skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are you using SSDs already ?
Hello HNers,

It looks like we are about to say goodbye to magnetic media. The price difference right now is still definitely there, a factor of about 20...25. But the biggest drives are no longer magnetic, they're solid state (4T!), and prices are coming down very fast.

By my reckoning by 2015 or so we will think about our magnetic harddisks with the same fondness now reserved for CRTs.

Are you already using SSDs ?

What is your experience with them ? Positive ? Negative ?

How do you feel about the price/performance ?

What applications do you use SSDs for and for which things do you think magnetic storage will be a hold-out ?
Massive Facebook and MySpace Flash Vulnerability Exposes User Data
I could learn nothing useful from the slides :(
...and processed food leads to depression
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916688
It may be poorly named, but they're completely different.

iGoogle is a custom homepage. Dashboard is a summary of the personal information about you that they store.
The researcher is called Yvo Schaap (not Schapp!), a dutch guy, here is the original article:

http://www.yvoschaap.com/index.php/weblog/facebook_myspace_a...
In business, up to a limit, money has a network effect. More money, especially more revenue, lets you move faster and take more risks. Only true up to a limit, okay, but disposable income is agility.
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He originally posted on reddit :
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a11mv/facebook_...
Everything which has a hinterland and ecosystem around it benefits from network effects. If you're going to throw up walls at the web-browser edge, sure, but...

Highrise, in particular, benefits from form processors, iPhone apps, analytics tools all outside of highrisehq.com. Nothing exists in isolation - everything in software services is a network-effects business. You can argue over how strong network effects are, but they're always present.
I mostly second that. The only thing I learnt was that there is a programming language called Ur. Maybe if we had the audio, it would be different.
We are looking into adding an option to directly use the apps without having to sign-in. These will be available @ fakeoffice.org.
The water cycle sure. But that's of no help to places with water shortages. If you return it to the sewer then other cities down the line can reuse the water.

If you remember a while back when atlanta had severe water shortages. Part of the problem is that something like 40% of houses had septic systems, so cities downriver from atlanta did not get enough water.
Maybe. If so, then the policy being suggested here would be to disallow these provisions (or at least discourage them). Maybe something like increased pay for loss of "firewall."
But letting his daughters know that isn't the only criteria he should be using. Not embarrassing her in public is useful other criteria.

Agreed though, I would like to know...
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The responses to this are worth reading too:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg03943.ht...
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tls/current/msg03942.ht...

Calling this "really bad" is perhaps pushing it a bit far; this is not something that is going to cause widespread panic tomorrow: because it's going to require more security flaws outside of the TLS connection - i.e. the unauthenticated request has to be useful :) Call it a gotcha for the moment!

What this should be is a heads up for TLS servers/clients to rework the renegotiation sequence slightly (again see the response link).
I'm afraid you might be right about that :-/
Except, linux users don't use four platforms on the desktop. They use (nearly entirely) 1. Those use x86-64 are almost entirely clued in enough to grab the correct architecture. And even if they weren't, you could get around this simply by making your installer a shell script, that choose the right dpkg based on the output of uname -m. Hardly overly complex.
Burla Xatın Urmu-dadır
Not all celebrations have a good reason. In some cases, its an excuse to celebrate.

Yes, you can celebrate whenever you want, but having "something" seems to help.

Also, it allows people a day to be the center of attention amongst their friends.
There's a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn't figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it's none of those. It's taste.

Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.
Is there any other online service which tries to tell as much as they can about you like this? I think it is good work. However, there is lots of information missing. But they do acknowledge this. Check out the "Is this everything" link at the bottom of the page.

"In a nutshell? Not yet."

They also say,

There are other kinds of data that Google records when you
use its services, but which are not associated with your
Google Account. To protect your privacy, that data is
intentionally kept separate from your Google Account and
thus is not visible on this page. Here are a few examples:

Server logs
Cookies
Interest-based advertising

No information about what is coming next, but I think that this is better than any other online service (that I know of). I am sure they could do better, but I think this is showing they are working on it.

I don't use Gmail, Calendar (much) and a host of other services which they offer, as I think they have more than enough information about me already.
We figured out a nice way round this; use mercurial.

We fork our main code base to a seperate location for each new employee and he can commit to that all he wants; then patches can me merged back by a lead developer.

This keeps them able to write code in the first weeks and gives us a bit of audit control over their work :)
Yeh I couldnt figure on that; how MUCH is the +TC money. It could be 100,000 or another million... it has to be the latter surely.
Google: Android fragmentation not 'bad thing'
India-Pak cricket ties to resume in 2010: Butt
A good reminder to audit your crossdomain.xml files, and make sure everyone who might edit them understands the security implications of doing so. I've seen this exact issue affect a whole bunch of very large services - it's an incredibly common mistake.
Can you say for sure that a good suite of functional tests wouldn't have saved your bacon as well? And they might have been much easier to write and also catch a whole lot broader set of problems at the same time. The post isn't advocating having NO tests. It's not even saying that unit tests don't work. Just that they're not necessarily the best value in every situation.
Feldspar: embedded domain-specific language for DSP algorithms in Haskell
SSH seems to do better. Yes, there have been issues with it, but the only recent issue wasn't that bad (see http://www.cpni.gov.uk/docs/vulnerability_advisory_ssh.txt). I'm discounting the Debian fiasco here, which started in OpenSSL anyway. And SSH is not a toy case: it's widely deployed and rather complex.

For the common use case, though, lazy CAs are much more dangerous than cryptographic flaws.
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It seems most people here disagree with you. Can you give examples for some/most/all?
Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform
I do this when I fly musical instruments like my bass guitar (for which I haven't managed to purchase a hard-shell flight case, bah) to evade having a damaged instrument at my destination. Some airlines will let you store these things in the bulkhead compartment forward, and others require you to purchase an additional ticket.

So, yes, checking the airline's policies would've been top priority. With JetBlue, this is amazingly easy: http://help.jetblue.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/webisapi.dll?New,Kb=ask...
The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time.
I agree.
And oddly enough, 37Signals does, too, even they don't seem to know it. :P

Go to http://highrisehq.com/ , scroll down a bit until you see the second large green button, there you can see the text:
"Thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs manage over 15,000,000 contacts with Highrise."

If it doesn't matter how many people use Highrise, why that text then?

Well, because this fact is indeed important, as the blog says "As long as there’s a sound business behind the product, she doesn’t care about anyone else."
That's of course correct but a lot of people use the amount of other people using the product as a way to determine how sound of a business there is.
Switched recently to the Intel X25-M. Experience is very, very positive. My computer now boots in less than 15 seconds and Apple Mail opens in less than a second.

The price was pretty high when I bought it (it went down since then) but it is worth every penny.
I used to check some of this information on "Account Settings" but this is much more complete.
Excellent article, shame it's not getting more upvotes.
Could you give more detail about what are you doing?
Felsenstein's Monster Comes Alive - the birth of the Osborne 1
SciDB
Well, the romans have it all written down as well. In the writings of their most prominent thinkers. To state otherwise, is just plainly wrong. You can learn so much from them, you just have to dive in and read a couple dozen books first, instead of all the wisdom being lazily presented to you in just a single manual and a single book. Far easier to learn, check. Far worthier to know about? I have my doubts.
I don't understand why qooxdoo http://qooxdoo.org/ doesn't get more attention. It's not as pretty as cappuccino, sure, but it seems a very nice set of tools.
It's a question of price and low power. I'm currently running two mini-ITX C3 systems in parallel, which don't have ECC either.

I'm hoping most of the traffic will just remain on the Intel NIC (I'm running a transparent bridge), which is server-grade, so it will itself be not a source of corruption. The rest will be caught by checksums, hopefully.
> It's all in the same part of the brain that says that 256 is a nice round number.

I recognize the feeling you're talking about, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it round. I'd call it familiar. It's the same sense that makes me see 42 and think "nice number", or 1983, or 255 even.

Round, on the other hand, requires more than simple recognition, it also requires easy calculation. Calculating 4 * 256 isn't that hard, but when I go for 6 * 256, I'll have to split it in 4256 + 2256. It's even worse for 1048576. Whereas decimally round numbers are very easy to do calculations on.
Ask HN: How do you use Twitter?
I have been trying to get what Twitter is about and trying to make effective use it. Currently I use it (via TweetDeck) to be aware of happenings in areas of web analytics, conversion optimization and split testing and indeed find it very helpful to keep on top on industry happenings. I also instantly reply to people, which helps me connect.

Just wondering how HNers make use of Twitter, if at all? Any specific use cases that you find helpful?
I checked my bag so I wouldn't have to buy 3 ounce plastic bottles.

I still check my bag, even though I "know better", because unpacking at the checkpoint is a big pain. I don't think I carry anything on that doesn't have to be taken out of my backpack.
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Aspen Square Hotel is located right in the heart of this renowned mountain resort, just steps from the many outstanding restaurants, unique shops and art galleries. Even the Silver Queen Gondola is right across the street at the base of Aspen Mountain.
I'm not actually all that certain I want Lisp as my extension language. Lisp is very, very nice, and while I may have a preference for it, someone else might not. FWIW, MicroEmacs uses an in-house extension language that, while really repulsive to look at at times, gets the job done.

That said, I also have a preference for Lua when it comes to more maintream languages, and to boot, there's a project called LuaJIT that performs just-in-time compilation of Lua to native code.

There's also MetaLua, which adds the feature of macros to the language.

Better still, there's lua-Coat, which is a port of a subset of Moose from Perl (which is, in turn, a port of CLOS and other things to Perl) to Lua.

Consider also just using Python or Io or any number of other languages.

I guess my point is that it really doesn't depend on the language. If the environment isn't going to be extensible within reason, I probably won't use it.

(Did you know that vim lacks the functionality to emulate Emacs' `create-frame`? That's a huge turn-off for me personally.)
> I question the design decisions of any code base with tens of thousands lines of code.

What operating system are you running on?
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Using my phone is hard, let's go shopping... for a simpler phone, an MP3 player, a camera, a personal organiser, a handheld console and a GPS.

Oh, and get off my lawn.
Jquery Basics Series - 2
Hacking Terminology
Yes but that requires serious logistics to do on a massive scale, furthermore peaceful was never a caveat. People are saying "what can we do? what power do we have?". As programmers we could do that. I'm not saying that is the right choice.
Yep, tools evolve and you should keep up, nothing new there. However the only thing that has ever really mattered has been to achieve good outcomes for our users. Everything else is self-indulgent tripe really. But hey, we love that.
Interview: The Man Who Named the iMac and Wrote Think Different
Best Sql Hacking Tutorials I Have Ever
I can't help but think that this approach cannot work anymore in the current communicational golden age. We really have social media, twitter, blogs. Content accessible to the public is not constrained by publishers anymore. If you're a big organization, people want to hear things from your employees directly and not from the usual boring PR channels, and they find a way to do so because it's so easy.

I believe companies have to embrace allowing their employees to communicate independently while making it clear that what they say is not the official position of the corporation. There's simply no other way, the age of controlled communication channels is just over. A good example is MSDN blogs - anyone at Microsoft can launch his or her blog and talk about whatever they want (except, of course, confidental information).
The author writes:

"I’ve received about 6 comments from C# developers all giving me their take on a better version of the liquid-value code above. A couple of them using Linq, which simplifies the code substantially. I’ve taken a drastic step in deleting all those comments — sorry guys!!"

sigh OK, clearly this guy is not worth attempting to have intelligent discourse with. What good are comments if you just delete those from anyone who disagrees with you?
I missed an AA flight in Munich, and they were complete assholes. Actually, I guess it was their 'partner', BA, but even the people we got on the phone were completely unhelpful. My wife, parents in law, and I ended up on three separate flights to Portland, Oregon.

OTOH, on the way back, the nice person at the AA ticket counter saw there were problems with one of our connections, and put us all on a Lufthansa direct flight to Frankfurt.
Exploring Mathematics with Sage
"In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven years."

This just isn't true. Last years winner, Peter Eastgate, was a professional poker player. In fact at last years final table there was 6 professional poker players, an accountant, a student and a trucking company manager.

Just because they're not one of the big-name TV-pros that get promoted by ESPN as big names doesn't mean that they're not professional. In fact many of the big-name pros are not actually very good in comparison to the online pros.
What are these things used for? Why can't they ever go away? I don't really believe it...
I went and read it because you're one of my favorite posters/commenters, and really enjoyed it and learned - so thank you.

The title is underwhelming though. The piece is a lot better than the title - author does realistic math on the range stock options are likely to be worth, then discusses whether it makes sense to jump into a risky venture with a chance of a big win, and talks about what to look for in more stable learning gigs if you're not going for a big win. Then he tells some stories, and he also mentions some nice specific points to think about ("accelerated vesting on change of control" - that one seems very important to me after reading this).

So yeah, very good piece, underwhelming title, but it's definitely worth a read.
1) Seeing what people are saying about my stuff or stuff I care about.

2) Promoting my stuff.
A couple of years ago I spent just over a year working as a mainframe developer on a System/360 set of mainframes and the author's description of mainframe development seems accurate.

I grew very fond of JCL, EBCDIC and the text editor despite, or perhaps due to, their idiosyncrasies. Not that I would ever go back ;)
Businesses, banks & booze warehouses look solid but can collapse very quickly
India consumer court forum
Discuss and share your consumer related problems, whether its about home appliances, loans, any stores, cars, credit cards, and other products and services.
n.b. the space after asterisks are to avoid italics

http://services.digg.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

http://api.search.live.net/crossdomain.xml

<allow-http-request-headers-from domain="* " headers="* "/>

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

http://webservices.amazon.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

http://s.ytimg.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

http://profile.ak.facebook.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>

http://www.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>

https://api.ebay.com/crossdomain.xml

<allow-access-from domain="* "/>
@snprbob86: I don't mind you moving comments from my blog to HN, but I do mind you misquoting and thereby lying publicly - it's not good for you and it's not good for me.

Here the full quote:
"Hi all — I’m serving up the first comment!

I’ve received about 6 comments from C# developers all giving me their take on a better version of the liquid-value code above. A couple of them using Linq, which simplifies the code substantially. I’ve taken a drastic step in deleting all those comments — sorry guys!!

Not because they didn’t present valid points, but because they entirely missed the point — I tried to spell it out with the K example — We’re discussing principles here, not code examples. I have no doubt that my rusty C# can be written in a more idiomatic sense, using better libraries etc. But thats much beside the point. The point is, that while the language so freely permits and even encourages me to code that way — I will end up seeing that type of code in my systems. If I had the privilege of hiring a team of superior geniuses and unspeakable coding skills, then sure, they might consistently produce rock solid functional code even in C# — but that’s not a real world scenario.

So lets stick with the principles. And if anybody does provide examples, please connect them with something discussed in the post. That makes for a better discussion than just swapping code.

Thanks to all for taking the time, sorry for being so harsh
/Lau"
OLTP through the looking glass, and what we found there [pdf]
Technology hasn't made us hermits
is it just me or is that not in fashion today

The advanced militaries of the world (British Army, USMC, IDF etc) are set up for maneuver warfare. This is what is known as third generation warfare (see William S Lind), and it has its roots in the Blitzkreig practiced by the Germans in WW2. When a third-generation military meets a second-generation military (one that thinks in terms of position-holding and massed formations) in a stand-up fight the result is always a rout (e.g. Six Day War, Gulf War 1, even Rommel virtually conquering France with a single armoured division). The Soviets knew this. Their genius strategy in WW2 was to force the Germans to fight in a second-generation style (and the Germans fell for it). This is also a major reason the Soviets were reluctant to enter Western Europe. All Western militaries thought very hard during the Cold War about how to defeat the Red Army, but the Prussians knew it all along.

Unfortunately the Taliban are a fourth-generation military (adept in psyops and propaganda, insurgency, guerilla tactics, information warfare) and the West is not well configured for that (and can't become so easily, as there are still second-generation potentials enemies around - we have to think in third-generation terms still).
A set of notes on Islamic design, including some on Arabic geometry
Don't use it anymore, but used it for a while to follow some people im interested in as well as a quick jott padd for remembering links or looking back on. For the later I found the sites that pdf your history very useful.
What's the point of Twitter Peek?   
A new dedicated device, launched in the United States, gives users access to their Twitter stream on the move. But in the age of the smartphone, is it really necessary?
ARM netbook with its limited SSD disk space is really a great usecase for something that makes binaries two (three, or even more) times larger, while I need only the binary for ARM. (Yeah, it's not that much for > 100G HDD, still, it can be quite a lot for 4 or 8G SSD. Especially when it is completely useless for the computer.)

It's not different, because fatelf doesn't help with this. You can still make some tiny wrapper, and have completely the same thing. Vendor still have to make a package fit for your system, for the set of libraries that you have, correct versions of them, and so on. Yes, Mac OS X system has two or three recent different versions, mostly mutually compatible. If you were trying to make a package for only one or two mostly compatible Linux distributions and one or two of their versions, then it would be also that easy. But it is not, and fatelf doesn't make any difference.
Blender Game Competition 2010
But they don't. Feel native, that is. Scrolling with the scroll wheel is horribly broken in Mockingbird. It does not work like a native control.

It's the details that get you. Sure, look doesn't matter (as long as UI "symbols" are not changed), but behaviour does. Where can I click the scrollbar? What happens when I click where? How fast does it scroll? And so on, and so on. Recreating the native experience is a horrible excercise and you will get yourself killed by thousands of small details you didn't even think of.
But what is really weird is that Mr X and AA.com come off pretty well in the email. A bit of humility and a focus on the future. I even liked AA a little bit more after reading it..... until I realised they fired him for sending it.
And even if all code is provably correct, there is always the chance of a random particle hitting a transistor in the chip and clearing a bit that should be 1.
Earning can give you a different perspective that improves your knowledge on what to learn.
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