skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made a habit out of measuring the disk performance of cloud servers, so here it is:

ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 11.0101 s, 97.5 MB/s

ubuntu@instantcloud:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nbd0

/dev/nbd0:
Timing cached reads: 2180 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1090.44 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 268 MB in 3.02 seconds = 88.85 MB/sec
Japan Gets First Bite of Apple Watch
Are there any restrictions on what you can do? Input/output ports blocked?
It's not that costly to hire a smart highschool kid to handle the basic security, such as backups and virus/malware prevention. It probably would have been enough in this case. Of course, such means won't protect against targeted attacks, but I doubt small town police departments are in a high risk of that anyway.
Didn't the Obama administration issue an executive order basically saying any hacking on any US government infrastructure is terrorism? Ransomware would be terrorism in that case (not that I agree).
Someone should add the ability for it to create new bots, that write new code and submit change requests back to it's original master bot.

At some point it becomes skynet. daa-daa-dun-dun-dun....
The issue isn't how much they are being charged, the issue is that far too many public employee unions have large pension deficits and cities, states, and the like, need a bogeyman. Looking for related stories, this pension went from over funded in 99 to underfunded by 2012, to the tune of only having 63% of what is should have.

Likely this is just the trial balloon, expect similar articles as the truth about government employee pensions funding comes to the forefront. Unlike private pensions the government at different levels can twist the rules quite a bit.

couple of scenarios come out of this
1) cuts to benefits, likely only through bankruptcy like Detroit. NYC should be able to avoid this result
2) tax increases to fund the pensions properly
3) finding new creative ways to fine financial companies for exploiting retirees and the like
4) bailouts, after all we have elections in a few years and what good polio wouldn't be for bailouts.. by the state or feds (again not necessarily for NYCERS, they are bad off but not the worst out there)

I
Very informative, thanks. I am a C++ developer and recently had to fix a bug in an OSX app using Obj-C, which looks insane syntax to me. This only goes to reaffirm my belief that it's insane.

Anyway, I'll carry on reading my ObjC book as obviously the language has uses, although there's a Swift book in the post. Which do I read first though, eh?
How to perfect your UX with persona scenarios
Unless you want to resize windows from the left edge :-)
How does that compare to other cloud servers?
Not much hope for the rest of the world then given that in the UK (Wiki: In terms of global poverty criteria, the United Kingdom is a wealthy country, with virtually no people living on less than £4 a day. There is both significant income redistribution and income inequality; for instance, in 2008/09 income in the top and bottom fifth of households was £73,800 and £15,000, respectively, before taxes and benefits. After tax and benefits, household income disparities are significantly reduced (to £53,900 and £13,600 respectively)one third of kids fail to achieve a C grade in a very undemanding exam (GCSE) at least compared to its predecessors 'O-level/GCE'. Moreover 2000 stats from BBC say 1 in 5 people are functionally illiterate. Judging from the standard of written comments in UK newspapers I'm surprised it's even that high. Meanwhile in 2013 - 'England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths' [ http://www.bbc.com/news/education-24433320]. Poverty is the fundamental problem? I don't think so.

Let me add, I accept that there will be circumstances where family poverty will be a significant factor in educational attainment.
The previous article on that site is essentially an announcement that they (they're a consulting company, I gather) have developed a big, early Apple Watch app: http://bilue.com.au/helping-woolworths-innovate-on-the-apple...
Create your own search engine
I've had a couple of interviews a few years back where they simply left the room and let me solve the problem, then came back to discuss the solution. Both went quite well.
Does it really matter why? There are innumerable occasions you might have 5GB+ of data you want to quickly swap between machines. DVD images (especially OS install ones) spring to mind, and it's not uncommon to want the image itself, not to unpack onto your drive.

Portable HDDs are bigger, more expensive, more fragile, and generally worse in every way (except transfer speeds) than USB flash drives for occasional short-haul data transfers. Writing 10G+ images onto a cheap 16G USB drive and throwing it across the office is a relatively common occurrence here.
this is great. I just wish digitalocean would deploy faster. it says 60 seconds but more than often it takes several minutes to load a snapshot or destroying can take ages (since you are still billed for idle and off servers).
Sure, but he's not lamenting the fact that his record sales are down, he's annoyed that something with crap music quality (in his opinion) is supplanting something with superior music quality.

Luckily, radio's gotten better since then. :-)
I just remember reading comments from other physicists along the lines of that they didn't even know what Hawking was talking about because the descriptions were so far off.

But now I cannot find the quote, so perhaps I imagined it or it was referring to something else.
Ovum's on the Radar Report:Golgi's IoT Mobile Cloud Service
The ELK stack powered by Docker
Ah yes, the river factor. The sister of the bus factor.
Web Components Pitfalls
How YouTube Is Like a Potato
Sure but do you really expect them to actually decrypt the files and then walk away? If they do I think they would be more honourable than some non-criminals!
And even people that think they're covered sometimes turn out not to be.

"But I have a NAS with two hard drives and all my files are on it. That's my backup."

"Yeah, the company that set it up did it wrong. Your files were spread across both drives, instead of copied to each drive. When one of the drives failed, all of your files went with it."

"..."

True story.
Watch how people make cool things in real time
I forgot to list this book but it is changing at the moment my way of managing thoughts and feelings, especially strong ones. Thanks !
Frankly I think people are far too concerned about these performance numbers, I think they're excellent. It's on par with the Sandy Bridge CPU in my 2011 Macbook Air, which is an excellent performer. In fact I have plugged that MBA into a 27" external and been quite happy with it.

Combined with 8gb of RAM and a very fast SSD, a decent iGPU and I think performance will be very satisfactory indeed.
If they were pretty important I would make sure they are backed up in the first place.
That's why you take backups. This is similar to someone taking the computer for a swim. Yeah maybe you may get the files back; but it's most likely too late.
I think that's one of the arguments in favour of this approach. Your neighbours on AWS might notice. On individual real servers, they wouldn't.
You can read my comment history for exact numbers. But for SSD storage it's not very good. Better than amazon EC2 though (t2 instance).
Ok, what am I missing?

Now: Application: Hey OS, what is example.com's IP? Okay, now give me an unencrypted connection to example.com's port 80.

Desired: Hey OS, give me an encrypted connection to example.com's port 443. (+ optional encryption params like minimum key strength)

Why can't encryption be an OS level task, exactly?
Well, that's where certificates come into play. And managing those is a perfect job for the OS.

You wouldn't want to deal with certificates and keychains and all the UI stuff that comes with it from within an application.
Yeah, we're a consultancy based in Sydney. Woolworths is a big supermarket chain down here in Oz and we've done an Apple Watch app for them.
The best way to fix a bug? Just close the issue ticket
The thing is, space isn't empty, so what happens when you run into a speck of dust at a significant fraction of c? Along with our sci-fi engines we'll need sci-fi shields.
> You fogot to mention getting rid of teacher unions and starting evaluation of teacher performance. The idea of teacher tenure is simply insane!

How about instead of beating people up mentally the whole time we instead focus on actually increasing their levels of job satisfaction and see if this doesn't lead to them improving at their jobs?

Or maybe continuing training for teachers?

Or instead we could just make everyone really easy to fire because this clearly leads to excellence and a real diligence in so many jobs. E.g. see the fast food industry or banking (where vast pay deals are needed to offset the essentially rubbish working environment).
Then there will be a Chinese company like Intel. There is already the Loongson processor. Arm based?
No, they get those on a "loan" from the agency that actually needs them, mainly as a way to shunt maintenance costs onto the police. But they can't sell them because they don't actually own them.
CryptoLocker is amazing. I find the reactions to it so intriguing. Because before, viruses would just delete your data and let you know you were screwed. Game over.

Now, they delete your data, but offer a quick time-rewind to undo the damage. $500 seems like a not-so-bad deal, and if the data was deleted instead of encrypted, I would imagine you'd pay more than $500 to send it to a recovery shop.

So really, it's just doing a good job of teaching users about data loss, without actually forcing them to lose data, just a bit of money. That seems like an overwhelmingly good bargain, overall. Especially if it gets someone to make backups before they suffer a hardware failure that truly renders the data lost.

And terrorists? Wikipedia indicates "Russian hackers". I suppose you can stretch terrorist to cover that but well, that's just being dramatic.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204659 makes for depressing reading.

Impact: A local user may be able to cause a system denial of service

Impact: A local user may be able to cause unexpected system shutdown

These two made me laugh though.
KSafe: Stay motivated. Achieve your goals
I always think of Rachmaninov as a composer from "the olden days". I was really excited when I discovered there were recordings of him playing his own compositions. Just imagine if we had recordings of Bach or Mozart playing their stuff. Having their written music is one thing (and a precious thing at that), but having recordings would be so much more…
This 1:2:1 distribution is the right sort of behavior for a double-precision random number generator (what the standard says notwithstanding). It's what you get if you throw a uniform random dart at the real line and round it to the nearest floating point number.

Also, a <= x <= b is really the right way for uniform floating point ranges to be, with half-probability of the edges getting selected. The API of returning [0, 1) is pretty horrid, because then when somebody uses that to generate [1, 2), by doing rand01() + 1.0, they actually create the possibility of generating 2, because (1-2^-53) + 1 rounds up to 2. (That's just like the rounding that happens when generating to [2^52, 2^52+2].)

If you want a <= x < b, getting that for practical purposes could be relatively simple: compute rand01() * (b - a) + a, and if the output is >= b, then return a. That works wonderfully if rand01() behaves like randint(2^53) / 2.0^53. It's a little suboptimal if rand01() is implemented something like randint(2^64) / 2.0^64, because it creates a weird little density spike at the bottom for contrived ranges such as [2.0^-30, 1 + 2.0^-30), but if you're getting that anal you'd also worry about the round-to-even behavior of computing rand01() + 1.0.
Apple Watch has been officially launched
Never heard of anyone using Changetip and not everyone has Paypal. Also not everyone is using their public email as their PP email.

I know some people who refuse to accept "donations" for some moral reasons that are unfathomable to me. TotalBiscuit is one of them, actually.

https://soundcloud.com/totalbiscuit/maybe-subbablepatreon-is...
Tested on random instance, without any io intensive application running

VULTR 2 GB INSTANCE
dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 8.11451 s, 132 MB/s

hdparm -tT /dev/vda

/dev/vda:
Timing cached reads: 25106 MB in 2.00 seconds = 12568.51 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 496 MB in 3.02 seconds = 164.16 MB/sec

DIGITALOCEAN 2GB INSTANCE

hdparm -tT /dev/vda

Timing cached reads: 8926 MB in 2.00 seconds = 4468.52 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 542 MB in 3.00 seconds = 180.43 MB/sec

dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 32.0005 s, 33.6 MB/s
It is now user space, so every app needs to reinvent the wheel. Updates to the security layer are per-app. At best, they use a good library (something we hopefully trust the OS will do, too).

It's like the OS not providing TCP but only UDP. Sure, every app can include its own TCP stack. But I'd rather the OS do it.
My session lasted for 35 minutes - The web app closed after 30 but my VNC connection continued, presumably because someone else took my slot.
EU Startup Spotlight: Memrise wants to give everyone ‘learning super powers’
Sometimes the idea is worth everything.

Although you are right that people are getting more and more distant from the original markdown syntax. Google still suggest this as the first result on that specific keyword [1].

Something more. Categorising markdown as an invention may be a bit wrong, but it is a huge push to what now is becoming a standard ( at least in dev's world ) for many companies that have a user input feature.

I can't just say everything he did is good ( I also miss standartization ), but for sure I can't neglect what he did. I still remember how markdown-featured textarea inputs redirected to [1] when I clicked on the help button.

This alone makes his attribution great and that's why I prefer calling him "inventor of markdown", rather than paid blogger.

1. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
Uh, yes? Because if they behave well, then word spreads and people know they can trust the ransom. If they kill the hostage each time, then no one pays. It's not like they make more money if they defect. Yeah, they could try to ransom again, but a: the success rate might be lower since right after ransom people are likely to have made a backup and b: word spreads that paying just results in more extortion, leading to less payments.
You should have a look to the IOPS instead bandwidth

root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randwrite
test: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16
fio-2.1.11
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [w(1)] [100.0% done] [0KB/18714KB/0KB /s] [0/4678/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s]

root@instantcloud:~# fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=16 --size=4G --readwrite=randread
test: (g=0): rw=randread, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=16
fio-2.1.11
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1): [r(1)] [100.0% done] [22307KB/0KB/0KB /s] [5576/0/0 iops] [eta 00m:00s]
That requires traffic on the socket to exist.
Japanese Court Orders Google to Delete Critical Reviews from Google Maps
> The Windows software community sucks.

I mostly agree, but there's still the fact that unlike in Windows I have to trust a randomer's ppa (or build from source, but that's sometimes pita and no-go for mortals) if I want to install the newest version of libreoffice or whatever, unlike in Windows where I can run binaries directly from the first party source.
Yeah, but they don't operate that way, and that's part of the problem.

From their point of view, if anything goes wrong with whoever they hire to work on their infrastructure, they get excoriated by the public. That smart high school kid turns out to be fond of child porn? The department ends up in the state newspaper.

So, they publish RFPs and select for established companies. The RFP publishing process isn't that great, so generally speaking there's a subset of companies that monitor for RFPs at various governmental levels, and those companies don't tend to be supplying the most cutting edge technology at the lowest prices.

Then, to cover themselves, the departments require a stupid amount of paperwork and a carefully-prepared proposal that's supposed to establish firm costs on vague requirements, like, "cost per computer to provide hardware support for offices in the county". So, the businesses writing the proposals stuff pork all over the place so that they don't end up upside-down on the deal, and besides, they have to pay somebody just to sit and write up reports like these and fill out paperwork and supply background information and client references and attend social mixers and so on and so forth just to get the work in the first place.

The entire process is not great, and it's the direct result of everyone just trying to watch out for their own best interests.
> Some of them were smart kids, but they had no proper upbringing

Which is one of the conclusions of series four of The Wire ..
I think the biggest issue with the Apple Watch is clearly the battery. Recharging my watch everyday seems problematic. Especially when keeping in mind that the "17 hours" will probably melt down and soon become barely enough to last the whole day.
That's the way markets who rely on heavy CapEx work. Too much money, too much power.
Many CS papers appear on the Arxiv, if you can keep up with it: http://arxiv.org/list/cs/new
Do these programs lay in wait, hoping to wipe out all backups? Otherwise a weekly USB-drive backup would probably have been enough protection.
The textual description (of the Nov 2014 draft I'm reading) also says it returns values x, where a <= x < b, while stating that it requires that a <= b. That's a problem if a == b.
I think the "1 part fun 9 parts of perspiration" ratio is typical of most software fields - especially fields working in established industries. That's why dealing with software in a professional context is called a job and not an enjoyable hobby which it otherwise would be :)
Something else about this kind of job cum go: "asynchronous I/O"* is extremely straightforward. Decoupling of the semantic threads ("goroutines") and OS-level threads mean a blocking I/O op only blocks your goroutine, which is cheap. If you are doing heavy I/O, you can still program sequentially. No need to manage I/O event queues, threadpools nor callbacks.

Cherry on top: you never need to worry about blocking libraries, either. Every library automatically fits the model.

It may not have been their consideration, but for anything I/O heavy, this is a godsend.

Sorry for the tangent. This is now biting me on a new project and I feel like I didn't properly appreciate this until I didn't have it anymore..

* from the pov of OS threads
Thanks, I hadn't noticed that, now it looks like only 25GB and no hotspot, I'll have to try Canaries Wireless next time I'm out there.
Malware hasn't gone around deleting data in ... I'm not sure exactly when the last time is I saw anything like that, but it's been a very, very long time.

The majority of malware now is a commercial effort, it's just trying to turn you into part of an obnoxious ad network, use your computer to send spam, pick up account information or credit card details that in aggregate are worth a little bit on some particular forums, that sort of thing.

Cryptolocker is amazing because the developers didn't screw it up. It runs very quietly in the background. Most people never realize it's there. It comes in multiple pieces, so your AV software might disable the UI portion of Cryptolocker but all your files will still disappear (oldest files first). Each file is encrypted with a different key, and then a master key is used to encrypt all of those keys. It's basically, "the kind of malware tptacek would build if tptacek built malware."

It's also been a huge boon for us in convincing people to get backups going finally, because the sort of people that are willing to gamble that their hard drive will never fail aren't also willing to gamble that they'll never click on the wrong thing online. I hate having to scare people into getting backups, but, that's how it is.
Text of the patriot act definition below. As much as I hate the Patriot Act, its terrorism definitions do a pretty good job I think, but B(ii) seems a bit redundant given B(iii). Note that it's A && B, not A || B.

‘‘(5) the term ‘domestic terrorism’ means activities that— ‘‘(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are
a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or
of any State; ‘‘(B) appear to be intended— ‘‘(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
‘‘(ii) to influence the policy of a government by
intimidation or coercion; or ‘‘(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by
mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
‘‘(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction
of the United States.’’
Tried it for 30mins. I installed apache2 and made a quick mirror of my personal homepage with wget.

After the 30min session the window closed and it told me that session expired. Although the actual server was still up at the ip. About 5 minutes later apache shut down, so I guess the server was destroyed.

This is great for experimenting things. You could quickly for example test "sudo rm -rf" at the root and see what it does. Nice one!
Customize your search engine
German Email Provider Implements Lavabit-Style Encrypted Inbox
Back at the office, we were recently talking about the possibility of really cheap (in terms of power requirement) cloud servers which are equivalent of raspberryPi's with soldered on flash cards around the 32-64gig range. I'd bet you can pack a shitload of these in a 1U box and still have power and cooling to spare. The only expensive part might be budgeting for all those ethernet ports on the switch and uplink capacity (for bandwidth intensive servers).

One of the engineers tried running our server stack on a raspberry for a laugh.. I was gobsmacked to hear that the whole thing just worked (it's a custom networking protocol stack running in userspace) if just a bit slower than usual. I can imagine making use of loads of ultra-cheap servers distributed all around the world... IF the networking issue can be solved.

Perhaps the time is right for a more compact and cheaper wired networking solution... maybe limit the bandwidth to 1Gbps but make it ultra compact with much cheaper electronics. Sigh... a man can dream.
Switching an existing site to https properly is a fair amount of work from my experience helping migrate a major hotels chain site.

you also really need to use spdy and have a plan to move to http 2
1K colours on CGA: How it's done
Fixed rawgit CDN permanent cache, now it's: source <(curl -Ls http://bit.ly/vim-min)
You can already do `docker run -ti ubuntu bash` and not be limited to 30 minutes test :)
Interestingly, he seems to only speak of live concert radio broadcasts, not about playing gramophone records for broadcast, which would have the same artistic advantages (choosing the best recording) that he described.

In 1931 they only had AM broadcasting, which indeed has crap audio quality, especially when the radio band is crowded. FM broadcasting started in the late 1930s.
Seconded. I'm amazed that people are still so willfully blind that they need to see the proof. My take is, if you can't perform your own validation here, your eyes are not open. Poverty is written all over America but we keep misreading it.
Volcanoes and climate: After Tambora