skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody knows it in the sense that a debt collector knows that they're ruining people's lives, but it's kinda swept under the rug. We also had the experience of people saying "yeah, we don't really know how well our algorithms our doing, so if you can develop software to tell us, we'll pay you big bucks." (Though, last I heard, nobody had actually paid big bucks for the software we did develop.) But it's the kind of truth that nobody really wants to face, so they just kinda acknowledge it and then go about their business.
It is not even international.
Obviously you pay a premium for the quick turnaround. But yes, that's a little ridiculous.
Kids have a poor grasp of logic and cause/effect, so you can only teach kids what is in their "zone of proximity". For instance, it might be better to teach kids how to manipulate an existing program, like changing the color of a circle that is being drawn, or changing the radius. Slowly, you could introduce more complexity in the modifications. Trying to teach kids a language outright wouldn't be feasible.
Local bank with great customer service, convenient hours, etc.and Quickbooks -- although the software is extremely lacking on the Mac.
I lived in Golden (where my first house design was built) for a while, and you simply can't beat the area there for outdoor activities. I was in amazing shape, rode my bike along the Continental divide, got a below freezing outfit to hit the road as soon as the snow was plowed in the winter, amazing skiing up Interstate 70. But if you're looking for fine art, symphony, theater, opera, great dining, etc, this is not a good place to be. For a shorter period though - a great experience.
When I was a student, I had a big problems with Fifth Third. Really stupid stuff like "unresolvable computer errors." I had to close an account and re-open it to solve the problem.

Needless to say, I didn't keep that new account open for long.

5/3 for the fail.
Is it possible the reason Apple did this is so that people don't use DTrace to find a way to hack Apple's DRM in iTunes?

I'm sure the RIAA and the MPAA had some concerns about that.
Ask YC: Capacity planning question
How many simultaneous mongrels am I going to need to serve 120K users? 120K mongrels?

Assume the mongrels are sitting at the front of a rails app - any idea of a good metric for this? I know they're not all going to be hitting the site simultaneously, but I believe each request to rails blocks.

So at 4 Mongrels a virtualized server I'd need 250 to serve 1K simulataneous users. Is there a good metric for breaking down how many simul users I should plan for based on the total number of users?
comments, links, ridicule welcome
TIA
Yes.

Your English usage is better than the author's.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/int.php
Nonsense. I started learning QBASIC when I was 5 and was competent by 6. That's not a fluke; one of my elementary school classmates in a class of 40 started just as early, and in fourth grade a second friend easily picked up Visual Basic on his own when I introduced him to it. I'm very happy that my parents never learned about Piaget.
Sony, Sharp offer free Blu-ray players, sorta
Hi endecotp. I'm glad to see your candor about the level of security offered and I hope that my original comment didn't come across more harshly than I meant it. I was speaking solely for myself: I am not the market for this because I'd rather carry PuTTY on a thumb drive than hand my private key material to a third party I've never met. Others are free to weigh things differently.
This looks an awful lot like my childhood experience with Hypertalk. (In fact, I suspect Hypertalk might be better-developed than this framework.) It was okay, I guess, but Hypertalk wasn't a real programming language and I'm not sure this is either. I probably learned more from an even earlier childhood experience with (heaven help me) Basic.

If I were trying to teach someone to program today, whatever their age, I wouldn't dream of starting in any language other than Python. Seriously, Java?
I dont think your question has enough data to answer properly. We need to know whats the service time(avg request takes how many seconds) for each request and how the arrival rate of your requests like (120K per second or minute?) and whats the limit on your request queue (put them on hold till they get server). Finally whats the tolerance level of the final response time (can support 120K users by serialising across 10 servers but that drives up the response time for end users)?

Anyways probably you can read some books here at http://www.cs.gmu.edu/faculty/menasce.html

or if you are in a hurry a quick glimpse at the tactical paper at
http://www.cmg.org/measureit/issues/mit04/m_4_7.html

Hope this gets you started if not answer your question thoroughly..
I'd prefer they build universities over palaces or 7 star hotels.
Nokia And Facebook Working On Mobile Deal; Could Involve Investment
The 1981 Loi Lang (Lang Law) fixed this with the objective of protecting local independent book stores from competition. The law enshrines the French idea that local, independent book stores are an important part of French cultural life and therefore should be protected. A secondary reason was the protection of small publishing houses (of which France has _a lot_).

I hope that Amazon wins this because they provide a much wider range of books than any local book store, and they don't have surly service (and that's not a stereotype... I live in France :-). Also Amazon should be able to support the small book publisher through the classic 'long tail' of books.

If you live in France, please consider signing Amazon's petition: http://www.amazon.fr/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000129903#Petit...
> So at 4 Mongrels a virtualized server I'd need 250 to serve 1K simulataneous users.

Depends on how simultaneous they really are. Are we talking 1000 hits per second? Or are we talking about 1000 unique people viewing some portion of your site/app at a given time?

If it's the latter, you can get away with a lot less.

Also, if you have shared-anything, it will become a bottleneck long before the mongrels. Your database especially will have to be replicated (for read-mostly apps), or sharded (for heavy read-write apps).

If it's a read-mostly app, consider aggressively caching fragments or even pages. (1K users hitting static pages will just hit Apache, given the right set of mod_rewrite rules, and you can have a lot more Apache processes (or threads; is Rails threadsafe these days?) running on a given server than mongrels (which, when I last used Rails, were very resource-hungry).

Consider also ways to extend the functionality of cached/static pages. You could have mod_rewrite check to see if the user has a login cookie and only then hit the non-cached app, OR you could have client-side javascript on the static cached page check for the same cookie and only then display the login name or do an XMLHttpRequest to the server (which then may cache a static html subpage named for that username, which can then be checked by mod_rewrite as well).

Just don't trust non-signed user cookies for looking up private information, or for making any database writes. Signed cookies, however, are a great alternative to centralized sessions (just remember to encrypt anything that you want the user to store, but not see: signing just protects against tampering). Jam the user's IP address into the signed cookie text and guard against replay attacks, as well!
Why do so many people rag on that movie? Are they expecting it to be some kind of epic manifesto of open source culture, and then getting let down? It's just entertainment with a few extra morsels for hackers. When you look at it that way, it's easily in the top 20% of what comes out of Hollywood.
Thanks - i'll have to spend some time to grok your suggestions, but for now at least I appreciate them.

Re: 1k simulataneous requests - concurrent requests - just didn't want rails to block.
Hi - yes - looking into how to price a potential large scale licensing deal - but unlike something like MS-Word the cost per instance isn't zero with hosted software. Trying to come up with a per-user or per 1k user metric for the server costs. I'll take a look at your links and post back when I get some data - thx
A few years back I heard from a friend at a dotcom that they had their payroll person work overtime to get the payroll out of the way so that they could lay off most of the people with short notice.

Then after she finished writing everyone else's check she was told to write one for herself. Ouch.
Edward Tufte's video work on YouTube
LOC is a terrible measure of productivity, but as a long-term measure of work it's not so bad.
This looks like a machine I'd actually want to own. It's about the same size, but comes with an optical drive, a real set of ports and (I think) RAM that doesn't require advanced soldering skills to replace or upgrade.
Did you mean to link to the main page?

http://www.google.com/experimental
Separating interfaces from implementations is ALWAYS good design.

If I understand correctly, a pure virtual interface avoids inline functions. And there can be a lot of one-liner inline functions in a large project.

So there's a diference between standard good-design and this yet-another-thing-that-became-a-pattern.
Looking at yahoo.sk they should hire not fire :) Or fire Young.
you're right, what I should have written is the question in their mind is "how soon and for how much can we create liquidity" with more of a focus on how much than how soon. In other words, how will the funds be used to reduce the risk in the startup. If acquisition is your likely exit (and that's a safe bet for most new startups) then they may ask you to speculate who would buy the firm and for how much. I am not advocating a "built to flip" strategy" as much as trying to understand an investor perspective.
dude, gears of war is multi-player.
Why Distributed Version Control Matters
Database War Stories #3: Flickr
Though neither persistant nor massively multiplayer. Both of those things add a huge amount of complexity. I don't envy the job of one person writing an MMO - although I guess it's a possible direction I'll be taking in the future.
Picking a favorite single color seems about as pointless as picking a favorite key on a piano. It's not the color that matters, but how the color interacts with those around it.
High Tech Mapping Starts to Redefine International Borders
3D Cropcircles in the English countryside
How to Run a Successful Internet Business
Project Management Tools Directory
Paper Prototyping in Usability Design
Coming from the consulting angle, it is much easier to get work doing web related stuff, and that work pays better I am finding. Even the desktop stuff I am doing either has a web component, communicates with the web or a website in some way or has a version that is a website. Learn your Javascript and have a decent working knowledge of HTML and CSS.

I do think that you should know probably PHP (for consulting most web projects are in this or are extensions of projects written in it) and one of either Ruby or Python.

There are opportunities out there, just not nearly as many. Also keep in mind as a recent graduate you are competing with all the people who never made the web transition because they already had 3-5 years experience on the desktop that now have 10-12 years experience there.
Campaign Reporting in 140 Characters or Less
I'm intrigued that nobody has mentioned UnrealScript in this context. I'm pretty sure they haven't dropped that for UE3, and language-wise that's apparently somewhat like Java. Historically, Unreal games have had most of their logic written in UnrealScript.

And yeah, 500000 really isn't much in gamedev. I worked as an engine programmer for the year following graduation and worked on a almost-2-million-LOC behemoth (including tools, so the game was probably nearer 1-1.5m) which wasn't an MMO or even had that much data to look after at run time. (the Wii only has 88MB of RAM)

I can echo the long compile and linking times mentioned elsewhere. Almost none of the code used templates, which would have been an obvious candidate for driving up the compile time. Linking really isn't fast anymore either once you hit a couple hundred compilation units.

Of course, the code was a complete mess. Few people cared much about the quality of the code base, particularly as the game was released about 9 months late and everyone just wanted it out the door. (it was delayed mostly by management pushing for features rather than having bugs fixed for the 2/3 of development and large-scale changes imposed by the publisher late in development) Not a particularly pleasant experience, but boy did I get to practice my skills in understanding and debugging badly written, undocumented code. Typically code that nobody who still worked at the company had ever touched or seen. Or maybe that was the crazy overtime talking.

~phil
Programming Book Profits
As someone who has been at the same software company for 8+ years, reading articles about how you need to have a professional presence / a dossier on the web (blog, LinkedIn) frankly freaks me out. I went to a presentation by a recruiter (for graphic design) who echoed the fact that if you don't have a viable LinkedIn presence - you're not really a candidate. Blogging about personal & software development and learning Wordpress are high on my choose-to-do short list for 2008.
Sigh... crop circle "researchers"...?
What about Alice from Carnegie Mellon? Randy Pausch (of life wisdom) fame. In Alice, programming errors cause objects in the Alice 3D virtual world to have unusual visual properties and/or behavior. http://www.alice.org
120K users a day? That's a _lot_ for a rails app. In fact, looking around, I'd be surprised if there were any existing rails applications that serve that many. 43things.com seems to max out in the 50K users per day range (on average). The first question I have to ask is do you really need to handle that kind of traffic? If you don't - don't bother trying to scale to that much yet. If you're talking hits, that's a different story... You'll definitely want to know how many concurrent you're getting. For reference, a TechCrunch post generates between 20-50 concurrent hits on an application that renders in ~1s/page (as of Nov 07). Plan for 2x-3x that for digg/reddit traffic.
That TechCrunch load was served with 4 or 5 mongrels. 6-8 is the most I'd recommend running on a dual-core box.

I haven't seen a 1000 concurrent user app since I worked at UPS... so if you have this problem, why are you asking us? You should be hiring someone with the huge amount of money you have. ;)
Nice. How did I get the result in the first place?

I know that this sum can be expressed as a cubic polynomial. So I just evaluated the sum at four data-points (n=0,1,2,3) and used those to determine the four coefficents by solving a linear equation system.
Could you give an example of this hidden liquidity? Seems interesting.
iTunes itself had it's share of unpleasant aspects, like in the beginning when it logged your playlist to Apple by default. I don't really miss it all that much - OK, Rhythmbox does not have Coverflow (yet), but apart from that, it seems to do roughly the same thing.

I don't want to compare Apple apps to Linux apps, just point out that many Apple apps come with a nasty aftertaste. Maybe most apps on your list are clean, maybe not. It's all about trust to begin with, and I don't really trust Apple to do the right thing.
Microsoft goes Mickey Mouse
How much for digital?
This year's Business of Software conference
I use it. Only issue I ever had was that a few weeks ago, all items' descriptions showed up as Undefined or something. But that's fixed now.
this is ridiculous, just use ConceptDraw.
...have multiple heart attacks, male pattern baldness (the girls too) and eye cancer to boot :)
So smarter people might just be better at suicide?
My Emacs doctor cares:

> I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.

I want to commit suicide.

> If you are really suicidal, you might want to contact the Samaritans via E-mail: jo@samaritans.org or, at your option, anonymous E-mail: samaritans@anon.twwells.com . Or find a Befrienders crisis center at http://www.befrienders.org/ . I would appreciate it if you would continue.
Computer vision, neat. You guys need a good developer? If so, you can find my email in my profile.
No, not in general. For example consider those pesky subsidies in agriculture. Huge farms are far better at collecting them than small, family run farms. That's because big business can afford to a law department to hack the laws.
Cantor made a major contribution. But his set theory did not solve everything. There were contradictions and paradoxes lurking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor#Paradoxes_of_set_t...)
I like the fifth black key from the left.
Maybe this is a stupid questions, but aren't there taxes to pay as well? If they use the money to pay a wage to themselves (to use to pay for food and rent and insurance), then they pay income tax on that wage, right? Or does that "$50k" number include income tax?
Down with Piaget!
I totally agree with the breaking up of the project to smaller DLLs, as long as you write your tests for each DLL separately it can save a great deal of time, as you only have to recompile the DLL&test with the bug-fix.
Ask YCNews: Any lady hackers using the site?
I just realized that I assume all of the users here are guys. I sure hope I'm wrong. Any ladies want to speak up? While girls are few in number in CS, they usually have valuable insights.
French people just don't get economics. It's not taught at school except as an option in high school programs, where you're only taught keynesian, if not marxist, economics (french universities are less biased). They're not really good at rational thinking or logic, either. That's why most people actually support taxes and protectionist laws.

Sometimes it gets really funny. Amazon.fr has setup a forum to let people discuss about this issue (the legality of free shipping). Nearly all people there praise Amazon for the quality of its service, for how it helps disabled people and country-living people to read books, etc. Yet, for some reason they feel like they have to save the inefficient bookshops just because they're small. They'll say that Amazon is the greatest thing and frown upon capitalism in the same sentence.
Makes sense - and you're from France yourself, or am I mistaken?

This is relevant:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2008/01/the_mise...
One advantage of paper prototypes is that anyone can draw them. There's no need to learn a tool.

Currently, I'm working with a large web site where we are redoing a section of the site (which is a sequence of pages taking you through a financial application process) and paper prototypes have been a good starting point for us. We also have a paper workflow between the numbered pages to illustrate the flow of pages (since it's not strictly linear).

The VP of Marketing has a rough time using any new tool that's not trivial (e.g. as easy as Apple Mail) and so making him learn a new tool would not be helpful to our process. However, he can sketch his thoughts nicely.

For nicer presentation we are simply using PowerPoint. Everyone has got it and we can take screen shots of existing pages and overlay them with simple drawings using the PPT drawing tools.

This has been enough to work through the new design.

But thanks for the pointer to ConceptDraw, looks like Visio replacement I've been searching for now that I use a Mac.
Wow. After reading that I realize just how little I know about finance.

I also now know how non-technical people feel when us programmers start talking in jargon.

It was an interesting article though.
Yes, I'm french. The Economist article is right.

I even remember having been taught, in biology classes in middle-school (something like 10 years ago), that AIDS was designed by the Pentagon or some other US agency to kill people in the third world (supposedly, for some imperialist or racist purpose). In history classes, I've been taught that the US basically went to WWII just to "steal" the world's gold reserves. It were exceptions, though; most teachers are decent. Still, I expect today's teachers to tell kids that GMOs are a very bad and dangerous thing and that organic food is the way of the future.

It's very sad because, despite this lack of rational thinking, we still have some very good scientists in France. But they're completely ignored by the population. When Claude Allegre, an eminent geologist and political figure, started to say controversial stuff about global warming, instead of thinking "maybe we should listen to one of our best scientists" the reaction was more like "oh, buzz of you and your science!"
Donna, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=donna

but she disappeared several months ago :) I assume she changed her nickname not to be abused by nice looking hackers using this site. I think the problem is that PG doesn't allow us to publish our photos, so your question could be inspiring for him :) YC.news => Hacker.news => YC.Hacker.Dating.news
Thanks... how much time how you been using it? Maybe I'll use it soon.
Flock 1.1 Arrives in Two Weeks
DTrace review at google
If you use Flex, it's free too (not open, though).
RSS feed is broken, and submission form is sometimes broken
I could not find a link to support, so submitting it here.
There are 2 problems with the site:

1. Links in RSS feed are broken; they look like http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101517 instead of the correct http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101517

2. Submission form is missing the text field if you get to access it through news.ycombinator.com/x instead of news.ycombinator.com/submit (this happens when you are redirected to submission form after login)

Cheers
If you need multiple user access for accounting, I recommend Less Accounting - think Quickbooks but online.
The article says: The "list" is reportedly the product of a Q4 project in which all group heads were asked to look at redundancies and create their own lists of potential cuts. All the group-level lists have now been turned in to corporate.

There is a lot of dead wood, and even more VP level employees that really don't contribute to the bottom line.

It doesn't sound like this is how you get rid of VP-level dead wood, or am I wrong?
The fall of Ion Storm: the story of a game startup that did almost everything wrong
#1 was already fixed once here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100946

I guess the changes didn't stick after the server was restarted?
What We Have vs. What We Want
True story: Your IP address can land you in jail
A Blogger Turned Martyr
How Microbes Fight Off Competition