skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 25th of May is Towel Day, to commemorate Douglas Adams.

If we keep the 8th of April as Terry Pratchett day, perhaps we could all wear wide-brimmed fedoras?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day

http://www.sfwa.org/2014/04/international-sir-terry-pratchet...
Is there some fundamental obstacle that prevents raid rebuild times from being within a small, constant factor of linear scan time of a single disk?

Naively I would think that it would simply have to stream large chunks of each drive in parallel, apply the parity coding and write out the stream of calculated blocks to the new disk.
Shingled drives are probably more likely used in a RAID-10 scenario where you're not recalculating parity, but just rebuilding linearly.

These drives (like the Western Digital Purple) are used predominantly for archival data. You should never have to randomly write to, for instance, surveillance video, or similar streamed media.

This isn't for your SQL database server.
It's pretty scary that a representative of a company who just put half a billion dollars into Lyft seems to have no idea why Lyft is popular with "millennials".

The only reason people of my generation don't go everywhere in a private black Suburban is because it's expensive. The only reason they use Lyft Line and not Lyft is because it's cheap. If you could get a private black car for $0.01 less than a Lyft Line you'd have the most popular app on the app store.

It's the same with AirBnb. If you could stay at the downtown Mariott for $110 and an AirBnb was $120, AirBnb would be dead. It just happens that AirBnb offers lower prices than traditional hotels and much more capacity in certain locations. People don't say "I really want to go on vacation and share a home with a stranger, so I'll check out AirBnb". They say "oh shit the Westin is charging $300 a night because there is a conference in town, I'll stay in someone's guest bedroom for $100".

Sure, the social thing is nice sometimes. Most Lyft drivers I get are more interesting than the taxi drivers I used to get (or at least more relatable to me). But all of the startups the "millenials" have fallen in love with either offer exceptional convenience (which is really about valuing your time), better pricing, or both. That's really all it's about. We're part of the free market like everyone else and we like to get things cheaply.
There were tons of insufferable dotcom jackasses in SF in 1999, but the industry was smaller so they weren't EVERYWHERE.
If someone today were to identify a consumer products bubble like the Beanie Baby craze or baseball card bubble of the 90s, what would be the best way to capitalize on it. I posited this to my economist friend and he suggested something ancillary like conferences, a publication, or website. I agreed but it'd have to guarantee me a very substantial return for me to go through the work of say putting together a national Beanie Baby convention, on top of the dread of hosting something that I have no interest in. So I'm curious if Hacker Newsers have any other thoughts on how to capitalize on a situation like this for a large return with less work involved.
Can't this problem be partially solved by having more read/write heads? I don't think it will fit in the same form factor, but if the limit is how fast you can spin the disk then having multiple independently controlled read/write heads per platter seems like one way out of them problem.
Why are these banners so popular - they are actually my least favourite part of browsing on iOS - every single webapp (GMail, Yelp, Urbanspoon) sticks one of these banners at the top of my page and reduces my real estate and doesn't remember that I dismissed it the first time. I'm not super excited to be seeing these on Android too.

Do usage stats indicate that a lot of people use this feature?
It's kind of both rarity and usefulness. For example, Black Lotus, is rare but also incredibly useful.

Creatures have mana cost (1 mana, 2 mana etc) in the game. To play creatures you need mana and mana cards can only be placed on the board 1 per turn. this means usually a deck with a some creatures having 1 mana cost so you can hopefully play them turn one, some with a cost of 2 for turn 2 ... etc.

Black Lotus let's you get 3 mana when you play it. So you can put serious pressure if you have a BL because it's basically "turbo" and let's you put bigger creatures on the board "earlier" than normal. (In theory a creature costing 6mana wouldn't come into play until at least turn 6 because of the 1 mana played per turn.) There are also ways to use cards that copy other cards abilities so if you copied BL you could make a lot of mana fast. That "breaks" the game because everyone would start to use that tactic and you'd get a less diverse metagame.

If WoTC made a "red lotus" that did the same exact thing as BL, the value of the Black lotus would drop (pissing off collectors) and they'd have to restrict this red lotus the same way (You can only have one BL per deck in the current rules) or the red lotus would end up more valuable than the black because it wouldn't be restricted to one per deck and people would want 4 of them. (the max of a regular card per deck.) This would also probably piss off current players because it "broke the meta" and would be expensive.

The reserved list isn't the best solution in the world but it's pretty solid to avoid making even more people mad. Most people that have "invested" in a BL are still playing magic or involved in some way so why make them mad?
Why do Russians like the UK?
the risk of an additional failure in say a RAID5 or RAID6 configuration is just too high.

Two disk failures in the same array within 15 hours is very rare.
Network learns a system of lighting and geometry, so you can manipulate a set of codes that represent some variables of that geometry and the positions of those lights.
That's also the kind of article/news I come to HN for.
They aren't tournament legal so people do (they call them proxies) but that's just for "fun".
Meh, reads like harmless humor to me. -no particular allegiance, perhaps Georgia Tech
Before people make too many comments about the complexity and speed of these drives, it is important to realise that these drives are designed for append-mostly archival of data.
Can we please stop calling Unity/Unreal "free"? Unity still sells a Pro version, and Unreal takes a cut of revenue after a certain amount of $ earned. I'm not arguing against either model, and it's GREAT for hobbyists, but these engines still cost professional studios money.
Also, if you need to, you can migrate to a self-hosted setup without switching to another platform. There's a built-in tool that makes this easy.
> Efficient 2D using OpenGL is very difficult.

It depends on what you are doing. Rendering thousands of sprites with independent rotation and scale is easy. Rendering text is a lot of work, but once you do it you can do all sorts of things with the text. Rendering simple things like bezier curves is very difficult. There are some things in the 2D world that HTML/CSS/GDI/GDI+ are very bad at, compared to OpenGL, and vice versa.
I am not sure but I read somewhere that mechanical equivalents are covered by the agreement on the Reserved list.
Oh sure, it's a big linear streaming read/write - the issue is that if you're taking a 8, 12, 15, etc. hour window to rebuild, there's a fairly high chance of something else going wrong. Particularly because you have to worry that, eg, your flaky power source has been shortening drive lifetimes, that's why you saw the failure within the expected lifetime of the drive, and that's why the another one is going to die in hour 14 of your rebuild.

Of course, that's in the context of an actual RAID array (or ZFS pool, etc.) - if you've got a replication strategy that spreads multiple entire copies over multiple systems, you're less vulnerable and these kinds of disks are a good choice.
AI Self Building Websites
I prefer looking at the "employment level" (number of persons employed) and the number not in the labor force. I couldn't find a way to link directly to these statistics but they're available at: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ln

The estimated number of persons employed today is less than 2% higher than in 2008. The estimated number not in the labor force is 15% higher.

About 2 million more people are working now than in 2008, while 13 million more are not working or looking for work.

(Disclaimer: These are statistically estimated and seasonally adjusted numbers from the same month.)
I think empathy needs several things. But above all, it needs one's brain power, or smartness.

In my understanding, empathy is pretty much a skill to emulate the other person's thinking. There's a discussion about Kolmogorov Complexity, which says to emulate an already complex system you need an even more complex system, which means a bigger brain. Of course human minds are not that simple, but I think this is onto something.

In addition to smartness, you'd probably need a patience and some serenity to react (or not react) to the situation accordingly.
Please read the rest of the discussion that happened parallel to this.
Not only that, most of the framers of the Constitution likely had high quality classical liberal arts education, not the watered down public school training that exists in USA today. To think that they never thought about how technology might advance is almost laughable.

It is silly to assume that just because the technology didn't exist yet, that it would be impossible for them to conceive of it.

"Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." - Ada Lovelace, 1842
Gorilla.bas!
Great idea. Based on the feedback and suggestions we gathered, we're now planing to split the site into different categories or at least focus in a specific community of people first.
Ask HN: What's a good company to do a Ruby on Rails internship?
I would love to hear from someone who did an internship and has feedback?

Learning curve is what I value most.

Location: Anywhere in the US
Maybe by like 2 CPU instructions? Javascript isn't C; that level of performance is noise in JS...
Death finally catches Rincewind.

R.I.P. Greatly missed
Molecule-making machine simplifies complex chemistry
Elegance is subjective... While its undeniable that you often need to type less characters in Python and list/dictionary comprehensions are wonderful syntactic sugar, its kind of nice that there is much less magic going on under the hood in Ocaml. In a highly dynamic language such as Python or Ruby you never know exactly what your code is doing: any method call can can be overloaded and even things like function calls and array indexing can be overloaded too. On the other hand, in Ocaml almost everything is statically dispatched and the static typing is really great (I'm sure Python wouldn't look as nice if you added the required modifications necessary to make it statically types as ocaml is)

While you might not see this dynamism as a big problem in Python, its something that I always found confusing about Ruby. Over there, people everything is a method call and people are super happy to monkeypatch extra methods to classes, which makes it very hard for me to understand the program by reading it. At some point, things get so dynamic that static analysis in your head gets too hard and you are better off just running the program and seeing if it worked...

In any case, I can't give you a concrete example right now because my laptop doesn't have ocaml installed on it but in my other post I already listed some of the bigger differences that the ocaml version has. The tldr is that some of the features you are using in Python aren't available in the ocaml stdlib (so you would need to write the sorting comparator the long way or create the helper function yourself) and that creating the polymorphic hash table is not very beginner friendly (this is a cost we pay for stronger typing). What I wanted to say is that the big things about the Python function (hash tables and generic sorting) are both things you can do in Ocaml just fine.
In my limited experience with collectable card games (not magic) it was common to see reprints with a different color border. These cards were otherwise identical to the originals and played exactly the same, but to a collector they were worth less because more might be printed at any time.

I've no idea why that isn't done for magic so collectors can collect rare originals while players can build decks full of lotuses and moxes and whatever other powerful cards they want so they can compete on skill, not wealth.
I would say someone netting $20/h driving a car around part-time is well-compensated. Pretty much anyone in the US can drive a car and it's neither dangerous nor particularly uncomfortable.
When I went to high school, there was a choice to go to this offshoot location for half the day, which had a programming class option. I went to that and it was what you'd expect out of a high school level programming class, I guess. Maybe a bit worse since in C++ and VB.NET it didn't really go into any abstract theory or even get to classes and functions. Except apparently now they've started using Scratch instead of real languages in it. I have to wonder if that's inappropriately dumbed down for that grade level. Someone should be able to handle real programming languages at that age if they're making a serious attempt to learn the field.
My own theory:

For most employers, there's something almost inconceivable about rising salaries. It's been routine for so long to have layoffs, to tighten belts, to pull together in these tough times and sacrifice, that market power over labor has been internalized into the entire way they do business.

If you read any HR industry literature you'll see a lot about the costs of a bad hire and missing out on candidates because they were out of a company's budget. You will not see concern about the opportunity cost of leaving a position vacant. If a company spends six months hobbling along understaffed, waiting for the sure thing to walk in the door for $5k less, that will seriously harm their business. It isn't considered.

There are a lot of things like that, aspects of employment that the employer won't change because it simply isn't done. This sort of creates an informal price ceiling, which has exactly the effects you'd expect: lower supply (discouraged workers, low labor force participation), "shortages", and more or less frozen wages.
Thank you so much for those valuable feedback and suggestion! It will really help us think of ideas on how to improve the site. Cheers!
Linked lists are only useful in very few situations and this is not one of them.
This is correct, they included all functional reprints on the reserved list. That's why people are praying for snow-covered dual lands, but honestly those will never see the light of day.
likely geographic proximity, but I'm not as familiar with Russian behavior as I am with Chinese behavior, so don't quote me on it.
Great question! I believe it's both. Cloud hosted becomes the lead gen and they've had to build a team to manage that deal flow. I don't think they're doing any cold outbound though.
Honestly, I thought plans to sunset it had already been put in place. I hate every moment that I want to check out a project and find that it's hosted on Google Code. The web has moved extremely fast in the last decade (and will probably move even faster in the next decade), and I can tell that I'm looking at 2006 code. There was never a push to give it the love it needed to compete with Github.

I hope there is some level of cooperation with those who want to archive it. It's important enough to be archived. The UX is not up to standards in 2015, though, so I will bid farewell to it with some amount of satisfaction and some amount of regret.
Well, that sounds more like worrying about a single point of failure (e.g. that power source that can take out several drives at once) than what the redundancy is designed to protect against, i.e. uncorrelated failures of one of the drives in the array.

Of course having no redundancy at all during a rebuild that takes more than a negligible amount of time is still worrisome, but that's why we have multiple-redundancy raid schemes.

But you still have to untangle your concerns. A single point (or cause) of failure has to be handled differently than increasing probabilities of encountering independent UREs on separate drives during rebuild.
The FAA never has anything out "soon". They're currently in violation of a direct order from Congress because they're so slow.
Personally, Angular broke me. We built an app that was just a table view basically, and it refreshed the data every minute or whatever. For users whose table got to be 100 or more rows, the performance was awful, and there was nothing we could do about it besides rewrite the whole thing a different way.

I still love JS, and coding for the web. But I don't use frameworks now.
This is analogous to why Princeton is so high up there as well. The school has a tremendous focus on theory even in the engineering disciplines.

(I studied electrical engineering there and as much as I hate to admit, because I wasn't motivated enough to seek out attainment of more industry-ready skills, it actually set me back significantly as an engineer)
Ghost finally supports static pages
That was an interesting read for me, because I started off with How to Design Programs + Racket, before switching to Haskell.

(I would count Haskell as my first 'proper' language, and prior to all this, I had zero coding experience.)

I experienced a lot of the same detours that you have gone through.

re: point-free code

There's a plug in that you can use, called pointfree (cabal install pointfree). I found that it was more useful to me for experimenting with point-free style than writing my own code in that way.
> It's high time we start seeing software understand that data identity as totally severable from data location -- and if our existing tools can't do it, we're gonna start seeing more and more clever hacks like this to make it happen.

I believe it was Alan Kay who said, "names don't scale". We've known about this problem for a half century. wget should be a semi-intelligent software agent, so that we humans can free up mental resources for the truly difficult problems.
Our Elegant Minds: Crowdfunding Community for Schizophrenics, Schizoaffectives
And data.

You must talk to people before you can understand them.
Ask HN: Algorithm for ranking comments in a post
I like the way HN displays comments based on how recent it is and its upvotes. I am building a leaderboard that ranks people and looking for a similar algorithm. Can you explain the algorithm?
Paul was a close friend of mine, and we worked together on his research during his neurosurgery residency at Stanford. He was a hell of a human being, brilliant, dedicated, creative, refreshingly optimistic, and selfless. Before he was diagnosed, I'd planned to postdoc with him when he was considering starting a functional neurosurgery lab (actively manipulating the nervous system to achieve therapeutic benefit, with deep brain stimulation being the most successful example).

This piece he wrote shortly before he died is well worth your time.
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/before-i-go.html
they should keep it on read only form. Lots of good FOSS will be lost if they pull the plug.
Is there a reason/ability to pay Github if all your work is open source (ie. no private repos)?
I myself have Bipolar Type Schizoaffective Disorder. This isn't my project - a friend tipped me off to it just now; one of her close relatives also has Schizoaffective Disorder.
I agree that remaining ancillary is the way to go. It should allow you to profit during the bubble while not assuming the full risk of being directly involved. The example that comes to mind is Samuel Brannan [1] who monopolized the sale of mining equipment and profited handsomely by selling to the miners themselves. Focusing on something that has a tangible value outside of the bubble (physical goods like shovels and picks) can help in cutting your losses if the bubble bursts at an inopportune time.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
This is probably why people like BackBlaze use RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes) instead of RAID.

Also, their drive failure is 10 disks/day out of a population of 44,100 drives, about 0.02%.

So, between the lack of correlation of failure (their Nodes, or, "Pods" are in different racks), their ability to lose an entire POD regardless (they have 3 parity pods), and the relatively low disk failure rate - the large drives aren't a problem. A rebuild in 2-3 days is more than fine.
In summary, the most interesting part for the general audience might be the following question -- can we learn a 3D rendering engine just from images or videos without any hand-engineering?

Apart from the interesting applications for computer graphics (like rendering novel viewpoints of an object from various viewpoints), this can also be directly used for vision applications. This is because computer vision can be thought of as the inverse of computer graphics.

Goal of computer graphics: scene description -> images

and

Goal of vision: images -> scene description.

Therefore, training a neural network to behave like a graphics engine is interesting from both these perspectives. We are a LONG way from even scratching the surface.
Ross lived above me my Freshman year. UTD was a special place.
Is he multi-engine rotorcraft rated? ;)
Unless the root cause is something to do with the array - flakey controller, or power supply.
The demo they were showing was as basic as it gets - drawing a whole lot of textured boxes (probably in individual draw calls) to the screen. From what I gathered you could not send large jobs to the GPU without blocking off smaller jobs (i.e. no thread priority) - at least according to one engineer from NVIDIA, which is something I was hoping they might implement as it would benefit applications like VQ which are attempting to generate things while running the game.

Its possible that these perf gains are actually working in a single thread, and the gains are from eliminating the default driver overhead that would be in these drawcalls. To some extent this could be mitigated by batching but it is still ideal to have the option to do far more drawcalls in a frame.
Funny thing that empathy should make it easier to recognize those people... Yet, most people simply can not empathize with them.
Why Asia’s Tech Giants Are Investing in U.S. Startups
Tell that to the OS guys.
That's a new leaf for HBR arguing for the general public over the hedge fund.
I actually remember him crawling from our porch up to his apartment because the door was locked. They also had a recliner with a bong built into it.
> Gladly NTP is not the mythical voodoo rocket science that you make it out to be.

Neither is DNS, but running the root DNS infrastructure (which serve hundreds of millions of users) is a wee bit more complicated than hosting forward lookup zones or even a public caching resolver on a handful of corporate nameservers. So too with the stratum-1 and stratum-2 NTP servers that serve as national or regional standards. They are not simple bits of kit that one throws together and shoves onto the public Internet, especially when they are ultimately used by just about every modern Internet-connected computer out there. That this guy's doing not only all of the software/release engineering but also operating some critical time servers for USD 84000 per year is too good of a deal to be true---and that he's running through his personal savings to finance the NTP project is just shameful on the IT community's (our) part.