skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Again, stuff I don't need to know about.

Until you do....

For example, disk addresses are numbers. In most cases, consecutive numbers means adjacent blocks which means that accessing a, a+1 is much faster than accessing a, a+2034.

Except that that's not true for certain values of a which depend on the disk's actual layout, which can change (because the disk may decide that a or a+1 is bad and remap it to some other place).

All abstractions leak at some point. (My fun one was some non-existent memory that could be written and then read reliably in certain ways. Yes, there really wasn't a DIMM plugged in, but I could write to the relevant physical address and get back what I'd written.)
True, but I don't think you can cleanly separate government from GDP. You see a lot more cops in rich areas than poor ones even though they have less crime. The higher someone’s disposable income the more they care about clean air etc. Which is why economic growth as a political message tends to play better in poor areas than rich ones. And why rich areas seem to have a "wasteful" government. However, when the local populace wants to have X then calling the government wasteful for providing X seems to miss a core idea, IMO.

PS: I was not implying that the government was the reason why they had a higher GDP just that was higher for some reason.
They had the javascript countdown timer set to refresh the pages at exactly when the sale started. Instant server death.
"To truly understand, you need to believe in what is wrong for a while."

Ahh Belief preceeds understanding. First believe then understand. Sounds like some religious cult. I have nothing more to say to you sir. Good Day!
It looks more like a self-inflicted DDOS..
Wow, you actually need to create an account to order? I suppose there's no way I'm getting through that gauntlet before the $100k runs out.

edit: In case you want to create an account in parallel while you're waiting, see https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/create_account.php
Google Energy enters the wholesale market
Vim keybindings extension for Chrome
We were in a similar situation, so we compared all of the options, went with iTransact, and it's working out well: http://www.itransact.com/marketing/referral/S33oOO
Good nyt interview too: http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/qa-googles-gree...
Pros and Cons about Python 3
I don't understand why 1024 bits is just a thousand times harder than 768 bits. Shouldn't it be like 2^256 times harder?
ActiveRecord allows you to query the database directly using execute() or use a query to populate ActiveRecord objects with find_by_sql().

execute() returns the result in whatever form the underlying database driver uses. I think that's about as transparent an abstraction you could ask for. You can completely ignore ActiveRecord's abstractions.

find_by_sql() returns an array of ActiveRecord objects.
Thanks for the tip. I will look into the various agile methodologies. Yeah, we use Git, Basecamp etc. but I was looking for some practical tips about managing devs. I know they don't want to be managed as such, thus the question.
Oracle should keep statistics on the queries it gets and infer which of the parameters should be treated as bound parameters in a reusable query plan. I wonder why it doesn't. It would still need to parse queries, but I believe making the query plan is the expensive part. Also parsing could be done by the client machine's driver.
Sed(1) one-liners
The figures I always hear say that the Cortex-A9 will scale up to 2 GHz if you go for the least power-efficient settings, and that somewhere around 1 GHz would probably be more typical of real use.

It looks like the obvious fit for the Apple Tablet, by the way. It's fast enough to compete head-on with Intel chips while taking it easy on the batteries. Apple bought PA Semi, and has made custom ARM-based chips before. This would be a competitive advantage that other companies would have trouble duplicating, and for that reason alone I think Apple would go for it.
yeh fraid so.

I dropped in earlier today (about 9am GMT) and it was a little slow - but I managed to make an account and fill a basket..

Now it wont load though... bah (considering going through a US proxy to see if that improves things).
Are any of these the Web's next big thing?
As I am in severe 'back of the envelope' mode, I did not investigate that claim.

But I think they refer to footnote 21 for the estimate: http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/papers/factorest.pdf
I'm not sure I buy it, but Scott Adams has an interesting theory that could explain this at:

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/job_satisfaction/

Essentially, he argues that when jobs are plentiful cognitive dissonance forces you to believe your job is a good one, otherwise you'd get off your butt and seek a better one. When times are tough, you are more free to believe that you are unhappy at your job since the economy gets you off the hook for doing anything about it.

(Of course, I'm pretty sure that in bust times jobs are objectively worse than in boom times--more work, less pay or hope for advancement, greater uncertainty and stress, etc. so I'm not sure a cognitive dissonance theory is needed.)

(Edit: fixing typo)
Not necessarily. Based on the running total ($1400 or so) it looks like only 14 people have managed to place an order so far.
I don't think nwatson wrote those off. He was probably referring to the fairly in-depth article, on HN some time ago, which discussed how "having options to leave" was a huge psychological factor for job satisfaction. I can't recall exactly how they supported that argument, but I think it was fairly convincing.

What nwatson is suggesting is that along with improvements in bonuses and working conditions, there will be the improvement of once again having options - which is itself a very significant boost to morale.
I did expect him to do a decent job, precisely because everyone was expecting him to be useless, and I've come to realise that the world tends to mess you about that way. Although I'm not a London resident, so I didn't get to vote on him, nor am I (directly) affected by things he does.
HockeyPlayer, I lead the Real-Time Linux development team at IBM. Feel free to contact me directly dvhltc at us.ibm.com, I've shared this link with the Real-Time Java people so they can get you the appropriate contacts there.
I also had a basket filled beforehand. So far, I've gotten as far as the basket screen, but haven't made it to checkout yet.
That's easy! Get everyone on dropbox and create a projects folder which you share with everyone in the company. Create a subfolder in projects/ for each project you have. Inside those folders make "bugs", "source", and "docs" folders.

It's simple and easy. (And you'll want to shoot yourself after about 3 hours of using it)
Microsoft can't even release improvements of its main OS for a single architecture in a timely, predictable way. It's highly unlikely they can successfully maintain separate ports of Windows (and Office) for ARM.

And then, ARM-based Windows notebooks will not run x86-based Windows software.

Microsoft has Windows CE for ARM (and others), but it sucks really bad and is bears little relationship to desktop Windows apart from its name (and suckyness, but that is only my opinion).
The problem with arm-based linux systems is that it's not that easy for casual hackers to cross-compile programs but this is essential when using linux. So "normal" users who don't develop for that device and don't have the proper tool chains set up are either limited to the packages the distributor provides or they have to compile the software on that underpowered device (which for older people has the advantage that it makes you somehow feel young again). The user experience of linux on an arm-based device cannot be compared with that on a x86-based device.
Something to keep in mind if you are inclined to try solving the puzzle is that solutions ought to work on NFS file systems. Why does that matter?

Well, consider a system call like rename(2) or mkdir(2). Suppose that on a local file system, two programs both try to rename "a" to "b" at roughly the same time. At most one will succeed.

Not so, on NFS! An NFS implementation is permitted to behave this way: (1) Client x issues the rename request; (2) Client y issues the same rename request; (3) The server reports "success" to x; (4) The server reports "fail" to y, but the server's report packets get lost so y doesn't get the message. (5) Client y asks the server "Hey, whatever happened to my rename request?"; (6) Server notices that "a" doesn't exist but "b" does and replies "Success". Then both x and y think that they renamed "a" to "b".

The rename itself took place atomically. It's just unclear to each client which client actually triggered the rename. Similarly for other operations.

In other words, return values from file system calls don't reliably tell you when your process was able to perform some atomic action.
This is one aspect of the USA that is extremely good. There is space for states to do different things. If something doesn't work, people have the ability to vote with their feet.

Another aspect of this is the right to work laws vs. pro-Union laws in some states.

It would be sad if this aspect of the USA disappears (with a more powerful federal government).
"I have been asked to be a much more proactive manager who actively keeps tabs on the developers and pushes the project forward."

(This may sound flippant but that isn't the intended effect.) If you are the technical co founder of a startup and the early hires aren't managing themselves well, maybe you hired the wrong (type of) people?

Hard to give useful advice for such a generic/vague situation. But if I were you I'd just replace them with more self directed people. In an early stage startip I wouldn't want to do too much people management especially if it distracts the tech co founder.

My 2 cents.
My name is Mike Fulton and I am the lead architect for WebSphere Real Time, which is a real-time Java runtime environment for use on Linux and AIX.
We provide real-time technology in our JVM, including Metronome (already mentioned) for improved determinism, improvements to our JIT compiler to reduce jitter, support for ahead-of-time compilation, if you want to completely eliminate the variability of a runtime java compiler, as well as full support for RTSJ - the real-time specification for java (and a bunch more stuff that I'd be happy to talk about)

My id is fultonm@ca.ibm.com
Their servers are really taking a beating... They must be in panic mode at the moment.

Methinks they probably should have invested in way more caching in preparation for this day...
"As a result, they have distorted the market by licensing WinXP (and now Win7?) at an attractive price point and added laptop/netbook size and speed criteria to discourage low end netbooks."

Thank you, Microsoft, for helping advance computer technology...

I don't have to repeat this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033708
Ask HN: please review Fifohead - my project for technical interview questions
I've been working on fifohead.com for past 2 months on the side. It's a digg-style site for technical interview questions. I use the Q&A format similar to StackOverflow and add the quizzes to help users practice solving problems.
Here's an example of a quiz: http://fifohead.com/quizzes/1-Essential-guide-for-Verilog-developers

I'm also in the process of cleaning up the code to make it easier to understand and more reusable. If there's interest, I can spend some extra time extracting the most sensible features to release some kind of open source FifoExchange platform.
I'm more embarrassed that my coding style coming from a hardware background may be a horror for anyone to use or understand.
I don't know, but if we stick to running open-source Unix-like software, it should be trivial to switch architectures when needed. Most software I use already has actively maintained ports to 64-bit architectures since the mid 90's.

I have several mid-to-late-90's RISC workstations (I restore and collect them) that have 64-bit processors and OSs in them. 64-bit computing is news only to the x86 world.

With about 1.5 gigs on my Atom-based netbook, it hardly hits the swap partition unless I am running Windows on a VM session.
> give us unlimited services but don't raise our taxes

Except that that's not true.

Income and sales taxes are, in principle, unlimited. (Prop 13 is actually keeping city and county revenues from cratering - my property taxes went UP this year thanks to prop 13.) And the amount spent on voter mandated services doesn't dominate the budget. (There's a 50% on education requirement, but that's just a tax on spending on other things.)

CA added a lot of programs and spending since the golden era, almost all by legislative action. How much of it made things better?

CA's govt is incapable of prioritizing within the constraints laid out by voters. Yes, if voters say spend money on something, that means that the legislature may have to go without some program that they'd like.
I used django-socialregistration and recommend it. It has generic support for any OAuth (Twitter is one), OpenID, and FacebookConnect.

http://github.com/flashingpumpkin/django-socialregistration

I've only used the Twitter-OAuth part of it and tweaked it a little to fit my own application, but by and large it works with no probs
You need a "card not present" specialist, that understands ecommerce/tech startups. I highly recommend talking with JetPay (jetpay.com). They are the largest CNP payment processor, and they are an engineering company (even the CEO is an alpha programmer geek). Furthermore, they can integrate directly with you so you don't need a middleman (e.g. Authorize.Net). Their API and services support is outstanding -- see http://www.jetpay.com/cc_update.php for details. We just wish we'd found them a year earlier!
I don't think the point of this article is quite warranted. What looks to you like something you could only have figured out in hindsight may well look obvious to someone more experienced. Let's take a couple of examples:

Yes, getting the founding teams right is hard. I agree there are issues with single founders and there are plenty of issues in quickly-assembled founding teams. No, co-founders who’ve known each other for a decade are not a recipe for success either. I’m not sure one can label the general challenges people have with founding team formation a mistake. How much of that is really in the control of the lead founder at the time of making a founding team formation decision?

Fights between founders can definitely be avoided. In my case, if I'd read the article which I later wrote on the topic (http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...) it would have saved me a very costly mistake. There are many ways for people to fall out, but with enough experience, I would think that a savvy entrepreneur should be able to render them much less likely and much less harmful.

Another example of determination that’s typically made ex-post. Just think about all the startups that got caught by the crash in 2008 with too little cash on hand. Had there been no crash, they may have done just fine. Should they be blamed for not seeing the crash? In good times, some of the companies whose CEOs always want plenty of money in the bank are blamed for raising too much money. In 2008 they were geniuses.

That's also not a fair comment. As far as I understand it, raising large amounts of money isn't a "here's a bunch of money, do what you want with it" kind of deal. If you raise $10m, you're damn well expected to put that $10m to work in the near future. I'd be surprised if any VC let you keep that money hanging around for more than 1-2 years tops (except, of course, if a recession suddenly hits). Certainly, during the good times, they'll want you to spend it - on growth, mainly, I believe.

So raising too much money is fairly predictable ahead of time: if you don't have solid, worthwhile plans for how you'll spend that money, raising too much money will force you to make up plans for how to spend it, and hire people to implement those plans. Hiring more people than you need will slow you down, and potentially cripple you, so that you wouldn't be able to implement the thing that you did need to focus on (and which perhaps only required 1/10th of the people that you hired).

So, on the whole, it seems to me that this article makes an interesting but flawed point. Experience turns hindsight into foresight.
> People love to dump on California but it's got a higher than average GDP compared to the rest of the USA so it's not completely broken.

A higher GDP isn't worth much if you consume it to produce it.
Unsurprisingly, studios don't 'get' technology or their customers
Review of SEO Improvements in ASP.NET 4
Give Us Your [Rich], Your Tired, Your Huddled Masses Longing To Be Free
Seems they are going to have a hard time giving away $100,000. They have given away $2,952 in 26 minutes. At that rate they will have given away $13k by the end of their 2 hour limit.

Interesting from a game theory perspective: If everyone had cooperated to select 1000 people to get it, the total winnings would be higher.

Edit: And if it wasn't obvious, the "slow" rate is caused by extremely slow servers.
Assuming that the core market is netbooks (which I doubt), this is just a comparison video.

James Hamilton is looking toward ARM and makes "the argument that the right measures of server efficiency was work done per dollar and work done per joule. Purchasing servers on single dimensional metrics like performance or power or even cost alone, makes no sense at all."

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/01/15/TheCaseForLowCos...

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/09/07/LinuxApacheOnARM...

"James is a Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team where he is focused on infrastructure efficiency, reliability, and scaling."
It really seems to me like they should try and capture online distribution rather than fighting against Netflix. Hell, charge a premium to NetFlix to get the media BEFORE the general DVD release but only via streaming, say.
Side note: If you have florescent lighting running at 60hz, and a UK tv running at 50hz, you get a horrendous flicker effect on the tv. (I got this working on the EU version of a console game, in the US, on an imported UK tv.)
I like it, and see a lot of uses for RCapture during the debugging stage. However, I can't think of a situation off the top of my head where it would be preferable to add a hook to a method rather than change the method itself. As the creator, I'm assuming you had some use cases in mind?
Tech support cheat sheet
I believe the question is more to do with the hardware options. Going to 64-bit will require a great deal more silicon area with a consequent increase in power consumption, which tends to go against the ARM philosophy (indeed, the later ARM instruction sets have gone more in the direction of 16bit).
That's not "perceiving" at 60Hz though. The eye is seeing an integrated image, which happens to be of several "frames" of your hand lit mixed with gaps of darkness. Effectively, you're seeing multiple strobes "at the same time".

You do get aliasing effects with strong strobing though, where your eyes can see beating patterns in the image intensity. That's why some people get eye strain looking at 60Hz displays; moving to ~70Hz or so generally fixes it.

But again, our visual systems do not have the ability to distinguish between individual events separated by 1/60th of a second. We just can't do it, and trying to animate at that speed is purely wasted effort.
Not true. HDMI 1.4 has enough bandwidth to do 2048x1080 at 96fps (or 4096×2160 at 24fps).
Windows CE also has bastardized versions of the Win32 and .NET API's
It would have another abstraction layer for a-hole behaviour instead.
Consider looking at Red Hat MRG's realtime offering. Red Hat have done work with both IBM's and Sun's realtime JVMs.

http://www.redhat.com/mrg/realtime/
http://www.redhat.com/mrg/faq/

It's geared towards low latency.
Let me know if I can help more.
I really like how simple the layout and design is, very djangothic :-)
Is this a correction? To quote myself: "(well, one is too few, but ten will definitly do it)"
Fascinating, but one bit of feedback--I really would like to pass this on to a couple of young, budding scientists, but I can't because of the examples: murder, people being stabbed with an icepick, etc. Out of all the movies this is what they choose? sigh

Please, writers--choose your examples with a broad audience in mind.
The time limit was until 11pm.. so 14 hours not 2
Secret handshake of the future
So, you're saying given queries like:

select * from t where t.col = 'foo'

select * from t where t.col = 'bar'

select * from t where t.col = 'baz'

Oracle should infer that foo|bar|baz should be parameterized? Interesting idea, though this seems like matter of matching parse trees, and I believe that's a relatively expensive operation, roughly polynomial time, iirc.
"As a result, they have distorted the market by licensing WinXP (and now Win7?) at an attractive price point and added laptop/netbook size and speed criteria to discourage low end netbooks."

How is selling their software at an attractive price to the market classed as distortion?
Swimming robot snake
I don't pretend to understand the deep details, but the core point is that the GNSF algorithm is exponential in the bit length of the number being factored, but the exponent turns out to be distressingly small.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve gives the complexity as O(constant ^ ((logN^1/3)*(log logN ^ 2/3)). Which grows really slowly.
Does anyone know the equivalent in rails for socialauth ?
Dude, you put a link to an overloaded site on a popular link aggregator, this doesn't really help anyone.
From what I've read, Microsoft's original corporate culture wasn't that far removed from "stand back and let the rock stars do their thing." For example, Spolsky likes to talk about how management's job at Microsoft was to keep people from bothering the developers so they could keep writing code. I think he also told anecdotes about developers coming into a manager's office to resolve a technical dispute, and the manager responding "Why are you asking me? Of the people in this room, I'm the one who knows the least about it." Then the manager sent them away to work it out between themselves.

That attitude probably had a lot to do with Microsoft's success.
Let’s Just Skip To The Super-Duper-Phone
I liked your post, but you didn't explain at all why a legacy x86 ISA has anything at all to do with either static or dynamic power.
I don't know if I'm a good judge (most startups make me yawn), but I'm left cold. It looks like a list picked by someone at CNN.
Are employees really trapped? I changed jobs this year, and my company (a large, household-name-type-place) is continuing to hire a lot of developers. I think the team I'm on was about 2 people a year ago, now it's 10+.

Maybe people right out of college are having trouble finding jobs, but I think anyone with actual programming experience is in high demand right now. (Just like always...)
Sorry to make you put in so much work.

I'm aware that you can't do this.

I guess my sarcasm didn't translate:)