skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the argument i have tried to make here is that eventual consistency does not need to be forced in tightly coupled environments that exist in a single data center. i understand that some forms of conflicts are inevitable if one wishes to update concurrently across a WAN.

regarding CAP - CA is achievable in a single data center (where as i argue - one cannot tolerate partitions anyway). the problem with Dynamo is that the overheads incurred in tolerating partitions are imposed on environments that do not suffer from partitions.

you are right that point in time consistency is no good for partition tolerance. i didn't mean to say that it was. all i wanted to point out was that very few, if any, commercial database deployments do concurrent writes across continents (and do synchronous replication across the same). cross data center replication is used for disaster recovery - and at best analytics - where point in time is just fine.
>You seem awfully confident about (1)

Take a Macintosh, open it. Inspect using the novel technique of "looking".

Not to be glib, but when Apple decided to ditch other platforms for Intel-styled chips, they bought into the entire R&D work of their principle competitors. Back in the day with the 680x0 Macs and the PowerPC Macs, even things like RAM and video-cards weren't interchangeable between the platforms (due to endian-issues and timing issues etc.). The early 3d cards were a prime example of having to buy Apple branded hardware (or co-developed in partnership) for Apple branded computers. So for example, if you wanted to upgrade your Mac with a better video card, you couldn't run over and buy the $199 Nvidia card that 90% of the market could buy. You had to buy the "Made for Macintosh" Nvidia card at the 20% markup.

What Apple bought when going Intel was expertise in a vast marketplace of hardware manufacturers and R&D departments, doing Apple's work effectively for them. So what's in an Apple branded case? Probably some x-ATX board, the standard combination of chipset chips from whoever Apple could purchase from cheapest, a perfectly stock Intel chip and perfectly stock memory. With PCI-E ports with perfectly stock video cards (or video on the mobo, like value PC builders go with). If you are careful you might notice Apple uses a different boot system that's equivalent to the traditional BIOS (and is the direction some PC systems have already gone as well).

What Apple also bought when adopting an open architecture was that unfortunately, it makes locking it down really really hard. They came to the same party as everybody else, but they don't like the music. Too bad.

If Apple wants to sell a closed architecture, then that's what they should sell. But they decided to adopt an architecture that's designed not to be locked down, then are trying to lock it down after the fact.
Submit locations of all ten balloons and win $40,000.
Compensation Differences by Gender in Social Media
I believe your trickery involves capturing the output buffer and grep'ing for a fatal error, yes? We thought of doing that, but our site commands too much traffic for that to be a feasible option. If it's something less intrusive, I'm all ears.
Evidence that Facebook’s Priorities Are On Quality
I've written a lot of code in C and never run into this error. And I never put the constant on the left.
I agree with your math... though I think there's probably still a question as to whether the sub-group can maintain the factors that have caused this higher birthrate as the population of the sub-group explodes.
Hi Hillel,

To concur with the masses... great site! I like the idea and I think its more intuitive than some of the comments would suggest.

This reminds me of these interactive CD-ROM books that my little sister used growing up (shes 18 now). One thing that I liked at the time was how interactive the books were. Users could click on background imagery to engage little animations, etc.

Do you have any plans to make the site more interactive? Something very simple like highlighting the word as its being read (think of Karaoke) would add a lot of educational value and help, at least marginally with reading.

I see this service as not only replacing the parent when they're away, but also as a standalone educational platform for kids. You can even incorporate ages to scale the complexity of the interaction. So for younger kids, clicking a carton bunny may just show a bubble with the word "rabbit" while older kids get something more advanced.

Are armed services the target group? Have you seen interest from users who aren't away on such extended leaves?

I wonder how useful this service is for parents who only make 1-3 day business trips.
>If you buy a Dell netbook, download an osx86 image off of the Internet and then install it, you're not an Apple users.

Precisely. There aren't many non-apple users (classifying them as people who already own an Apple system, but want the improved portability the netbook formfactor affords) who are interesting in taking the time or energy to hackintosh their netbook. These people are saying, as loud as they can "Apple! We love your platform, make some hardware like a netbook and we will buy it! For goodness sakes, look at all the trouble we're going through to simulate it!"

Apple doesn't even have to R&D the netbook formfactor. They don't have to work with chip vendors to come up with lowpower chips and chipsets, or downgraded low power GPUs. They literally have to do nothing except get Jonny Ive to cook up a unibody case and put OSX on them. Charge $400 instead of $350 and they have and Apple netbook.

But Apple can't find the margins in the product line and the equation means that they have no offering for this huge hole in their lineup.
Wrong. It can easily be an indicator of a company (or series of companies) that doesn't want to go through the hassle of firing you.
Pictures? Or it never happened ;-)
Our Mistaken Expectations
Amazon provides windows instances now...might want to look into that
See also
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911119
where there is already much discussion.
Why not use set_error_handler() instead of scanning the logs?
( http://php.net/set_error_handler )
You are EXACTLY right - we display our jobs email address this way. We figure if someone can't figure out an email address that is presented this way, then we don't want to hire them.
Being a hockey player, I definitely want to see what this would/does look like.
Why do you think that this is a biological trait?

I don't. It might be, it could be. Certainly religion, income, how you were raised, etc, all play a big role in how many children you want. But IF there is a genetic component to how many children you want, then I expect it to spread.
cool in principle, a bit awkward in practice.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/11/02/sports/hockey/0...
Ask HN: Computer Generated Music Sites?
I'm looking for some very simple repetitive music that I can use to help me concentrate at work (something like white-noise, but with beats).

I'm wondering if there are some sites that use some predefined beats with some randomization algorithms to provide non-stop endless steams of computer generated music.

Any sites that you recommend for this type of listening?
The definition of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?

It also depends on whether there are malthusian limits applicable specifically to the population that is growing. It's unclear if this is the case in the modern world, but it certainly was the case in the past (availability of food in one place didn't prevent famine in another).

In this case, a higher birthrate could technically continue for centuries (or even millennia) before a reckoning, so you might have to go well beyond a single iteration of offspring to know.

There's plenty of debate about whether science can save humanity from malthusian limits, so the scenario I described might never come to pass. There are also other ways (wars, territorial conquest, mass immigration) for a high growth population to find a release valve.

All in all, though, I'm hopeful that the economist has this right - a non-coercive reduction in birth rates brought on as a natural response to increasing levels of global wealth, peace, and prosperity. Man, that would be an awfully nice way to avoid malthusian catastrophe. And while there's plenty to debate and disagree about, it's encouraging that the data does at least to some extent support this hope.
This is fixed in 4.5.3.

The crash was caused by printing the value of the procedure in the nested REPL. Using define in nested REPLs works, but you'll get a warning about it.
Wahmy Sammy
There's a removable SIM caddy at the top that can be popped open with a paperclip or a key included in the iPhone 3G packaging. It's the battery that can't be easily removed.
Giles Bowkett made this: http://wiki.github.com/gilesbowkett/archaeopteryx

It might do what you're looking for.
This is great concept! I think you have a winner as far as user desirability goes! Incredible artwork and the layout and workings of the site are top notch.

As far as profiting from this site in addition to trying to get grandparents to pay for the online reading of the books it seems like a natural to allow parents to access the books in total to read to the kids themselves for a small 6 month membership fee. Then you expand your target market and your potential income.

This is an incredibly well done site. If this were my site, initially I would not try to market it myself, instead I would focus on licensing its use to other sites that already have a large presence in the kids/parents market such as Disney and Barbie. I would focus on selling the larger company as to your sites potential of being a marketing feature for the larger site and I would seek to bill the licensee company for the traffic vs. billing the grandparent or parent directly. You would simply become a feature on their existing site.

What a great holiday gift for a child this site would be. I would also come up with a marketing angle to sell access to the site’s books in full in large bookstores like Borders and in Wal-Mart alongside the physical books. I would use some sort of physical packaging that could go in the bookracks alongside the hardcopy books with a little teddy bear attached to grab the buyers attention.

Marketed correctly—I believe you have a winner!
It's about craftsmanship. It might not cause any harm, but an error message like that in this type of site just shows you don't care for your craft.
http://tones.wolfram.com/
It's not that they don't care -- it's not their business model. I believe a company should have the right to control their own products as long as they are not breaking any laws.
First off, "Use your brains" is so condescending that it shuts down any useful dialog.

Most importantly, the people who are responding with "i don't get it" (like myself), are not missing the point of what they're trying to deliver. In fact, we might be potential customers. What the site is failing to do is impress upon me why this is a useful service. The bedtime ritual is about so much more then just reading a story, as stated here over and over, by gasp real parents. When I'm away, I could just call and tell my kid a story over the phone, and frankly, they'd prefer that to having a pre-recorded book (I just asked them).

With all due respect to the developers, (and I do wish them the greatest success, it's a well-intentioned product), but honestly, this feels like a solution in search of a problem rather then the other way around.
A lot of it is also because we are still in the middle of the story. The jury is still out on that bet.
Not having to worry about it at the application level is nice.

E.g., if you store dated snapshots of content, it's much easier on you if you can just store the whole directory, rather than manually maintaining hard links back to previous versions.
Seasteading (http://seasteading.org/) hopes to be the next release valve.
Does anyone know anyone who works at Zynga? What is your impression of them?

A friend has just begun the interview process with them and would like to find out about the culture and the direction of the company. Neither he nor I have any other reliable source of information.
Ask HN: What happened to Proper News
A little while ago (maybe a month) someone posted a HN clone called Proper News. They said the temporary address was propernews.tk That URL stopped working I'm just wondering if anybody knows what happened, did it move, die, or is there something else going on?
While his specific tool examples are excellent, I agree most with his point that, whatever your tools, you need to love them more than is really healthy ;-)
news.yc is not reddit.
That should be spelled Poincare (Poincaré would be even better :) )
New study suggests that P2P users still buy plenty of music
And I guess the energy used to grow the extra food you consume by doing more physical activity.
The pros won't be wrong about this, but I'm glad they've tried it out before I do.

The graphic actually makes me fearful of not being able to control the rate of stopping, as though I'd somehow lose the ability to modulate the depth of edge applied to/into the ice.

I am also worried about how long a sharpening like this would last (something the pros won't care about). I can go half a no-hit season with a traditional sharpening and higher end blades, so long as there is no blade-to-blade contact to flatten an edge.

With the new process, I bet any grit on the bench is going to nick up blades quickly.
Not working in PHP doesn't automatically makes sites scale better. Yahoo!, Facebook and more use PHP.
Conveniently, I've typed this up in the past:

http://catch-and-sing-the-sun-in-flight.blogspot.com/2009/02...
Lojban is not designed to be complicated. The important parts of the BNF grammar are about a page, and easily understood in an hour or so of properly directed study.

The hard parts are the vocabulary and the mind-set. It is specifically designed to be different, but even then, there are sufficient similarities that it doesn't have to feel completely alien. Some people present it as such because they think it will attract people, but I know that sometimes familiarity is a better draw.

It can be presented either way.

And people tend to say uncomplicated things in Klingon, whereas most lojban speakers are exploring saying very complicated things - you're not comparing like with like. Further, although gatherings of Klingon speakers are fairly common - piggy-backing on Star Trek conventions - gatherings of lojban speakers are rare. Even so, there are several people who speak it fairly fluently, and the number is growing (in some sense).

It is often criticised (I'm not saying you are doing so) for being something other than what people think it "ought" to be. This is a marketing issue. I think it's interesting, and, like learning Lisp, it has expanded my mind in interesting ways.
About those old photos. The reason for the serious look is that for a daguerreotype you needed to sit still for 15 minutes without moving or varying your expression. It is basically impossible to hold a fixed smile that long, so you had to look serious.
This guy also wrote FireRainbow, a JavaScript syntax highlighter for Firebug:

http://firerainbow.binaryage.com/
"When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton – which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park – he found just acres of green, empty fields."

Did he try midnight on a full moon?
Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server
Comic Sans ftw!
upvote, with the disclaimer that science also acknowledges that some experiments are non-repeatable either in theory or practice.
z(36) = 35(10), actually ;-)
Do dolphins try to mimic our language?
Your post and Steve's response made me realize that Steve's book was basically a minimal viable product. Now that his buggy MVP has proved the market, he should follow up with an improved v2.0! :-)
Ah, my mistake. I didn't read the dates on the link, and assumed it was recently created.
I don't see much use out of either other than as a line on a resume. With that in mind, I'd choose IEEE - more well known than ACM. (And if you're getting the type of membership providing access to research libraries, IEEE will cover a far broader range of topics than ACM).
I work for Peanut Labs, it's been a fun day making sure we're 100% compliant with Facebook's guidelines: http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
I don't find it hard to estimate this. Sure, the cow killed to make your steak might be slightly different than every other cow in the world... but probably not. Unprocessed foods often have a predictable nutrition profile.
Though there's only one way to be sure: A/B test it!

I couldn't agree more, and yet so many ignore this step. Plenty of "great" designs, clearly better than "meh" designs even to the practiced eye, get clobbered by "meh" in A/B testing. Find good metrics, and then trust the data.
Startups can teach NASA to budget: pick decision criteria, then spend $billions
Eating every couple hours is not historically impossible. The gatherer end of the hunter-gatherer duo usually do not have to search far for food. You don't need to guess at this, we have records of how the !kung san lived and continue to live.

Besides, people get really hungry if they don't eat for long stretches between meals, what to do about that? Turns out if you have a couple pieces of fresh fruit, every couple hours, it will suppress the hunger and you also won't gain fat. This is because the body handles the sugar differently than more complex sugars, and also because fresh fruit is more filling than a calorically-equivalent ball of white rice. Our primate cousins like the chimps are mostly-frugivores too, by the by.
Yeah, I agree, especially in light of recent events and coming from the WSJ. Whether or not scaremongering was the intention it doesn't exactly help.
I don't really trust the calorie measurements from heart-rate monitors. I have mine "calibrated" appropriately and I sometimes hit 1300 calories in an hour and a half on my bike. Yeah right...
Hey, is there somebody around to accept this award?
It also works in the reverse order as my professors who fill in for those who take sabbaticals are those that work at the national labs near here as well as the engineering companies. Though these professors are a bit harder to reach than full-time professors.
If it's better everyone will do it, and they're right back where they started.
This is awesome. One question: What was your initial process to get permission to use these (copyrighted) books?
You'd be surprised. After a couple weeks of obsessively counting calories and ingredients you get really good at estimating the caloric value of food. It's not hard to look at a sandwich and say "Oh, about 800." And if you're plus or minus 100, who cares? You don't have to be perfect, just show continued weight loss.
To cut a long story short I had to take that server down at short notice. This was meant to be a temporary outage but I haven't yet got a replacement server that is able to run the news.yc software in arc.

Also the site was a bit dull and I was wondering if I could do something to make it more interesting.
You say bubble, other people say sound investment. If Twitter crumbles because they overreach there will be a thousand startups ready to pick up the pieces.

So what's the problem, exactly?
Assuming for a moment that psychology is pap, not science...

And assuming EQ is based on some objective anatomical comparison of the brain...

Then Dolphins are 5.6/7.4 as smart as Man.

A rational society would be bound to protect the dolphins '75% human'-rights.
Yes, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Joyce, Kafka, seriously! Why the hell not? They're all incomparably more fascinating, stimulating, fun and mind-blowing than watching House, after all! (and I'm a fan of House).

I'm not trying to invalidate your perspective, but your rhetorical question suggests you really don't understand, beyond the point of your own preference, why people would read Shakespeare. That's incredibly bizarre to me.

My own perspective is that I'd rather lose a limb than swear off fiction for the rest of my life. I can't help feeling deeply sorry for people who can appreciate good literature but won't read it, for whatever reason - even if I understand how gratuitous and unwelcome this feeling may seem to them. It really is such an important part of what makes life worth living.

I'm honestly not aiming for hipster cred here (I haven't read Infinite Jest). Just another perspective.
Can anyone see what the value these traders add to the market? It seems so perverse that they can earn so much money while creating so little value.

And the financial industry is essentially allowed to bet on funds that don't exist (unbacked insurance), safely knowing that the government will print cash to help pay these imaginary sums should disaster happen.
"This guy doesn't seem to know very much about physiology or metabolism..."

Exactly! With a bit of effort and really no impact to my life schedule, I reversed a weight gain trend. I very well could have lifted regularly or gone running, but I didn't want to.
yeah, i only put the constant on the left in languages that let you do assignments in the if, like C++.
Very cool idea.

I'm reminded of the setup at Chena Hot Springs Resort (east of Fairbanks, Alaska), where the temperature difference between a hot spring and a normal stream, is used to run an air conditioner that keeps the interior of an "ice museum" frozen year-round. It's a very different process, of course, but it seems to me to involve similar thinking.
Father of the Chinese space program dies
I bet. If it makes a significant difference but requires more waiting at the pro shop, I won't complain too much. I've never decided on a hollow I like (5/8 is just a little too slippery), so the ability to customize a little more is very appealing.

I really like stories of competitive-edge entrepreneurs in professional sports. Products that provide a demonstrable advantage, whether in technology or salary analysis or ticket pricing, seem to become a hot commodity on their own merits.
FWIW: My sons would like to rewrite AI. We've discussed AI in terms of how I raised them, which is rather different from how most parents seem to raise kids. For us, your question makes sense. But we are just one family.
related [ previous post? ] : dolphins blowing bubble rings - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q
Childbirth is not _easy_, but it's certainly a normal part of life, and treating it like a sickness, requiring hospitalization, is perverse.

We had the last 4 of our 8 at home, with, yes, one close call, but with a competent midwife, that's par for the course.
in c# you wouldn't use the .Equals() method. You just do myString == someOtherString. Also it has a nice static method on the string class:
if( string.IsNullOrEmpty(mystring) ){}

I use that like crazy. I'm not sure if Java has something similar now. Years ago when I used java, I remember being constantly frustrated with having to write a helper method in every project to do { return myString==null || myString.equals("");}

I did find "something".equals(myString) helpful though.
Time is a big part of it, yes. I'm a slow reader too.
op anecdote :

"Not only do the dolphins understand the meaning of individual words, they also understand the significance of word order in a sentence.
...
learned a vocabulary of more than 60 words and can understand more than 2,000 sentences"
Very good presentation. Of course, you can add few minor points (use publish!, instead of publish etc.), but the overall message is excellent.
Exhaustive list of things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux 9.10
Noah Kagan of Gambit discussing his failures
When he does real investigative stories (like this one), he is as powerful as the best of the old newspaper / TV investigative journalists.

When he does Silicon Valley gossip, he gets clicks but no action.