skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its only function is this one case. Whereas the Arc version is built by combining highly orthogonal components that can be recombined to solve completely different problems. Do you really not see the difference?

This is why the appropriate test is the ability for an average programmer to put together a DSL for a randomly-selected problem domain: it actually speaks to the power of the language. The characteristics of orthogonality and combinatorial flexibility is what DSLs are made to do. Arc doesn't have a monopoly on them. The only thing that is interesting here is your choice to include web-specific functionality in Arc. I think it's a great choice, but it just doesn't say much about the general expressiveness of the language as a whole.

We may have reached the point here where splitting hairs over DSLs versus included libraries is not going to get anybody anywhere. From what I understand, I would certainly agree that Arc programmers having such easy access to stateless web programming in a highly flexible manner is a great thing for the language.

But I would judge any language by the ability to easily add solutions to other problem domains that are highly orthogonal and flexible, not necessarily by the problem domains that are enabled by default.

Hope that makes sense. I think I finally figured out what your point was.
The Uniqueness of Humans
I really like Twilio as a service. That said, I find it really disingenuous that you and Danielle post here under the guise of community members without disclosing your ties to the company. You guys should update your bios to state your relationship to Twilio if you're going to tout it the way you do and not participate in this community outside of your astroturfing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dmor
http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=danielle17
http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kmorrill
http://xmonad.org

http://gitit.net
Totally agree. I don't think anyone would have looked at LAMP 5 years ago and say it's scalable, but Facebook did it, in steps, because they had very talented engineers. I found the point of "don't use a relational database" ironic considering they contrasted Friendster and Facebook. Facebook uses MySQL as their backing store. While they might not use it in the traditional way, they most certainly evolved from joins and normalization to their current scheme as a sharded object store as it became critical to their growth.
Going to America: A Ponzi scheme that works
Coding in PHP make Al Gore cry.
It gets you closer to the theoretical maximum of your network and memory busses. When a single machine can generate queries and lookups and log and render results faster, you need fewer machines to handle a given load. I know we increased our web front end capacity by 5x when we migrated from PHP to Java that runs backend queries asynchronously, so we reallocated some boxes and now we won't need to light up new hardware for a while. The inefficiency of PHP really adds up when you reach hundreds of cores.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the string will already be Base64 if it's human readable (I'm not trying to use character 254 as part of my password) and base64 encoding actually grows the data you are encoding (since you are breaking some bytes down into two bytes to make them both human readable).

The problem being length. Human-readable (ascii-armored/whatever) hashes (md5/sha-1/sha-256) have standard lengths which are usually longer than the maximum size of the password fields.
No, actually, I didn't. I chose the simplest stateful web app I could think of: take input on one page and print it back on the next. What about that problem is specific to Arc?
Just to add some rationale.. this is probably the coolest Economist article I've read in the last few months. It highlights some of the greatest aspects of brand America and why opening the immigration floodgates would be no bad thing.

I think encouraging a policy of significantly increasing US immigration to people unlikely to cause a drain on the public system should override more selective policies like the "startup visa," as further general immigration can only continue to help America's cause.
Sowmya's spicy looks with Boob show
There's a more glaring deficiency than that, which is that CPU is rarely the bottleneck on a webserver.
A "web server" in Facebook's cluster is just Apache+PHP. It doesn't do any disk work. It's not reading anything from disk, as that gets forked over to memcached or MySQL. If you've got thousands of boxes in this arrangement, clearly reducing the CPU usage thru whatever means will get you more efficiency.
Facebook:1 Simon Cowell:0 ?
But American's who would code in C++ already exist and are emitting CO2 regardless of what they are doing. As long as there is unemployment, there would be no net gain in CO2 by switching to C++.
It doesnt take a 'skilled hacker' much effort to use the tools others have released. I cant imagine the author's blog being hacked as anything more than mere button pushing. A 'script kiddy' really.
Many good answers here already.

What I can add is that having learned, worked or teached other parts of the corporate environment, say management, accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, public relations, which can be found in the corporate world will make the entry much more easier.

Knowing something of the above will help you move faster and the hurdle 'to learn on the job' is not there. But still be able to apply insight of (say neuroscience) to your job.

And consultancies aren't the only ones who are looking for outsiders to their business. Small companies and start-ups are much more open to people (IMHO) with a different profile but obviously in the last third part of the IQ spectrum. Smart people with a can do attitude are always an asset.
Why was there a big drop in crime for NYC in the '90's? Sometimes just one man can make all the difference. From Wikipedia:

Rudy Giuliani served two terms as Mayor of New York City... He was credited with initiating improvements in the city's quality of life and with a reduction in crime.
The Comfort and Convenience of a Towel Radiator
Often , things that we have in our home are more than a luxury item. As an interesting point, there are some items which many folks would never consider not having in our home.
Aye, he Accidentally the whole English language.

Though given the article, the title can be construed to make sense, albeit still badly worded.
One could argue that any resource Facebook was using, human, energy, physical, or otherwise, is going to get consumed in some form regardless. What the article focuses on is Facebook's operation itself, not the net impact. Also, the unemployment rate of programmers in general is relatively very low, explaining the mean annual wage of $87,900.
Consider Cambridge physicist David MacKay's Without Hot Air, especially the section "Every Big Helps."

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c19/page_11...

On a related note, I suggest the everyone run Wattzon.org to see where their carbon footprint comes from. I found that while I was a much lower user on everything else, heat accounted for 40% of my entire carbon footprint. Immediately I ran around the house and fixed the duct vents that I could close before, and now I'll have probably halved that, saving me $15 a month, $180 a year, and 20% of my carbon footprint.

Seriously! Little fixes can make huge changes.
NYTimes pollutes web with garbage text to boost search rankings of its ConsumerSearch subsidiary?

That may be the real story here. If in fact the craptastic linkspam copy was laundered through some affiliate program, giving NYTimesCo plausible deniability, they still bear responsibility.
In the first version, the first person adds their salary, modulo 10NB, so you don't get any information.

In the second version, you are correct, with a sign error. You are presenting an _upper_ bound on your salary, which is probably not a serious problem. That said, you do need negative numbers to truly conceal all the information about the initiator's salary.
...it's impossible (heh, well for this mortal) to definitively predict the consequences of a particular drop. Badda-bing-bang-bong and half the screen is cleared. When it doesn't work out so well the responsibility for failure can easily be ascribed to unfortunate randomness introduced by the row feed.

What do you mean by this? The chain reaction doesn't involve anything random.
Google's approach to privacy
It's a non-profit. They're not interested in maximizing revenues.
That sounds like an architectural change, not a problem with PHP's runtime.

It's quite possible that the solution to your particular problem can be better expressed in another language than PHP, or will run faster under a different language's runtime. This doesn't mean that PHP "is slow". It might mean that your problem is an imperfect fit for a PHP-based architecture at your particular scale.
Check out http://identi.ca/doc/openmublog
Probably because it would be an easy way to get links back to your site for SEO reasons. Google loves HN. Yes I know all links are nofollow, but I could imagine Google following them anyway.
I liked the futures example. That will probably be useful to me.

I don't understand what the site means for "standards and practices for well-written, readable code". Isn't gofmt meant to be used, making manual practices obsolete?
For Simon Cowell it is all about the money. You think he's promoting a record because of its message? The attention that this promotion brought to both records put sales through the roof for both. Look at the sales of the 3rd place record and compare.
Facebook makes heavy use of, and is one of the major contributors to, APC, the opcode cache. Most of the time, Facebook is hitting this cache, so its interpreted load is much, much less than this article estimates.

In other words, this article's author is railing against some imagined version of Facbook running some imagined implementation of PHP, not the Facebook that actually exists running PHP with opcode caching and memcached.
Why I Think The NFB.ca History Website Suck
Brittany Murphy Death & Google’s Real Time Search Results
Strange how this explanation changes a flagged post into a genuinely interesting one.
Ask HN: More types of flagging? 
Right now to flag something is to recommend that it be killed. I'm thinking of adding additional types of flags that are more specific, and less draconian. The goal is to create things
between a flag and a downvote, or maybe even to replace downvotes
in some cases. The two most obvious options are to allow
comments to be flagged as uncivil, and frivolous. The numbers of these flags (but not who issued them) would be displayed to
whoever posted the comment in question. So this would be a
way to tell someone to stop being a jerk, or posting dumb stuff,
without having to write a comment to say so.

Any opinions about the types of flags there should be, and how
they should work?
PLT Scheme
The text of a submission should be the title text of the article being submitted. This is unlikely to contain a link. thus the need to supply such functionality is just about zero.

Editorialising the title of a submission is not encouraged at HN.
Sure, but how is that "evil"?
Ok, will do. I'm also thinking of adding more types of flags: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006589

Edit: There should now be flag links on noobstories.
I did this for the first time a few months ago and it was incredible. It made me more confident and especially during conversations where I'm able to hold someones gaze while talking. It's also quite powerful when you do this with a member of the opposite sex with a sly smile on your face. These days whenever I'm out I'll be scanning hungrily for anyone to make eye contact with me. I've had stare down battles with people on the tube, a game of first one to look away loses. Battles can last between 5-10 seconds.
You have to be careful when making these kinds of leaps, because anyone can link to a website. If having spammers link to you is an indication of guilt, it would be trivial to destroy your competitors by setting up link farms pointing at them. This is why Google would be unlikely to penalize consumersearch in this scenario, even if they detected the spam. They'd likely just not take that link into account.

Not saying that this happened here, just that it's not a story yet. More information is needed.
So that's what happened to my Blazers this year! Come on Nate, let's get that morning shoot around back on the schedule, quick!
What are you estimating as the demographics for each?

As a 30 something alternative music type the RATM campaign was big on my facebook page. At least back in 2007 the xfactor was big with the 16-34 age group. So about the same age group, I'd have thought.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1560802/X-Factor-back...

Poorer, I'm not sure. The Xfactor crowd does seem less geeky/bookish than the ratm crowd, from the people I have met.

What this all means I'm not quite sure. Perhaps we will see the start of micro payment campaigns. 40p to support some cause is not much. You just have to make it have wide enough appeal.
Have you considered downvotes for submissions? Maybe with a Karma threshold, so that it'll only be used to get irrelevant submissions off the front page.
I would imagine that depends a lot on what the distance is. Release too close and you get blown up by a laser before you can release. Release too far and by the time they get there the ship will have moved away.
This idea didn't work for Slashdot at all.
I thought that was the exact point the article was making. For example:

In addition, Skylink argued that the rolling code was not DRM, since it did not protect access to some copyrighted computer code but to "an uncopyrightable process" (the opening of a garage door).

and:

By way of example, DVDs marked 'for home use' or 'non-commercial private use only' are not legally restricted as such. Unless there is a contract, those representations are not true. A given use, e.g., classroom showing, is permitted or infringing depending on copyright law, not what is printed on the packaging—unless there is a contract including that restriction. Rightsholders still print such claims on the packaging, however. They might as well print that infringers are obligated to forfeit their first-born child."
One possible problem with this is that you can downvote everyone except your story of course.
Flagging seems better for that, because if they're really offtopic they should be killed, not just have fewer points.
You could put some water or other substance and have it swimming around the ship and when you use weapons or engines send it through them and fire it out the back of the ship. It's a limited supply, but so is whatever is powering the engines and lasers in the first place.
What went wrong for them?
The comment flags is a great idea - there's a good chance that it would cut down on "why am I being downvoted" types of posts, which would in turn reduce noise.

Are you thinking of adding more flags to stories too?
Jesus, there is just so much that I don't know it sometimes seems like I'll never catch up!
This problem seems trivial at first, but what if the garage door opener runs out of batteries? Synchronization is lost then. Some method of resyncing has to be provided. It looks like that is what Skylink is taking advantage of. This backdoor seems like a built-in mechanism to resync the garage door opener.

It isn't really a math problem. This is real-world engineering. One has to weigh the cost and added benefit of the myriad of possible solutions. I agree with you that the company shouldn't resort to strong-arm legal tactics to keep its products secure, though.
That's easily caught by a script... Also, if downvoting is limited to high-karma people, the chance that they would actually do this is fairly low.
I read it as "A record by Simon Cowell called Rage Against The Machine is UK #1 single for Xmas". Your formatting is better.
It would be 1:20 if they wrote it in assembler. I write all my webpages in Assembler and I eat bits for cereal.
When Developers Work Late, Should Manager Stay or Go?
Ask HN: Favorite encrypted VPN provider?
I'm considering subscribing to a VPN service for increased security and privacy.

But the reviews I found are confusing and contradictory, making it very hard to pick a provider (f.ex. strongvpn.com is both "great" and "horrible". Same for perfect-privacy.com).

I trust this crowd a lot more than random online reviews, so I'd like to ask what's your fave VPN provider and why?

Ideally: Very fast using Canadian and US servers, would work well on OS X (better if doesn't require additional software), would use strong encryption, and have a solid privacy policy.

Thanks in advance for the help.
I prefer to use my brain for absorbing news here, not for mastering popularity games. With more ranking options, HN would start to look like work.
I think this is a good idea and long overdue.

Ideally the system will train new users. It has been difficult in the past for me to figure out exactly what downvotes meant.

Over the last few months I'm seeing a rise in ad-hominem attacks. No matter what the subject of the article, technology, startups, history, whatever -- it seems like within minutes somebody has called the author's reputation or the news source into question. Sometimes the information is pertinent, but most always it's just an effort to look superior and/or take easy shots at people. If I remember correctly, we've even had posts about "check out my startup" where the founders were trashed, not to mention the nastiness with Dennis a while back.

I don't think downvoting is sinking in with the people who are doing this. As much as most people don't understand ad-hominem attacks, it'd still be good to have that flag, because it's the same old discussion every time.

EDIT: I meant Dustin, not Dennis. Sorry about that Dustin.
I guess the trade-off there is between a purely binary action (kill / don't kill) which depends on a moderator's opinion, versus a softer, more gradual action of slowly pushing a story down and letting more worthy stories rise to the top...
Absolutely agreed: these situations could also be frame-ups hoping to trigger Google sanctions. But then the suspects are those sites ranked below ConsumerSearch for these terms.

Someone's up to no good, and it might be NYTimesCo's subsidiary. It deserves more research.
Solo pelis de terror online
I think the real point is that it puts the next series of xFactor in jeopardy.

It's a signal that a lot of the public are sick to death of the formulaic rubbish tossed out by these reality shows.

So if I was Simon, I'd be pretty worried now.
can you elaborate more on "no disk work" and forked over things? i didnt get.
What does this guy's future look like now? Nobody'll give him a job in science right?

Is there any way he can use his expertise outside of starting his own company that somehow monetizes it?

Would he be accepted as a high-school teacher?
The point was not "don't use a database"; the problem identified was "inappropriate use of a database." And that is a problem which is much larger in scope than the simplistic examples discussed in this piece.
Anyone have good game theory book recommendations? This book was enjoyable, although it dragged here and there:

http://www.amazon.com/Prisoners-Dilemma-William-Poundstone/d...
Solo sagas de pelis online
blog dedicado a la difusion de las sagas dentro del cine online.de cualquier clase de genero.
Apparently it's some sort of 4chan meme

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-accidentally
The Great Australian Internet Blackout
facebook may be a contributor but apc has only a minor release for the last 8 months.
> That sounds hard to detect.

Well, obviously you need really precise spectrometers, but just because the effect is tiny, doesn't mean that you can't detect it.
I thought Markov generators synthesize text? The text from this blog appears to be stolen from other sources.
Thanks for the link. I've just watched a sunrise from the surface of Mercury. :)
Even on a diskless machine, the limit still is not necessarily "CPU usage". The machine might be limited by I/O bandwidth -- both to the clients and to those memcached and MySQL servers. It might be limited by the amount of memory that must be dedicated to each connection or process, even while that process is sleeping on I/O (which is most of the time).

Most likely, the overhead of running a server is so large that the power consumption problem is all about saving servers, rather than saving CPU cycles. In which case these other variables are just as likely to be a big concern as the speed of your HTML template's WHILE loops.
Sarcasm? :-) Slashdot recently turned 100k stories and its moderation system has remained largely unchanged over that time (with meta-moderation being the only key addition, I recall). The moderation system has a lot to its credit: http://meta.slashdot.org/story/09/12/11/1615202/Slashdot-Tur...
The webserver will only do computations which data they get from other services (memcache, etc...). They will never fetch the data locally, so there is no local bottleneck except the local bandwith and the efficiency of the code, thus the cpu.
I always held the suspicion that there is a difference between good and bad writing.
The Java solution I pasted is "built by combining highly orthogonal components that can be recombined to solve completely different problems".

createForm("click here", new Response("you said %foo"), new InputElement("foo"), new SubmitElement());

Does this not look like a combination of highly orthogonal components that could be recombined to solve a variety of problems?

So no, I can't see any different whatsoever. I'm guessing we'll just have to agree to disagree at this point.
> Your plan actually works pretty well because, while other people here say I should follow the posting guidelines, nobody says you should.

To be fair, one other person has told you this and has been turned gray for it; I'm sure most people think you can probably fend for yourself just fine.
AuTeNTiikAAªª\\
I'm not sure he's quivering in his boots. Even if The X Factor goes down the pan (and it's past its prime, I'd agree), he still has Britain's Got Talent and American Idol raking in the cash pretty quickly.
If you're going to follow their line of thinking to its eventual end, then why not urge Facebook to just write everything in Assembly? :)
Story mentions "The Strategy of Conflict" by Schelling, which is indeed worth a look.
Ask HN: Books for writing a data-intensive Python webapp using CouchDB?
What are the go-to books for gaining comprehension of Python web frameworks (like Django), modern web (and web app) design, and dealing with large amounts of data and analytics, possibly using CouchDB as the database?<p>It's a broad request, I know, but I'm hoping there's some good advice out there.
The UK chart is quite representative of music purchases, compared to most national charts, as it includes downloads from all of the major players. That doesn't cover piracy, free downloads, or certain types of streaming (e.g. Spotify) but has a significant reach IMHO.
I should probably add a way to flag a story specifically as a dupe, and maybe also for having had the title reworded too egregiously. Those are common problems people currently have to use comments for now. Can anyone think of others?
Huh - I knew nothing about that. My intention was to say that this was the first commercial satellite that went past the Moon, but that it was not originally intended to do so. In this way, to have done so was more-or-less an accident.

I didn't have enough space ...

And nothing was left out - I could have said "this was the first commercial lunar satellite - by accident." but that would have been silly.