mkelly

This is a great way of thinking about it. Same goes for "unlimited" plans: the more I use, the lower their profit margins. I'd rather agree on terms and pay for what I use.

I got the offer and really considered it as well! It was the fear of an acquisition that convinced me not to take the offer. I was a TextDrive customer before they were acquired by Joyent, I was a LastPass customer before they were acquired by LogMeIn, and it was CrashPlan's cancellation of CrashPlan for Home that drove me to find rsync.net.

None of those other companies are rsync.net, so it's not really fair of me to consider them when making this decision -- but it made me think it's safer to just pay you guys regularly for a good service. Worst case, I spend a little more over the life of my account, but that money is going to a company I really like, so it's not much of a downside.

We believe that the risk of "logical failure" of an SSD is higher than the risk of physical failure. This means that some pattern of usage or strange edge-case causes the SSD to die instead of a physical failure. If we are correct, and if we mirror an SSD, then it is possible the two (or three, or four) SSDs will experience identical lifetime usage patterns. To put it simply, it is possible they could all just fail at exactly the same time. The way we mitigate that risk is by building mirrors of SSDs out of similarly spec'd and sized but not identical parts.

This makes sense to me (and is a good example of looking at more abstract failure domains in addition to the basic ones we all know and love) -- I'm curious if there's data to support this. rsync.net is in a good position to possibly collect that data.

Why is it even possible to “charge [someone] as an adult”. If you have the concept of “adult” and “child”, and a line in between them, how can the crime dictate someone’s mental maturity?

(Of course the answer is, I’m sure, is selective enforcement. So they can lock up black kids and let white kids off the hook.)

This is a very good point.

I'm this is true to some extent, but (as much as I'd love to wholeheartedly agree with you), the reason I don't consider this likely is this: the main reason I have this opinion of HN is because of one 3-month period in 2009, where I was off the grid (bought a car in Europe, drove around, drank lots of booze, smoked some mushrooms, &c). I assure you I didn't learn about computers during that time. When I left in June, I thought HN was full of insightful articles and comments; when I returned in September, I thought it was markedly worse. I think HN had its Eternal September then, and it's been steadily downhill since then.

(Um, yes, I was keeping track of replies, and logged back in to post this. Mea culpa.)

This made my day, thanks. :)

I agree. I posted a crazy rant elsewhere in the comments, actually, prompted by the same thoughts.

Poor HN.

Warning: crazy rant coming.

So this is what HN has degenerated to? I'm sorry, but I remember eagerly reading the front page, learning things from interesting articles, and -- more importantly -- reading well-written commentary from people far more accomplished than I. I lurked, because I couldn't contribute at the level that most of the regular commentors could, but I learned a great deal.

HN has retained its preoccupation with not being reddit (which is noble), but has not retained the quality to justify it.

Great communities are transient, and HN is probably what taught me that. I have nothing but respect for pg, and for the community that once populated HN.

Peace. I'm out.

Crazy rant done.

Aww, HN takes itself so seriously...

Depends on how much you care about latency, right?

The easy solution is just, y'know, write the log to a file and scp it back to some central place every so often. But then you have to either (a) keep track of how much of a file you've copied, which is a pain; or (b) only grab files that you're no longer actively writing to (as determined by naming scheme or something), but that introduces some latency, depending on how often you rotate.

It's the last friday of july -- your timezone is too advanced!

http://www.sysadminday.com/

Can anyone tell me why HN is so obsessed with G+? This is a real question. I've mostly forgotten about it, and I work there.

No, I agree with you. I think the article is a perfect example of what it's trying to criticize.

Re the article: People have always been running their mouths; technology makes that easier, but doesn't fundamentally change it, I think.

Because the comma adds a sequence point, it should be defined: the post-increments both happen before the use of the k lval.

Yes, this is how digital information works. If you give one person a copy, they can then give other people more copies.

The UI fluff will never change that.

Okay... I still don't understand how this is better than simply putting the contact details on the card itself, other than the risk of staleness.

(And the marginal case where you want to revoke the ability to view your details after you give out the card, but before the person checks...hmm...)

So what is the purpose of this? How is this better than business cards?

I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, but I'd be much more interested to read some research on this topic than a bunch of unsourced opinion.

To make a claim like this you need some hard numbers, in my opinion.

The fact that he could give up without consequence when his family member got ill is significant. If he was actually poor, caring for his family member could have put him back at square one again.

[Edit: oops, someone else beat me to it]

Once you have money, you have a lot more to lose, and become more conservative. Broke college students will throw their weight around as much as they can, but once they're rich, they're afraid (consciously or not) of losing it.

That's my impression, anyway. (Based on my own experiences, graduating and beginning to earn lots of money. I've had to fight the urge to become quite conservative.)

Did anyone who has a subscription read this? Any thoughts?

It looks interesting, but not $32 interesting, to me.

OTR supports this for pidgin, and has a proxy for other clients: http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

I ran into this from the other direction: I don't get much natural light at all in my bedroom, and when I moved in I had a terrible time waking up until I installed a lamp that automatically turns on every morning and blasts the room with light (starting before I actually want to wake up).

After that, the alarm is much more effective.

> It's difficult to retain your composure when you're inconvenienced by the incompetence of your social inferiors, but it's usually worthwhile.

Wow. I'm not sure that's the point of the article.

Who do you see as your "social inferiors" and why?

I'll judge people based on their actions. I'm unconvinced it's fair to do it based on something else.

[Edit: formatting]

So how does Alexa get these numbers, exactly?

If others haven't had the same experience w.r.t Al-Jazeera, it's possible I got confused about reporting vs. opinion.

It depends on the subject matter. Reuters and Al-Jazeera are by no means objective on all subjects -- the obvious example is Al-Jazeera and anything to do with Israel. (They immediately begin frothing at the mouth and spouting angry gibberish, just like, e.g., Fox news does in the US when reporting on Democrats.) But Al-Jazeera has useful reporting on other subjects.

I think the key is to try to figure out who's useful for what subject matter. Vanity Fair is probably not reliable for anything.

You weren't the only one. I remember learning a bit about powerpc assembly several years ago, but never did anything with it. I've since learned a fair bit about sparc, and was eager to compare. Oh well!

So, I don't mean to be a hardass, but Sergey picked a latin transliteration for his name, so let's stick to it, okay? (I know, cry me a river about "И" vs "Й" and "i" vs "y".)

To what end? Is vertical space at some kind of premium? I have a scroll bar.