skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you'd have the same trouble with the automated way.

The doohicky that does it would have to be programmed to be catered to you, I should think - particularly if you have a sensitive stomach. I've known a few people in your situation, and they prefer to throw things out well before their "best before" date.

This means it's a personal preference and as the first commenter states: a "use by" date.

Wouldn't that end up being the same as a sticky note?
I see now with all the comments that everyone is referring to getting more platters spinning the data.
I'd put a wireless camera ala Justin.tv on the tricycle and hook the steering controls up to the internet.

Then outsource the driving to India. The blind person would state his destination and the Indian would drive him there using a mash-up of Google Latitude + webcam + wireless steering. The blind person would have to pedal.
Yea, log to a file and turn on write-caching on your HD controller.
Just write to /mnt (150GB ramdrive on the small instance) then occasionally sync to an EBS volume. That'll probably give you the best I/O.
said like that it makes good sense. thanks
That's got some really good information. Most important to me is that it does confirm my fears of flaky IO performance. He does point out some ways to tune it but it still seems like a rough experience.

These cloud services seem great for low IO apps but once you have to hit the database hard it seems like anyone's guess if your db will perform.
Maybe a combination of DB file in RAM and transaction logs to disk?
I think you failed to recognized what's wrong with the section I quoted. Negative text indent is fine. Negative text indent for the purposes of "[putting] the standard text for the button way off the screen, leaving only the background image visible," is a ridiculous misuse of that CSS property.
The true hackers of today create pirated electronics?
Yeah, all those pictures of hats look about the same to me.
Announcing the Agar-Pack!

This a clear plastic bubble containing a sample of bacteria and a quantity of agar.

Squeeze the bubble gently and the internal membrane separating the bacteria from the agar is broken, but the outer bubble remains intact. Now stick the bubble onto the packaging of any food product you've just opened. You now have a visual indication of the state of the food inside.
With any high IO web application, it all comes down to horizontal sharding to make it work. But, we recently switched from a high powered DB to Amazon and we're doing fine.
He means the title on HN.
Stewart Brand, Innovator and writer looks ahead - with caution
Well, to be fair, total color blindness is something like 100,000 times less common than red/green.
These little "here's how it would look" tools work well enough for sanity-checking images on a computer monitor, but don't necessarily tell you much about what someone will actually see. Color blindness makes a lot more sense if you have a decent grasp on how human color vision actually works.

Quick summary: Most people have four different types of light receptors. One type responds to all colors, the other three have overlapping response curves covering parts of the visible spectrum. Perception of hue and saturation derives from the differences between how strongly the three color receptors react--even "pure" colors will usually trigger at least two color receptors. Because of this, for any given triple of receptor response strengths, there are many combinations of light that will cause it; the RGB color system exploits this, using three colors in varying proportions to create a large range of perceived colors.

Colorblindness is a catchall term for defects in one or more type of light receptor. Which type, and the nature of the defect, can cause widely divergent effects.

Some people have anomalous response from one type; i.e., a nonstandard response curve. In practice, this means that their color vision essentially works like anyone else's, but the set of light combinations that cause a given response differ, so two colors that look identical to you may look different to them! For instance, if the medium-wavelength receptor's curve is shifted downward to further overlap the long-wavelength receptor's curve, reddish colors will seem more green and bluish colors will seem less green. Compared to a normal spectrum, this makes the cyan range shorter and the yellow range larger, making it harder for the individual to distinguish between mixtures of red and green.

Other people lack one color receptor type entirely, and thus have only two-axis color perception instead of the normal three. Losing the long or short receptors makes extreme reds or blues effectively invisible, while losing the medium-wavelength receptors leaves the individual with a full range of sensitivity, but able to perceive only a single gradient between colors. Note also that this collapses hue and saturation into a single axis; for instance, to someone with only the long and short receptors, there are both purples and greens that will look like white light.

A very few people have only one type of color receptor, or none at all, and thus perceive only overall brightness, with no color at all.
We have a highly trafficked and large dataset that we aimed to move from our datacenter to EC2. This is all in MySQL. Upon doing so, we had to spend significant effort trying to get our system stable and we ended up narrowing it down to EBS simply not being able to handle the IOPS we needed.

We explored all the options available and worked with both Percona and Amazon on the issues, but it was clear that EBS and EC2 just are not meant to handle such load. Our database is currently back running in our datacenter.

There have been a number of reports with similar results using EBS. It all depends on your particular IO profile, but since you said it was high, I encourage you to tread lightly.

If you want more information you are welcome to email me.
Not sure how trustworthy the color balance is on this website, but the Ishihara test is the standard one: http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.asp
I'm currently developing an app in Cappucino and it's quite sweet... I'm not sure if I'll actually use the IDE, but I'll pay anyway because I want to support their work
Actually, why don't you google "screen reader simulation"
I once applied for a job and got an email questionnaire back. On of the questions was, "Given 9 balls, one of which is heavier than he others, what is the minimum number of weighings to find the heavy ball? Write an algorithm."

I wrote back, "I have a question for you. What is the maximum number of balls from which you could find the heavy one in 5 weighings? If you know the answer to that one, then you know I know the answer to your problem."

Needless to say I didn't get the interview. Must have been written off as a smart-ass.
One thing I see people rarely mention in these discussion is that since CouchDB is master<->master, you can design applications completely differently: peer-to-peer.
That's why I'm a big fan of Rackspace. You can get bare metal servers for heavy I/O and simultaneously have "Cloud" servers on the same local network (example: Github).
On a Mac, you can view everything in greyscale using the Universal Access panel in System Preferences.
I had a blind childhood friend who rode a conventional bike up and down his street, knew where his driveway was, could tell where trees were by their sound. He and I would ride all over town, he following me by the sound my bike made.

The interviewer's question is clearly not out-of-the-box enough itself, it is just in a little bigger box.
I don't really think it matters when it launches.

That said, if you wanted to hit the ground running on Monday morning, launching on Sunday allows for the blogosphere to start talking about Atlas on Monday morning.
Yes, it's the clicky mechanical switches that make this keyboard so nice. I don't know of any other keyboard that has these in a nice modern package. The sleek black look and USB hub are just icing on top.
I just want to point out that not everyone who asks these questions is just a sheep following the herd. My last manager asked a few questions of this sort just to weed out the applicants who gave the "extremely overcomplicated solution for a completely non-existent problem."
Since that's also possible with the current voting system, it can't be considered a strike against this proposal.

Absentee voting is possible in every state, usually without any reason given, and any absentee voter can just hand the incomplete ballot over to the attacker in exchange for whatever compensation.

Since offering your vote for sale is illegal in any case, this has to be considered a threat that is so minor as to be nonexistent.
I can see differences in the hats but cannot see the "3" in the Ishihara plates.
Ha! So there is a trick. Good thinking.

Guess that's why I don't work at Microsoft .. :/
FWIW: SoftLayer offers the same combo of dedicated servers and cloud offerings, and I prefer their turn around time, support, and pricing to RS.
The interesting thing about usability testing is that at first it's very surprising and a complete revelation. With time and enough studies, you do get a sense of what motivates other people and subconsciously put yourself in their place while designing.

When switching contexts though, nothing will prepare you for the myriad of ways people can and will use a product, and tests become a necessity again.
Ha. I can't read it. But if I boost the contrast on my display the message becomes visible.
Has anyone been running this? Does anyone have any comments?
I think the potential buyers are already convinced, it's the people who have already started developing with Cappucino.

Having a paid beta, means that people who haven't used Cappucino probably won't try it and it's a good thing because they would have been harder to support...
I'd like to point you to Section 2(C). Judge Alsup's words indicate that, under your conditions, he would have found Psystar still in violation.
Per emmett's comment, I doubt Hibernate would have become ubiquitous had it been dual-licensed GPL/commercial from day 1.

There have been other commercial Java ORM/JPA/JDO/etc. implementations that were quite good (okay, not all of them, but the name of one in particular escapes me) but Hibernate won out because it was free.

That it's primary strength (being LGPL free) also makes it hard to monetize is the conundrum.

I think 280north's price point might be the right idea--anything <$100 (per project, not per seat) should be discretionary income to most any commercial development project and you can make up the low license cost with scale in wide spread adoption.
A book called "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by RG Loeliger is about Forth (not about multi-threading). The author is sufficiently excited about the topic that you can envision him falling out of the chair. It also covers the very basics of how to build Forth.
That sounds like a good mix. I'll explore that option some more.
They should move their business to Europe. Here, overly restrictive EULAs are regularly ignored by the courts. Which is a good thing.
I really wish you could take a look at the link I posted before calling it simply "pirated electronics"
Endowment isn't bad. But then who decides where/who the money gets paid to?

Does the money go to the copyright holder (e.g. the Apache organization for anything org.apache, JBoss/Redhat for anything org.jboss) or the individual developers?

If individuals, how do you partition the money, by LOC, in-project voting/ranking of team member contributions?
Not only that, but by this logic Mozilla are liable every time I view the CNN logo on the CNN web site. This seems odd.
I'm late to comment on this post, but I've read several posts on rating systems recently and not many seemed to mention this.

Have you tested the theory that response bias is skewing the ratings upward?

In other words, given that not every tea drinker is going to bother logging on to your site, finding each tea they've tasted and leaving a rating, it seems plausible to me that people who've had a good tea-drinking experience are more likely to make that effort than those who've had an unremarkable tea.

The figures that you quote seem to support this theory. With a yes/no rating system you had 90% yes votes, or an average vote (assuming one yes vote cancels out one no) of 0.8, skewed 80% up from the unweighted mean you'd expect. With a 5-star rating you expect an average rating of 4.3, which is 65% up from the unweighted mean ((4.3 - 3.0) / (5.0 - 3.0)). So adding granularity is decreasing the skew, but not very rapidly. I'd be very interested to know what your averages are like now, with your new system.

Granted, some of the skew is due to what teas are available to be rated: presumably people are less likely to enter awful teas into your system in the first place. I realise the point of your article is about redesigning the rating to combat that skew, rather than necessarily about finding the one true rating. But if you're concerned about bias, it seems worth at least investigating all possible sources of bias.

There's an obvious asymmetry in this hypothesis - why would the response bias be in favour of strong positive experiences, rather than just strong experiences in general? Even if drinkers of mediocre tea can't be bothered to vote, why wouldn't people who've had terrible tea be just as likely to vote as those who've had great tea? I can think of two explanations. One is an innate sense that a good experience is worth more effort than a bad one - so after a bad pot of tea, there's less of an impulse to run off and tell everyone how bad it was, more to just write it off and go do something else. Another is that people motivated to tell people about bad experiences might want to do so in words, to explain what was so bad about it.

I realise this is all hand-waving - I don't have hard evidence to back up this theory. I do think it would be an interesting theory to test, for those with sufficient levels of usage of a rating system to do so.

Some anecdotal evidence comes from my use of other UGC review sites, particularly restaurant reviews. These sites usually have a disproportionately large number of negative reviews. Reading reviews for nearly any restaurant leads you to conclude that restaurant has terrible service - apparently because those who've had bad experiences are always keen to vent about them. Yet nearly all restaurants, even those with tens of vocal unhappy customers, have above-average ratings.
And the quality doesn't compare, that's the point.
Of course they are relying on you to intuit some property of the situation that they don't mention. If they had said the box has three incandescent bulbs which become hot after they are switched on, most people would "get" the answer easily.

In a real application development situation, however, solving a problem based on what you assume to be true rather than what the customer asked for is usually a mistake.
Baby Bedding Factory
It's a very bad idea to judge/make law based on a single case. In US for example the law is broken in the opposite direction: one a sexual offender in any way, forever a sexual offender. It's not just about murders, it can be a simple bar fight in your 20's that can follow you forever. Or any other stupid act or decision.

That's a defense of the spirit of the law, btw. In this case there's no doubt wikipedia should not be censored.
The bike-for-the-blind question is a totally reasonable type of question, but a stupid example IMO. It could either be a common sense test or a constrained-thinking test, and isn't clear which it should be.
We run all of reddit on ec2, which includes a bunch of postgres servers. Each one is running with a single EBS. However, I've heard horror stories of people trying to run much less busy databases and having lots of problems, usually with MySQL.

Those databases are all on XLarge instances, so there is minimal sharing, and we've also gone to great lengths to make sure all of our normal queries are in indexes, so the disk gets hit less.

We also have a read slave for every database to alleviate read loads.

One thing you might want to do is run 'iostat -xtc' on your current box and put that in a log file. Then go back and analyze it and see what your average and peak reads and writes are. Amazon's max for a single EBS appears to be about 1000 ops / second (at least, that is what we were doing when they told us we maxed out the performance of the disk).

Good luck!

Edit: I forgot to mention that on all the database disks, we use ext2 and noatime. Both decrease the total number of writes necessary, and have very little downside (the biggest being that you have to fsck on a crash).
Some people mentioned defense funds.

Defense funds could be a business model in itself, if RIAA/MPAA/??AA just got the clue. They could establish their own defense fund and channel the money to themselves.

??AA establishes a defense fund: pay a $5 insurance a month and you get the right to download and share any (of their) content as much as you like as long as you're listed. Or maybe you won't get the right but you'll be guaranteed to not sued.

Then they proceed to sue non-listed downloaders and sharers in as large numbers as it is required to deter people from getting listed and as it doesn't consume too much money. Maybe they want to use Felten's ordering system, too.

Yes, some people would still not pay, some people would still be sued, but they would make lots of money pretty much "for free" because people would pay to avoid the potential hassle.

Ideally the online sharing culture would florish in open and that would bring more innovations to the field. Yet I'd like to see the world without copyright.
Well, granted, piracy's going to happen nonetheless, and it's still going to be a niggling issue no matter how you look at it. Two ways to curtail it: give the foundation parts away for free and charge what people are willing to pay for the rest.

Support's easy as sin to scale. Certification programs are a good way to accomplish this; they establish a trust chain and also provide yet another revenue stream to take advantage of.

Maybe your customers would rather purchase a support contract through one of your Certified Professionals® instead for one reason or another. A good use case would be because your customers feel most comfortable dealing with someone who can speak French, but you only provide support in English and German.
OneSeason Closes Its Doors
I'm beginning to thing that MySQL does something very different with disks than Postgres, because everyone I've talked to that said they had a problem had been running MySQL, and everyone who has been successful has been running Postgres (myself included).
It is a cycle. Most endeavors start out as labors of love. Invention. Creativity. Internships. Then as the product is developed and there is more demand for it, more customers, more money. The wheat separates from the chaff. The chaff makers lose customers who concentrate among a few vendors who then start charging more and looking for more expensive and talented producers but all the free and cheap stuff is gone.

So then the young bucks come in and say, "I can do this for less!"

Saṃsāra
pg has written about a similar idea about founders who get featured in magazines have a higher bar to live up and are less likely to just give up.

I have been doing this a lot recently--telling every friend I meet that I am broke and I am going to fix this part of my life in a big way. But i'm not sure if this is a cause or the effect because I am not doing this systematically or as a plan. I actually would be kinda embarrassed if I was doing it consciously. It is just what comes out of my mouth naturally these days. The impact of this is after a while you attain a certain image in your friend circle. That image gets reinforced from multiple channels. Example: a friend of mine posted one of those quizzes on my fb wall:

"Is Zaid addicted to Facebook?"
I answered ''no. But he is addicted to his laptop.
Constantly refreshes his bank statement. Asks where the f*** is his 10,000. ''
I enjoy interviews with these types of questions because I am nerdy enough to have wasted some of my youth buried up to the nose in logic puzzles and riddles, and sensible enough to research employers and interview tips to find out who asks these questions and which ones are commonly asked, and lucky enough to have studied mathematics and computer science at a university which teaches the birthday puzzle (probability) in its first term. Between all these, I'm not too bad at these questions, and very little of the reason for that is innate.

Anecdote: I was asked at interview "If I was in a room with 27 people and made a bet with you for $5 that no two people in the room shared a birthday, would you take the bet?". Answering "Yes", the reasoning being "I've done basic probability and covered the birthday puzzle, so know off the top of my head that you only need 23 people to get even odds" probably flagged me as arrogant (I had to explain why it was 23) but I felt good saying it. Interestingly the interview said only 1 in 10 people - interviewing for a fairly technical position that required a computer science degree - had encountered this before.
If I walk up to the line and pick one ball at random and it is the heaviest by pure luck, that demonstrates it can be done in zero weighings - more than 10% of the time, even - so if your number was higher than zero it's not really a 'minimum'.

If you put all the balls on a stretched rubber sheet and picked the one with the deepest depression, would that be one weighing, nine weighings or no weighings?
The status entry under CLANG/LLVM says Status: Experimental, but works. Highly motivated. I had not seen "highly motivated" as a status before.
"The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. These are generated during the production of animal feeds, for example, while ruminants, particularly cows, emit methane, which is 23 times more effective as a global warming agent than carbon dioxide. The agency has also warned that meat consumption is set to double by the middle of the century."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/07/food.fooda...

Dear Mr. Brand: change begins at home, and it doesn't require advanced engineering.
Actually, that's not why Psystar lost the case. Read the rest of the comments and Judge Alsup's order. The ruling had nothing to do with running OS X on a non-Apple hardware, and everything to do with Psystar cutting corners in such a way that it qualified as ordinary copyright infringement.
Just to add to what QHoxie said (I worked with him on this project), the site is doing Alexa top 750 traffic. Every page view would hit the db atleast a few times. And it's not that the site just couldn't run off EBS volumes, but we would see massive performance spikes where EBS IOPS would slow to a crawl for a few minutes to even a couple hours.
Are you actually using this sort of service from them? When I talked to them about 2 months ago, we couldn't get anything like that since their "cloud" stuff is in a datacenter you can't currently buy dedicated servers in. In theory, they're opening another next year that may solve the problem. It's hard to tell, though, since their sales people don't seem to have any experience selling a hybrid setup.

My understanding is that Github virtualizes things themselves, they're not running Rackspace cloud servers.
The cult of the faceless boss
Compelling Cases for Clouds