaps only the truly great ones take the organic personal project route. Apple, Google, Facebook, and YC are among the handful one could list out of thousands of startups.

Most successful startups are the result of ambitious people working hard to come up with good ideas. PG has explicitly said he started Viaweb to get rich. IIRC it was picked from a list of other startup ideas and was the second attempt. He wasn't deeply fascinated by online stores, it just seemed like a good business to start.
Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future
Nice sock-puppet, Shapiro. I hope you lose the rest of your hair.
While I certainly can't speak for PG, I would imagine that the advice is simply derived empirically, and so doesn't really demand a great deal of elaboration.
I'm pretty sure the two are related, no? A B-trees is a disk-friendly structure (shallow and wide), skiplist aren't (but they are a concurrency friendly structure)
It's certainly a more objective measure than what you've offered.
Cigar butt investing is a very interesting term. What does it mean?
Delivery ETA is now Fall of 2015 http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx

Not too bad for a new design.
Global AgeWatch Index 2014 (infographic)
Boring Future, Volume 1
Magnetic levitation train prototype demoed in Rio [translated]
Google, Oracle and Amazon among others have Distinguished Engineer title so quite a few people know about it.
Teen Entrepreneurship Center Building Its Own Makerspace