skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sure you can...working long hours, not getting enough sleep, paying a little bit less attention the road, you can easily link that one to startups
All (?) [edit: I stand corrected: only some] of which rely on A Big SAN, which falls under the "vertical" classification, i.e., scaling-by-throwing-money-at-it. Which is fine as long as you're aware that your price/performance sucks, and as long as your SAN is big enough.
I've had a similar experience with a company called 'Acacia', they claimed to have some broad ranging patent wrt to audio and video over the internet. I told them to either sue or get lost and never heard from them again. It probably helped a lot that I'm based in europe.

I have absolutely no respect for companies that use software patents as a way to either control their competition or, as seems to be the case here to use it to effect a take-over.

It's a pity these jerks aren't named because it would be quite neat to give them as much bad press as they could handle. Cowards.
There's got to be some kind of art project you can do with this.

Here's something done with toothbrushes, for inspiration.
http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/just-two-cavities.html
Am I correct in assuming this is impossible on a machine for which you do not have root access?
Shouldn't be too hard.

if ( SkinReflectivity(defendent) < SkinReflectivity(victim) && NetWorth(defendent) < NetWorth(victim) ) {
}
I am so sorry to hear about this, it's heartbreaking. I enjoyed fallentimes' timely and insightful comments here for quite some time. He really told it like it was. I distinctly remember that he was at the top of the best comments list for his take on the mint.com acquisition. I will miss him. My condolences to his family and friends.

Tom, don't be surprised by how much time you need for the fog to clear; everybody is different. Please use this community to share or ask for anything you need. I'm sure I'm not alone in offering whatever I can to help.
Advances in technology have often killed jobs. Actually, advances in technology kill jobs continuously. Like, since the invention of the wheel probably.

It's just that technology hasn't made people LIKE THIS obsolete before. At least, not recently. Now we're killing the jobs of people who can write stuff to thousands, if not millions at a time. It's all fair until it's YOUR job, right?
Perfectly N*Sync. Or when the celebrities turn geek, the going gets weird
" . . . it never hurts to learn more languages." This is the problem of too many choices, It does hurt to learn a lot of languages. Each of us can only master a few languages. The exact number varies from person to person, but it is a fairly small number. The alternative is the proverbial "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Believe me, I'd love to give these guys bad press--TechCrunch or Gawker could do a nice story at their expense. But that's my friend's decision to make, not mine. The last thing I want to do is undermine his defense.
No. Creationism is a bad theory because it is inherently unprovable either way, and because people have provided evidence for the alternatives.

If you want to provide evidence that 'perl is a bad language' feel free. Of course, you'll be handicapped by the fact that there is no really widely accepted definition of a good or bad language, but you should at least be able to argue it one way or the other. You just seem to continually asserting that it's bad, hoping that it'll prove your point.
Ask HN: Monitoring historical server resource usage on linux?
I want to be able to find performance bottlenecks after usage spikes, so I would like a tool which monitors and logs cpu, memory, disk io over time on each of my servers. These are ubuntu servers.

If you have any other suggestions for tools I can use to help find bottlenecks, I'd appreciate that too; I'm new to this.
facebook is profitable:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-mi...

It will take a while though before they've recovered their investment to date though.
Wow, TWiT is going to get on the Netflix Roku box. That is a fantastic strategy.
Fair enough. Please wish him best luck from me and let it be known wide if he sets up a defense fund, I'll certainly contribute.
You absolutely can be sued over a violation of a contract that you are not a party to.

One way is called interference. MSFT needs a reasonable expectency of a valid business relationship with the MVP. GOOG would have to know about the relationship between MSFT and the MSFT. MSFT would have to argue that GOOG intentionally interfered with the relationship with the MVP (such as by exploiting the MVP's NDA to get sensitive information about product plans), and then argue that GOOG's interference damaged MSFT.

I'm not a lawyer, but been at companies where things like this have happened over noncompetes and NDA's.

Obviously, if GOOG and the MVP do nothing to violate the NDA, nobody should get sued. Obviously, it is possible for the MVP to work at GOOG with any number of tricky relationships with MSFT. But saying "GOOG didn't sign the contract, so it could never (your word) be GOOG's problem" is a drastic oversimplification of the legal risk.
colr.org is a good resource for this
Where do you sell your textbooks?
I am wondering where do you buy/sell your textbooks online?
Fruits For Diabetics - Can it Work Well
No. Multi-user screen does not require root access.
Dan was one of those amazing people that did more for us than we could ever hope to do for him. He gave more in his short time here than most of us could hope to give in a lifetime.

Hang in there Tom.
It would work slightly different (but that may be just to locality) here: MSFT would have to sue their MVP for breaking their NDA, they could then implicate that their employer forced them to, then their employer could get sued.

Alternatively, but this would be a completely roundabout route, Microsoft might get wind of google having access to inside information, with some proof, during discovery it would be found that it was leaked by the employee (with, for instance google acting in good faith since they could not know that this was internal MS information). The end of that one would probably be google being unable to use the 'tainted' information, and microsoft suing the MVP for breach of contract.

I think this latter scenario is what causes google to 'prefer' it if their employees would not have such contracts with third parties. It's a stretch, but it could happen. Best not to have even the possibility.
Are we patenting ideas now?
I keep munin, http://munin.projects.linpro.no/ installed on all my servers. When things begin to look unwell, it lets you look back to see what resource, temperature, voltage, or activity might have changed.

It is alleged to be easy to add your own data points to it as well.
>You just can't make Postgres (or Oracle) scale on an ideal horizontal the same way you can distribute IP, DNS, HTTP proxying, HTTP serving, memcache, message queues, or bigtable.

Is there something about MySQL that exempts it from this scaling weakness that I'm not aware of?

I'm not bull-baiting, I'm just covering the bases and wondering if there's some reason it's not presently under discussion. Part of the reason I ask is because I've been pushing for a shift to Postgres at work after we get some more pressing matters dealt with.
I thought he ascribed that view to the folks who run traditional television media.
Knoyce, a 'meta' social network
you are right, i meant haven't.
Thanks, bookmarked this for later.
No, most of the scalable SQL databases are shared-nothing.
>Can we say "boil the ocean"?

Careful, I hear tell that the ZFS people are working on that very idea.
I had a similar experience with him. He emailed me after seeing something I wrote on HN. We stayed in touch and he was very supportive.

I feel terrible about this.
What?

"You keep it hidden because for every 1 person who takes your advice and helps you out there are 5 who will write you off as a serious person for the rest of your life.

Edit: I'm not saying this is right/wrong, but there are real consequences to outing oneself as a depressive."

What are the consequences? After dealing with OCD and social anxiety issues from 18 to 28, I finally started to open up and talk about these oddities that conflicted me to others. What I learned is most people I talk to all dealt with something similar. These were just random people I met at work, friends and family members. I wish I talked about what conflicted me before I was 28, I would have been able to enjoy that 10 year span of my life more.

What I am saying is don't think you are alone, think you are crazy the one dealing with ocd, social anxieties, depression - the majority has been there and when you learn/realize that we are the same a huge weight is lifted off your shoulders. In other words talk talk talk about your problems, oddities (obessesive thoughts or actions), social anxieties and depressive thoughts until you are blue in the face. If people are going to look down on you for being a depressive screw them, they are hiding behind their own wall of B.S. - no one is perfect and everyone has dealt with something from the above in various degrees before!

My condolences to Dan's family and friends.
... A little more looking shows that while some systems, like Oracle RAC (the one I'm most familiar with) and Sybase, do rely on shared storage, many do not. Sorry to generalize from insufficient data!
I get the feeling that this really shouldn't be an indicator for "talent" in a technical setting. This study really seems to relate to executives and not the type of "talent" that we talk about here.

One of the telling things is the people in the studies reluctance to take on hard assignments as it would damage their reputation. Most great programmers are the exact opposite.

These are the big quotes that tell me to ignore this one for developers / engineers:
"The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around."

"Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer."
You know.... I am crying now.
Death seems to glaze at me every time I start wasting my life again. I know that this is stupid, but I just can't help it.
I am terribly sorry. Really. The funny thing is that I don't even know this guy - but I really like him.
Nietzsche said that suicide thoughts are a wonderful comfort - they help us get through a lot of bad nights... and you know, today - right now, actually - it feels good to be such a coward.
It feels good to be incapable of taking my own life... no matter how stupid I am, no matter how fucked up everything and everyone is.
I am really terribly sorry... I just don't know what to say.
You can try Munin, MRTG, or CACTI
A trademark is a distinctive sign or indicator [1]. It has nothing at all to do with patents [2] or "ideas."

Coca Cola and Pepsi each own trademarks for their respective names and likenesses, but neither own patents on the idea of selling sugared water.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
Whether your notional smart person ultimately chooses a given product or not, based on the results of their research, advertising may still be the thing that makes them aware of the product in the first place.
Collectd, I swear by it, running it on thousands of hosts without issues.
Great people and work environment, low pay and perks, not immigrant friendly.

And they've been doing the iOffers for a long time now. I was an intern in 2006, and they looked just like that back then.
Hollywood Hotels Like Sunset Tower Are Hub for Deal Making
This is horrible news. I didn't know Dan personally, but I recognize the name from his comments. He will be missed here.

My condolences to Tom, and Dan's friends and family.
http://collectd.org/
But which is easier to type on, the iPhone or the BlackBerry? I realize I'm just taking one of his example, but simple design is not always the most functional. Devices should definitely have no unnecessary interface or design elements, but there are differing opinions on what is necessary. I really can't imagine typing lots of text messages on a touch screen.
Just curious, what industry? I know it almost happened to model rocketry, what else?
Are you looking only at free solutions? Or is proprietary software an option?
The Burger That Shattered Her Life
Free, but feel free to recommend proprietary solutions; I'm curious about what's out there
They do, but Facebook is already testing out their payment system. The thing is Facebook customers trust Facebook. Having a stored credit system which could then be used for Facebook gifts and purchases in apps would cause more than a 10% uptick in sales for app devs like Zynga, so Facebook could charge a relatively high processing fee like that and still be worth using. They don't even need to mandate exclusivity to do it.

They're working on it right now, and I've enough experience with ads to tell you they're never going to make Google money off of their self-serve stuff. Why is too detailed for this, but suffice it to say their actions make me think they feel the same way, but also agree that their platform can make more.
Colourful Bac Ha fair
You probably know about sar, but a lot of people may not; it can get advanced with all the options, but for simple cpu spot checks:

sar -u X Y

prints Y lines of utilization info, one every X seconds.
What do you use to generate graphs?
"... observing nature is far more interesting than just trying to think about things ..."

Nature.

I discovered this back in 2007 playing around with images I'd taken out my kitchen window ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157603995704881... I also keep a hand colour set on flickr for reference ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157600195794663...

Back in 2007:
"If I ever need to do things like come up with ideas observation of nature and complex systems such as the web is always a good place to start. Here I'm looking at colour & colour schemes. Never would have thought of this combo and ratios" ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/541666109/
It's not the scale, it's the reliability.

When I worked at Amazon.com we had a deeply-ingrained hatred for all of the SQL databases in our systems. Now, we knew perfectly well how to scale them through partitioning and other means. But making them highly available was another matter. Replication and failover give you basic reliability, but it's very limited and inflexible compared to a real distributed datastore with master-master replication, partition tolerance, consensus and/or eventual consistency, or other availability-oriented features.

I think everyone is missing the boat by evaluating datastores in terms of scalability. Even at Amazon's size, database scaling is only occasionally a problem. By the time your site is that big, hopefully you've split your software into independent services, each with its own (relatively) small database. And for the services that do need a distributed cache or persistence layer, there's now a huge body of literature and software that solves those problems.

Reliability is another matter. Every business can benefit from improved reliability, regardless of size. And reliability is harder. Scaling is basically an engineering problem, which can be solved with the right architecture and algorithms. Reliability is more like security: it's a weakest-link problem and requires constant vigilance in all areas, including engineering, testing, operations, and deployment. Adding redundant components improves reliability against hardware failures (which are independent between hosts) but not software bugs (which typically are not). Many of the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859058 are missing this point.

Anything that mitigates reliability problems has huge potential for saving costs and increasing value. CouchDB, for example, doesn't even provide basic scaling features like automatic partitioning, but it does provide reliability features like distribution, replication, snapshots, record-level version history, and MVCC. That is what makes it interesting and useful in my opinion. Similarly, although people talk about Erlang as a concurrency-oriented language, it's really a reliability-oriented language. The concurrency in Erlang/OTP is not designed for high-speed parallel computation. Rather, it's one part of an overall strategy for reliability, a strategy which also includes the ability to update code in running processes, a standard distributed transactional database, and built-in process supervision trees. (Steve Vinoski wrote something similar in his blog a while ago: http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/05/01/erlang-its-about-re...)
I've gotten quite good at typing on the iPhone. I used to write my girlfriend all of my "Love emails" from my desktop at work. Now I write them all from the iPhone on the plane. 2 or 3 large paragraphs are not a problem, once you get the hang of it. That said, I don't think typing on the iPhone is for everyone. I think UI programmers and programmers and engineers in general will tend to be better at it. We know how to be "nice" to machines.
Unmount external peripherals easy way with Eject 3.0.0
You can have a shared-nothing architecture using traditional "shared-everything" RDBMS.
Why Don’t We Apply What We Know About Twins to Everybody Else?
The High Price of Being a Gay Couple
When admitting to even a brush with mental illness doesn't disqualify someone from running for public office, my point with be moot. Until then, people who suffer from serious depression have to be very careful who they share this information with.
> Is there something about MySQL that exempts it from this scaling weakness that I'm not aware of?

No, there isn't. We're discussing Postgres since that's what Heroku uses.
FYI: We're looking for developers to help build this. As Paul Graham says, "Be good" (http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startup-sc...) -- here's your chance to change the world for the better. This is a benevolent project for the common good. Contact us -- we'd love to chat.
As one of the many that never knew him but am now reading about him, I can only imagine the sense of loss that you feel now and will for the rest of your life. I'm very sorry. Dan seems like one in a million.
Why should micropayments enter into it at all? Sending letters to Congresspeople should be enough to indicate the amount of support. Consider the stamp purchase my micropayment.
Mobilizing the population (and their donations) through the internet is a big part of how Barack Obama got elected. (And yes, the rest was behind the scenes wheeling and dealing in oak-paneled back-rooms.) We know this can work.

As always, "Who watches the Watchmen?" What ensures these other lobbyists don't become part of the corruption problem?
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The American people don't have the greatest record on deciding what the "common good" is.

Think of something like gun control. As someone who lives in a city, if I could participate in the US political system I would be in strong favour of aggressive nationwide gun control legislation, as would most of the people who live around me - and I wouldn't be interested in giving money to a politician who was strongly against that, full-stop. Likewise, being pro-equal marriage and abortion rights are deal-breakers for me and many of my friends.

I recognize, however, that there are many people who feel the exact opposite of me, with equal ferocity. For issues as divisive as these, how do you plan on deciding what the "common good" is to support?
JSFUCK Esoteric Programming Language
for some reason the HN link doesn't work well for me, but if you go through google it does work:

http://www.google.com/search?q=the+high+price+of+being+a+gay...
Genetic algorithms are in a certain sense doing things in the stupidest possible way.

Whenever it creates a random mutation, A better algorithm programed with at least a little knowledge of the problem could make a change that is more likely to be beneficial. An educated guess instead of an uneducated one.

Since we know a fair bit about image compression, regular algorithms just take their own best guess without any selection step. (or an I wrong about this?)

Unless you really don't know anything about how to solve the problem, you should be able to make an algorithm thats faster by mutating the population more intelligently.
>What ensures these other lobbyists don't become part of the corruption problem?

This project is not a solution to the problem of money in politics. It's a "if you can't lick 'em, join 'em" project.
On Complexity, Complication, Surgery and Software
Home Automation 101
As I read it, your goal is to get more Americans to join your project than currently use Facebook, and have them all do $3/month in targeted political donations.

Didn't that get tried by MoveOn?
How 'common' is the common good you're thinking about here? If this lobby group becomes dominated by Republican issues and concerns, will you still consider it a "benevolent project for the common good?"
The system will have checks and balances built in that are transparent to users. The organization would not lobby for any position directly. Instead, lobbying firms that specialize in the given policy areas would lobby on behalf of the users that support those policies, and the users could have a say in which lobbying firms are used for particular issues.
"there were 146 million registered voters in the US.... for $3 a month we could outspend special interests and campaign contributors combined."

Isn't this just like the "if only 1%..." fallacy, except it's "if only 100%..."?
The difference between now and then is that we didn't have so many out of work journalists then. Any "news startup" that uses actual journalists to do original reporting will get coverage from journalists for, um, obvious reasons.
Ganglia is pretty good, although it's oriented more towards detecting problems than diagnosing them post-mortem.
Google Websearch Parameters
"not immigrant friendly"

Coould you expand on this? Is it something like "they don't do H1 visas" or "there are occasional incidents of borderline racism" (I heard something to this effect in a conversation recently) or something else?
As i mentioned earlier, you can have a highly-scalable "shared-nothing" architecture using existing RDBMS's. It depends on your design and implementation.

Also, when used in active-active configuration, replication actually decreases the reliability of your application by the number of replicated nodes, because you're increasing the number of point of failures in your application (although scalability increases). Replication increases reliability only if used in an active-passive configuration. I've ran into this issue over and over again.
Feel free to elaborate the whom you are speaking of.
I guess I could start a list...
1. Navy seals
2. High level CIA/FBI agents
3. Airline pilots; any person whose work deals with the lives of others.

Maybe that is a good sampling of whom you speak of?
I write filters as I find the need for them. Many of them forward to those to whom I have delegated, applies label and marks them as read. Only read and respond to e-mails a couple of times a day. The rest of the time I'm focused on productive work, interruptions better be very important.

I delegate on the basis of "Get ... done, by ..." and manage by exception. I discourage cc'd stuff and unsubscribe from everything that is directly relevant. It is a huge trap to appear important because you are across everything. I ration my time and anyone who abuses it by making disproportionate demands via e-mail, IM or phone is 'tutored' and if that fails, cut loose.