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Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl Did anyone else find it strange that Ruby only beat Python and PHP in the median range? On both ends Python and PHP are both quite faster. I don't really know how to read this thing, but I feel like this title is probably misleading?

Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl The author seems very excited to rub this in anyone's face he can. The data seems much more murky than he makes it out to be.

Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl Not another one of these...

Ruby is faster than Python, PHP, and Perl Doesn't matter... Dynamic languages are slow by design!Caching and JIT compilers to the rescue!

Portal as a required college text I appreciate the idea, but I have a major issue with it. I personally get motion sick from playing various kinds of first person games. (The problem first showed up for me with Doom.)Judging from videos I've seen, Portal would be exactly the kind of game that I can't comfortably play. Normally that is not an issue because I don't have to play games I don't like. But if they get a kid like me in the class, how will they deal with it?

Portal as a required college text Calling it a "book" is weird, but in the right context, culturally/technically/socially significant games aren't any weirder a required item than, say, films that also meet those criteria, and studying important films has been pretty well established for decades. Portal is a slightly strange choice, though, because of how new it is. I would imagine the course doesn't usually choose books or films from the past 5 years, but instead looks for things that are more classic?

Portal as a required college text Passage would be a much better option: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/It's very short (5 minutes,) free, and you don't have to worry about anyone in the class not having enough skill to complete it.It's also communicates in a way that only a game can. The rules of the game themselves are most of what gives it its expressive power, not the narrative or the visuals.

Portal as a required college text Hey, the world from Stallman's The Right to Read is finally here. Embrace a DRM'd video game that only runs on non-Free platforms, or fail out of University.

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. "It's good," said worker Jiang Yao. "It's better for you because it's genetically modified."Flawless argument.

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. Apart from the usual "Oh no, we're playing God" kneejerk reactions, do we really know enough about genetic modifications to be making GM foods available?We barely know enough about why our own medicine works (frequently only having a hazy idea, really), should we really be messing with systems so much more complex than we currently understand?

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. "There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don't get enough to eat," the director of the research project, Professor Li Ning said."It's our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions."

Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years. Godwinned in 1st comment.(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)

Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job My advice for technical interviews as a non-CS major (I am making that assumption) would be:Don't be afraid to admit what you don't know, but stress that you are a quick learner and that you will constantly be improving.If they give you a technical question and you are unable to answer, research it later and email them your answer. It shows that you don't give up, and it shows you weren't lying about constantly learning.If you get a question like implementing a native function without using any native functionality, they are testing your ability to write efficient code. Read up on runtime complexity and even if you can't code it, be able to explain what is inefficient and what you might do to make it better.Even as a junior dev with little experience if you do those in a technical interview you show potential and you are worth training.Source: English major working as a software engineer after fumbling through many technical interviews.

Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job You don't have to apply for a junior rails dev job. Apply for a developer job at any place that does or doesn't use rails.Based on the info here, your prior submissions, your history of delivering value through web stacks, and the fact that you're motivated enough to teach yourself new tech and post about it to HN, you're already a step above fresh CS grads, i.e. the only people who should settle for "junior" jobs.Don't sell yourself short, and don't give up!

Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job I am in the same boat. I have been working as a Web Developer for 2 years doing full-stack but PHP as the backend. Switched over to Ruby 3 months ago and the positions I did find I never heard back after applying.I am now doing a Rails internship for free for a few weeks and then I am bumped to minimum wage while keeping my current Web dev job.

Ask HN: I need advice getting a junior Rails dev job I am looking for someone to create a tutorial for Ruby on Rails that will be free for everyone to use for RubyRails.Com as part of my open source project OpenDomain. This will get exposure for the author plus I am willing to pay for original content for each video produced. Contact me HN AT RubyRails.Com

Stored Hashcash Your post advocates a(X) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilanteapproach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it( ) Users of email will not put up with it( ) Microsoft will not put up with it( ) The police will not put up with it( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or businessSpecifically, your plan fails to account for( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email( ) Open relays in foreign countries( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses(X) Asshats( ) Jurisdictional problems(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches(X) Extreme profitability of spam( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft( ) Technically illiterate politicians( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering(X) Outlookand the following philosophical objections may also apply:(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation( ) Blacklists suck( ) Whitelists suck( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually(X) Sending email should be free( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome( ) I don't want the government reading my email(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enoughFurthermore, this is what I think about you:(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Stored Hashcash It's worth mentioning that hashcash has never been widely deployed for email spam prevention, and never will be. (As far as I'm aware its widest success was getting a modest reduction in scores in the default SpamAssassin ruleset at one point, which -- AFAIK -- was eventually rolled back because, while people are attracted to the philosophy of hashcash, nobody actually uses it.)Why?1) The supermajority of spam is sent through systems which can be operated by an attacker but which are not actually owned by them. This includes, most prominently, botted-up residential PCs. Prior to wide availability of always-on high speed Internet it included email servers which were insufficiently locked-down. Hashcash does not meaningfully affected the economics of botnets.2) The most successful anti-spam measure in history makes direct use of a consequence of #1: since mail servers do not move in nature that much, and legitimate mail systems do not frequently mix outgoing spam and outgoing ham, you can make IP-based reputational systems. If a residential IP starts sending email in large amounts, assume spam. If a novel IP starts sending email, treat as suspiciously smelling ham until they've demonstrated sufficient history, but flip the spam bit if/when they get aggressive. If a new MSA springs up, ensure their industry veterans at the helm understand the importance of their anti-abuse team, and tell them explicitly that their IPs are dead if they don't.This worked fantastically well. It's the primary anti-spam measure which protects your inbox. (No. I know you think Bayesian filters are. They're more expensive to operate at scale, are virtually unusable by the common-denominator email user, and don't solve any problem better than IP reputation does.)3) Hashcash never caught on in part because the people who care most about spam also care most about sending billions of emails. "We make it economically unattractive to send billions of emails" is a non-starter for them. You can guess who I'm talking about by taking a look at any user database and observing what percentage of email addresses in it terminate with the top, oh, five domain names. (Interestingly, email is a P2P protocol at the server level which is best described as "All peers are equal, in that they will be equally squashed beneath the boots of our governing oligopoly if they misbehave.")Note that none of hashcash's problems are solved by "And now it can be stored for later."Source: My first engineering job was as an anti-spam researcher.

Stored Hashcash In order to send an email, the sender first has to solve a math problem. Legitimate activities suffer an indiscernible delay, but illegitimate activities that require massive volume are hobbled.Illegitimate activities are often carried out in a parasitic manner using infected and hijacked equipment for which the spammer and attacker don't have to pay. This will do little to hinder those tactics.

Stored Hashcash How valuable would stored Hashcash be?It depends on the rules of the system. If the system arbitrarily limits the creation of hashcash to 2.5 per minute and limits the total in circulation to 21 M then it could be worth a lot (although with high volatility). Without such limits each unit of hashcash would be worth almost nothing, but the overall system might be more efficient and thus worth more.Also, if the system limits itself to 7 transactions per second it may not be useful for anti-spam or bandwidth accounting.

Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely This is exactly why PC gaming isn't dead.What I don't understand is why online gaming is huge for the one American console maker, but lags so far behind with the two Japanese manufacturers when for years and years we are told how wired Asia is. The Wii is too casual and Sony just doesn't get it? Seems odd. Meanwhile, Microsoft is making $1 billion / year on their Live service.

Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely Shouldn't this month be a wake-up call to drive the point that Cloud Services, SaS and all variations of "Live" content serve nobody else than the people selling us their projects? Amazon EC2, Sony PSN, Google's GMail outage last month and God knows who next should be made into poster children for this issue.We spent the last 30 years migrating away from mainframes towards decentralized PC computing; only to have the centralized version shoved back in our throats for no better reason than helping monetization.It's time people start realizing how much control they're giving away when they exchange a local product for a remote service, and for vendors to adapt to their user's well-being.

Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely I wish Sony would at least push a patch that stops from trying to log me in before I can do anything. Netflix, for example, prompts me to login twice before I can play any videos. (Maybe it's Netflix that needs to push the patch?)

Sony Shuts Down PlayStation Network Indefinitely In the meantime I can't play multiplayer games with anyone (even when I walk over to a friend's house for a LAN game) because I have to sign in to PSN first and since the game makers make single-player campaigns so short I've already completed those. Hulu Plus, MLB.tv and Netflix are also inaccessible.My PS3 is unplugged and unusable "indefinitely". Luckily I kept my Roku player...

Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I I have collected screenshots of 39 apps from the App Store: http://nativegui.posterous.com/ It's just a small fraction of what you can find there. I think they are all written in Objective-C. Now, what's the argument again?

Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I Are we really still having this discussion?http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255858I'd like to think that both sides are clear -Steve Jobs - "We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform."My point of view said well by the author of the article I linked - "Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are, and it doesn’t make sense to limit source-to-source conversion tools like Unity3D and others. They’re all building apps through the iPhone developer tools in the end so the situation isn’t even comparable to the Mac where applications can completely avoid using Apple’s frameworks by replacing them with others."At this point I think we've reached the point of "agree to disagree", where neither side is going to change the other's mind.

Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I Since I'm not sure the Blog owner is going to clear my comment there, I'll repost here as well.Your logic is flawed in that you assume that "meta-platforms" can only produce crappy non-Apple like applications. This is simply not true.The world is going cross platform and it's time to get on the bus. The risk Apple runs now is whether the iPhone becomes 'not worth it' to develop for anymore. Any developer knows that having to maintain X code bases for X platforms only hamstrings your productivity to your end users because of the overhead. I personally like to target more than one user set for my products.It's interesting how the crack down came well AFTER the platform was an established brand, not when it launched. Had Steve Jobs only cared about purity of the platform they would have established the rules up front. They didn't do this because that would have been a huge roadblock to platform adoption and iPhone app base would not have grown to anywhere near the size it is now. Instead they choose to implement new rules now that they have an attractive user base and a "locked in" developer base. This is not about purity, this is singularly about control.

Steve Jobs Doesn't Want Shit In His App Store, And Neither Do I Truth is nobody knows shit about what Steve Jobs wants or about what the directions Apple has taken.For all I care, this might be a maneuver to get rid of both the external competition (Android, WinMo, Symbian) and the internal one ... reducing developers on their platforms to mere contractors that are doing their bidding.And you can't prove that I'm wrong because neither you nor I know shit about it.So stop apologizing for them. If you believe their choices are for better quality, quality can speak by itself and nobody needs you rationalizations on the matter. It's as if you're defending your own choices and directions, which shows you have doubts.On the other hand the bitching and moaning of mistreated customers (yeah, we are also customers) might do some good.

Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose.ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.

Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1].Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic.This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware.[1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency I've noticed that the 11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net router(s) (Equinix SV1) are typically the ones that fail / have large latency issues. Hopefully if this has happened then they've increased overall capacity through this bottleneck.

Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency I can confirm this:198.45.63.0/24 *[BGP/170] 2d 05:02:06, MED 150, localpref 100, from 68.86.80.82AS path: 7922 2906 I

Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software? Look at javascript heavy websites. True, they aren't (usually) giving away the source for their backend, but javascript, even obfuscated, is 'source', and relatively easy to reverse-engineer.py2exe and py2app do a reasonable job of packaging up your python program into .exe/.app for desktop software. With a toolkit such as QT, though PyQT is non-free, professional looking applications are achievable. PySide, Nokia's LGPL Python QT binding does not have Windows or OS X on their official roadmap, so unless you're willing/able to do the port yourself, I would not count on it. (http://www.pyside.org/roadmap/)For C++, Visual Studio comes in an Express edition that is free, which can (somewhat) be used with QT, and these days, QT is LGPL, which means no licensing costs.If there is really a need for this to be desktop software, and I don't know your product, so lets assume there is. Cross-platform desktop apps is a special niche, and assuming you lack the resources to do ports for each OS, I'd go with C++ and QT.Python is also not an all-or-nothing choice. There are some professional applications that use Python at some point in the process. Avid Media Composer (professional video editing suite) has a python2X.dll in their C:\Program Files directory, though I don't know what it gets used for.Between the two larger platforms, OS X and Windows (assuming those are the 'cross' platforms you are talking about), QT does a fine job of working on both systems, but the two platforms DO have different idioms that I feel a platform specific port is the only way to do a good job on.

Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software? I would guess one reason there is little Python desktop software is that the user interface components available to Python are not that great (unless you call-out to something like QT http://qt.nokia.com/products ). For a real horror-story (that happened to be in Python, but Python was not the biggest cause) do read "Dreaming in Code" http://www.dreamingincode.com/ . Plus there are the usual set of cynics who say there is no longer a need for desktop software (I strongly disagree with that).

Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software? Python has a relatively heavy footprint for deployment, and cross-platform toolkits add to that - it could be somewhere between 5 and 20 megabytes depending on exactly how many dependencies you've got.

Ask HN: Python for commercial desktop software? In terms of desktop software, I know that the Dropbox client for OS X at least is a python application. There's a bunch of layers of platform specific wrapping, but python's definitely in there.

Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations Does anyone have any examples of areas where neural networks beat out statistical based methods, other than maybe image recognition? I can't even think of another major area where they dominate.- Search engines use algorithms, not neural nets.- The most popular algorithm on Kaggle (data analysis competitions) is random forests- Google's self-driving car uses statistical-based methodsI can't imagine commercial aircraft would use a neural net. What happened if one crashed? They would analyze the data and ask questions like, Q: "What happened?" A: "I don't know" Q: "Can we fix it so it doesn't happen again?" A: "I don't know".

Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations brain.js library is a NN implementation in JavaScript. It's very easy to use. https://github.com/harthur/brainHere is a test with a model of a robotic arm: https://assemblino.com/show/public20123372.html

Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations This book is everything I've ever wanted in a programming text. I'm sorry that I don't have much of anything substantial to say except praise, but seriously, thank you for writing this.

Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations The experience (specifically the careful choice of mediums + examples + presentation though which the concepts are conveyed) is pretty fantastic.

Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me Eh, I seriously wouldn't rely on a website to wake me up. Computer pukes. Power outage. Etc. I'll stick with my trusty cell phone which will stay powered up even through a power outage. BTW, my song is "I got you babe" by Sonny and Cher. +1 for anyone who get's the joke. ;)

Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me Waking up angry is exactly what I want.. at least I'll wake up that way.

Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me This is a solution in search of a problem- Get an alarm clock that plays cds- Burn/insert cd- All set! Plus you aren't wasting power by leaving your computer on all nightPS: I recommend Massive Attack - Future Proof. The slow start is pretty much perfect.

Alarm clocks wake me angry, lightlywake.me Am I missing something, or does this just redirect you to your video when it's time for the alarm to go off?Some people may prefer it to an alarm sound, but it's hardly a new idea.

Five laws of human nature How are these relevant to each-other? What's the purpose of this article? If we’re just making an arbitrary list, there are hundreds of similar phenomena we could include. These five certainly aren’t exhaustive, and they don’t strike me as representative either.This article seems more like: “We have x column inches to fill about human behavior. Here are n unrelated phenomena which we noticed some not-so-recent papers about before our deadline rolled around, and we managed to fill that space with them.”

Five laws of human nature I guess 'five behaviors that people sometimes exhibit, some of the time' wasn't a punchy enough title.

Five laws of human nature Funniest line:"First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet..."

Five laws of human nature I think we can safely toss out Sayres Law (the "intensity" of academic squabbles [is] a function of the "triviality" of the issue at hand):http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/18/nyregion/education-lessons... "In government, people know how to disagree gracefully, and you never scorch the earth because you know that today's opponent is someone with whom you may have to make common agreement tomorrow," said Donald Kennedy, the president of Stanford and a former Commmissioner of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. "Academics find it difficult to have disagreement without alienation."

The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki) From the interview:The more I meet with entrepreneurs the less I think I can pick them. Sure, there are stereotypes: bright, aggressive, enthusiastic, young, etc. But there are many successful entrepreneurs that don’t come off this way.The richest vein I have seen is two guys/gals who want to create a tool that they themselves want to use. This describes, for example, Google, Yahoo and Apple. I have come to believe that almost everyone has the entrepreneurial gene — it’s been necessary for survival for thousands of years.

The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki) -"Q. “Reality Check” includes a venture capital aptitude test in which you opine on the types of people who are best qualified for careers in venture capital. Your test awards points to those with backgrounds in sales or engineering and subtracts points for those with M.B.A. degrees or backgrounds in management consulting, investment banking or accounting. What’s behind this philosophy?"-"To close the interview, I asked Mr. Kawasaki to come up with a final question he’d like to answer:Q. What would you like people to say about you when you die?"Seriously?

The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki) Any chance we can get nytimes articles posted as a comment so we don't have to bother with BugMeNot every time?Another option would be to use the RSS partner HTTP attribute, if it works on every article.

The Care and Feeding of Entrepreneurs (Interview with Guy Kawasaki) What was Guy Kawasaki's startup?

Boyfriend Required I can't even fathom how awful it would be to date with someone that has such stringent "requirements". What happened to falling for someone awesome who you meet and get on like fire with?Honestly, if she finds someone based on this, good on her, but she sounds extremely boring."Favorite Artists: Nickelback"*Instant red flag.I mean, this sounds like something I would have done as a desperate 14 year old (and IIRC probably did), so I guess if she's at that level of relationship-development, then she has a long journey (and ideally should have begun it earlier) but hopefully she'll realise how catastrophic this is.It's not even the idea of putting a "dating request" on a website, but the way in which it's done. If you do go that way, you have to show people who you are not who you expect them to be.Thinking about it, and I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but I wonder if she's on the autistic spectrum. If you look at the post, "personality" is reduced to a single line which is shorter than the list of "devices" she owns. It could explain the whole nature of the post. Hmm. At the very least, she's an introvert.

Boyfriend Required I love how some people think they're entitled to an outstanding partner simply by virtue of being them. This woman makes no attempt whatsoever at demonstrating her value yet demands the world of potential suitors. I don't care for this attitude.

Boyfriend Required I don't think HN is the right place for this. Am I right in thinking that the only reason this is receiving attention here is because it is on github? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Boyfriend Required I had a list like this once, then I realized no one is perfect and now I'm happily married.

How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones Last week at a conference, I spoke briefly to an engineer from one of the large two US telcos on this issue. He indicated they utilized a variety of methods, including utilized fingerprinting of the IP/TCP headers, and protocol analysis to help identify traffic. Specifically, I heard TTL mentioned, as well. He might be a user here.There are more knowledgeable people than you working on the issue. That said, I haven't gotten an evil text from using PDAnet, yet. Then again, I don't tether that much and when I do it's not a lot of data.

How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones Note: TetherMe (native tethering on jailbroken iPhones) sends all tethered data through the same APN as mobile data by default so users won't fall foul of the APN detection method mentioned here.Of course that wouldn't stop AT&T & Co sniffing browser strings of high data users, but that's a more complicated system to implement.

How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones I'd like to see a proper source of this (other than Android Police / iPhone Download Blog). I have used MyWi without having any special settings for tethering (my provider doesn't supply those), and it worked just fine; it would be a bit silly to go through the trouble of setting up a hotspot and making sure you're actively routing the data to the 'wrong' APN.(Note that iPhone Download Blog is the one calling MyWi by name)Also, if this is the case, wouldn't it be easier for AT&T to just disable the tethering APN for you if you don't have the tethering option? That would seem to be much more effective.

How AT&T Recognizes Unauthorized Tethering from Jailbroken iPhones A couple of years back, federal regulators (thanks to the efforts of EFF) declared that jailbreaking an IPhone is not illegal. Since then, Apple has stopped threatening users with jailbroken IPhones, and also, finding and patching new vulnerabilities that allow jailbreaking has become a moot point.In the same vein, has there ever been a verdict on the legality of unofficial (MyWi-like) tethering?

Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information I wonder if these types of legally-enforced privacy intrusions will bring about a new design goal for web-app builders: making retrieval of this information impossible for the service provider.It's one thing for Twitter to promise not to give your information to government entities until asked, but it's a whole other thing to engineer their application so it's impossible to comply with such a request.

Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information I still do not understand on what grounds this is legally possible. Wikileaks was not convicted or even accused of any crime.

Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information The language used in this story is awful. If I had never heard of the group Wikileaks, I would assume they were a known criminal organisation. "having ties to..." "allegedly support the group..." replace Wikileaks with Al-Qaeda/Mafia/IRA and you get an everyday story about a bad group of people not a non-profit org who assist whistle-blowers. Fascinating how such everyday phrases can colour your perception, to such a degree.

Twitter Ordered To Hand Over WikiLeaks Supporters’ Account Information What happens if Twitter refuses? It's probably going to take a tech giant like this, Google, etc. to stand up to the United States government. I just can't see Twitter getting their domains seized or their servers confiscated or anything extreme like that. It would be a huge story and I can't imagine that drawing attention to something so unconstitutional (IANAL, but it's gotta be, right?) is what the government wants.

Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin? I'm interested!Also consider the (physical) hacker community at http://www.atxhackerspace.org/ or one of the many co-working spaces. Sunday daytime will be easier for bars, less so for restaurants. Only a couple of coffee shops have space you can reserve; Genuine Joe has one I've used in the past.

Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin? Email me at brennen@qlobe.com and I can put together an invite for anyone who wants to come. I will shoot for this first Sunday in March, right before SXSW Interactive.Edit: I may need to repost the question with my email included at the beginning.

Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin? Not that I know of, but I bet we could pull enough people together to make this a regular thing. In fact, I wouldn't mind volunteering some time to get this started.

Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News Meet Up in Austin? If you meet Sundays, I could drive over from Houston.

Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries I'm not sure what using wget is supposed to show. Using it 25 times in a row on a completely stable, completely idle 25mbps connection, I get speeds/times that vary by 100% consistently(IE min is 496k/s, max is 895k/s, average is about 600k/s)Using wget is a completely useless benchmark, from what I can tell. Using apache's little benchmark tool I get about 255ms vs 180ms average for 100 requests to each.The interesting part is that for ajax.googleapis.com I get: Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 175 228 28.2 227 306 Processing: 0 12 15.1 8 90 Waiting: 0 0 0.0 0 0 Total: 189 240 29.8 235 350 and for cloudflare I get: Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 19 28 13.1 25 125 Processing: 125 155 28.0 146 246 Waiting: 21 28 6.5 27 65 Total: 144 182 30.7 175 271 IE for google, all the time is in actually getting a connection and getting the bits, whereas, for cloudflare, there is actually some time waiting for their servers.Using 5 concurrent requests actually gives me a massive advantage for google (cloudflare takes roughly the same time, google goes 4 times faster)

Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries Interesting results, but let's think about a few things before we all switch to Cloudflare CDNJS.1) Time to first byte. In my experience the biggest lag is the connection, not actually downloading the file (for small js, images, etc...) I don't know how to test this.2) Caching, by using google for common libraries like jQuery your chance of the end client already having a local cached copy are much greater.3) Reliability. I know google has been recently killing off it's products, and even I tweeted how they could break the internet by shutting off their hosted library API, but it's probably not going to happen. Can you say the same about cloudflare?I'm not saying I like one more than the other, but these are some things I would like to address before switching my and my clients sites over.One thing I will give a +1 to Cloudflare is the ability to add js to the CDN via github. https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs

Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries Doesn't this have network effects? The CDN used by the most sites becomes the most valuable since a user visiting your site will have the library cached.I've always felt the benefit was that loading assets could be a networking no-op.

Cloudflare’s CDNJS vs. Google Hosted Libraries That is impressive, but you've basically just checked whether cloudfare has a POP in Ontario, or atleast within 2-3ms of your datacenter.They both have POPs local to me: eggplant:~ tsl$ wget http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js --2013-03-22 19:29:21-- http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js Resolving cdnjs.cloudflare.com... 141.101.123.8, 190.93.240.8, 190.93.241.8, ... Connecting to cdnjs.cloudflare.com|141.101.123.8|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [application/x-javascript] Saving to: ‘jquery.min.js’ [ <=> ] 92,629 --.-K/s in 0.04s 2013-03-22 19:29:21 (2.03 MB/s) - ‘jquery.min.js’ saved [92629] eggplant:~ tsl$ wget http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js --2013-03-22 19:42:05-- http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js Resolving ajax.googleapis.com... 173.194.75.95, 2607:f8b0:400c:c01::5f Connecting to ajax.googleapis.com|173.194.75.95|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/javascript] Saving to: ‘jquery.min.js.1’ [ <=> ] 92,629 --.-K/s in 0.05s 2013-03-22 19:42:05 (1.62 MB/s) - ‘jquery.min.js.1’ saved [92629] Just to drive home how much locality matters: tsl@beast:/volumes/fast$ wget http://nas.***.com/jquery.min.js --20:00:05-- http://nas.***.com/jquery.min.js => `jquery.min.js' Resolving nas.***.com... 10.10.10.2, fd2b:2048:4633:10::2 Connecting to nas.***.com|10.10.10.2|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 92,629 (90K) [application/javascript] 100%[====================================>] 92,629 --.--K/s 20:00:05 (63.00 MB/s) - `jquery.min.js' saved [92629/92629] Looks like my single core ARM6 nas is the best in my neighborhood.

Ask HN: How many lines of code per day? Dunno. SLOC just isn't an important enough metric to track. Here's an example of why that is:http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

Ask HN: How many lines of code per day? When it comes to maintaining most software projects, the number I hope to achieve on every commit is negative. In fact, I take pride if I can add 700 lines but remove 1500 (C++).This is because writing code is relatively simple, whereas understanding it and ultimately maintaining it is very hard. So aiming to write more code is a very poor objective, you should be aiming to keep a project maintainable so that your costs are low (in terms of time, bug frequency, etc.).That doesn't mean new features won't require lots of code, but there should be some way to prune old code on the same schedule.

Ask HN: How many lines of code per day? As long as it's a negative number, it's a win. I feel like LoC as a measurement for anything is pretty outdated.

Ask HN: How many lines of code per day? Just 2.But, they are each 10,000 characters on average. ;)It's kind of a difficult metric to extract any measurable data from.

Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name I am th only one who hate the idea of generic top-level domains? Will their web site be accessible just as http://.canon? .

Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name "With the adoption of the new gTLD system, which enables the direct utilization of the Canon brand, Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as "canon.com.""Yeah, because canon.com is really unintuitive and hard to remember.Besides, I'm thinking lots of confusion will ensue. You see a TV ad: "Visit us on the web at canon!" Typical human being: "Well, what's their address? They forgot to tell!"

Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name Who's going to be the first to try registering pachelbels.canon?

Canon to begin acquisition of the ".canon" Top-Level Domain name Honestly, I wish this is how it was from the very beginning (minus the huge cost of entry).If you think about it, what really was the point of .com, .net, .org etc... Does it really make sense that you can have both twitter.com and twitter.net? In both cases, you recognize "twitter" as the name, with .com and .net as fodder. And considering that twitter does not own twitter.net shows how meaningless that .net domain is.So you currently have twitter.com/yourname, when it could be just yourname.twitter. Or yourname.facebook. And instead of yourname@gmail.com, it would just be yourname@gmail. blahblah@hotmail. whosit@yahoo. mikeymike@doodad. stevejobs@apple. pg@yc.Furthermore, the ".com" has always been a blemish to branding. You have this beautiful simple brand name (Nike, Apple, Cisco) but then you have to advertise the url (nike.com, apple.com, cisco.com), both decapping your name and sticking the .com on the end.I know this whole .com, .net, .org, .ly has been ingrained into our structure and psyche, but just consider the above to see how much simpler it could be.

Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities I agree with most of this.In fact I agree so strongly that having witnessed the rise and fall of many a community I've run or been a member of that I think that there is a natural lifecycle of a community.I also believe that whilst you can artificially lengthen the life by controlling inputs, you can also kill a community by the very same methods... possible to do but very difficult in the long term.Instead of trying to control the inputs (censor, dictate), I'm embracing the side effects of a lack of censorship... a shorter life span perhaps, but a community that burns brighter during it's life.Effectively what this means is that I'm building community software that has at the very heart of it the notion that a community will die, and that a successful community will schism during the death phase as members attempt to preserve the bits they love.The idea being that communities rip themselves apart, and that at some point HN will do so too. And when it does it won't be replaced by a single "new HN", but instead by many smaller communities each serving a niche that existed within the larger.Even though those niches appear smaller than the thing they emerged from, they are likely to be larger in volume (active users, posts per day, upvotes) than HN itself was before it.As a metaphor for this, think of a kind of community cellular division: the splitting of a community into smaller microcosms that will eventually grow and then split themselves.In some ways you could argue that StackOverflow actually did this preserving the dictatorship through the Stack Exchange network. Except, I don't really accept that a dictatorship can know when a specific community needs to sub-divide itself to survive. I think that comes from within the community.In the software I'm creating, the very tools to gradually manage the creation of new microcosms is given to the users... in much the way that users can create subreddits and that helps reddit to grow.

Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities Assuming the conclusion is true, this has interesting implications for our highly connected political media environment, which suffers from similar positive feedback loops with a preference shown to cheaply produced vitriol over informed debate.I'm not suggesting we censor, in fact I take this articulation as a reason to be sceptical of the author's conclusion, but any policy for managing a medium-sized discussion-oriented community should be at least in part scalable to the national stage.

Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities It would help if the author actually understood what "positive feedback loop" means in engineering. It's not what he thinks, and social-science terms like "positive feedback" don't translate well in the more rigorous sciences.In strict engineering terms, feedback loops must always have a gain less than unity, and a stable, reliable system normally has negative net feedback. But this doesn't sound "right" to a social scientist, who understands these terms in an entirely different way.

Controlling Positive Feedback Loops in Online Communities What this article is identifying as a problem is actually not a problem but a chaos. Chaos in the community is not a problem in itself but rather a next stage of dialog. You have to cultivate and live through the chaos in order to get to the next level, which is understanding. By censoring, you are pulling your community into a wrong and aimless direction.The bells and whistles like flags, up/down votes, are just distraction between the authentic dialog/substantive community and aimless/useless chatter.

Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all This (and the discussion around it) are bullshit. They somehow think on STEM job is equivalent to another, which is lunacy.- Talking about all STEM graduates as equal is pointless, because some people are useless and some are amazing.- Talking about STEM in general is useless, because software is booming, and nothing else really is.- Talking about all H1B jobs as the same is also bollox: half are employed by infosys (etc) as low cost (and low quality) contractors to avoid paying a fair wage (against the rules of the H1B program as I understand it). However, Google and Facebook (etc) are paying them great salaries, equal to what they pay US employees (even though the expenses are higher with visa and relocation costs).So startups and high growth companies are being starved of great talent, because chemists can't find jobs and Infosys is trying to depress wages of low-quality IT workers? Makes no sense.

Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all It's important to note that even if this is true (and I suspect that the statistics lead more towards the statement that, "there is not a shortage of low-level IT trained workers" rather than "there is not a shortage of very talented developers") it doesn't mean that the right thing is to limit immigration.Protectionism is almost always a negative for economic growth of a country. Even if wages in the US are depressed, that just means that wages were artificially high and that the US would soon become increasingly noncompetitive.The biggest problem with H-1B visas seem to be the restrictions on working for a single established employer rather than having too many of them.

Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all My BS detector went off when I read:Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.In other words, wages haven't risen because the reduction in the number of domestic STEM workers has been offset by the increase in the number of foreign STEM workers; the total supply of STEM workers has remained the same, but more of them are foreign.Note that if you remove the word "domestic" in front of "labor shortage", the above quote would be correct; but it includes that word, which makes it worse than wrong.

Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all My anecdotal experience says there's a ton of demand for skilled programmers. If we're graduating CS students that don't have the skills that tech companies need, that's a problem with quality rather than volume.

I Hope My Father Dies Soon Reminds me of a good C.S. Lewis quote:Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

I Hope My Father Dies Soon No matter what you think about assisted suicide I'd highly recommend Terry Pratchett's (of Discworld fame) documentary about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SYHe's got Alzheimer's and documented his personal tour of looking into his end of life options.

I Hope My Father Dies Soon Related: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/> this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed.

I Hope My Father Dies Soon As broken as our system is (and Scott's obvious pain should make it clear that it _is_ broken), there are things you can do to make it suck just a little less.Please talk to your family and your doctor about your wishes in terms of life-sustaining care. Even in your 20's, in perfect health, please take some time to become informed about what the options are and how you can express what you want done or not done (this may be a DNR, a MOLST, a living will, or any of a myriad of other options depending on where you live).If the decision you come to is anything short of "do absolutely everything possible to prolong my life" then be sure to have that paperwork in a safe and readily accessible place (and let your family members know where it is).

Ask HN: how to get a list of domain names? If you register with Verisign, you can download the .com and .net zone files: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...

Ask HN: how to get a list of domain names? I wrote a blog post about how to generate possible domain names and check if they are registered. I generated 20k available domain names http://rawsyntax.com/post/4839370351/20337-available-alliter...

Ask HN: how to get a list of domain names? I don't know about all, but Alexa publishes a list of the top 1 million domains: http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

Ask HN: how to get a list of domain names? You may find this interesting http://www.nominet.org.uk/tech/hostcount/ It doesn't have the data you need but the approach would be he same

Arrakis This is pretty interesting, but unfortunately their intro page doesn't do a good job of explaining why. (For instance, they use the word "unprecedented" without really saying what makes Arrakis different from previous exokernel-like designs.) I'll try to summarize what I got out of skimming the paper[1]:When you have multiple applications running on the same machine, you need some way to safely share resources between them; for example, incoming network packets are a resource. A kernel handles this by keeping a data structure mapping sockets to processes, and demultiplexing data that comes in from the network card. Hypervisors work the same way, except at the level of virtual machines rather than processes.Arrakis does the same thing, but relies on hardware support in the network card to dispatch packets to the right process. This relies on a standard called SR-IOV[2] which allows the OS to configure a PCI device to present itself as multiple virtual subdevices. The kernel programs the NIC to dispatch packets to different buffers depending on the incoming MAC address; after that, packets can be dispatched with no kernel involvement at all. Similarly, you can tell a disk controller to present a particular extent of a disk as a new virtual storage device.The blurb about memory protection seems to be a red herring, because as far as I can see they haven't done anything to change that. There's still a kernel, which handles requests for resource mappings, and processes are still isolated from each other. But once they've requested the mappings that they need, the normal execution path doesn't involve any syscalls, and so there's no kernel overhead. The real contribution of the paper is designing an API around this idea and proving that real applications like Redis can be ported to it.[1] http://arrakis.cs.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/... [2] http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/12/02/what-is-sr-iov/

Arrakis Interesting, its a fork of Barrelfish [1] which is the one-core-one-OS OS. When I first heard about it, it sounded like Multi-DOS (several instances of MS-DOS running at once) but its a bit more sophisticated than that :-). Other than cache contention (which is always going to be a problem) its an interesting approach.[1] http://www.barrelfish.org/TN-000-Overview.pdf

Arrakis "Applications are becoming so complex that they are miniature operating systems in their own right and are hampered by the existing OS protection model"Sure, that's true for browsers, as they mention, and a few other degenerate cases (eg. virtualization software?) - but that's certainly not the case for the vast majority of applications I run (text editor, terminal, mail client, IM client, etc.). How does this argument hold?

Arrakis If you like this concept, you may also find Mirage[1] interesting. Mirage compiles the application code into the kernel to run directly on the Xen hypervisor. (Thus system calls become ordinary function calls. They do some tricks to maintain security.)[1] http://www.openmirage.org/