skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually we hit this point at least a decade ago; I remember getting improved performance by using a compressing filesystem for Windows 3.1. CPUs have been outrunning disks for a while, only the number of orders of magnitude has really changed.

Part of this is that even very cheap algorithms can consistently get "some" compression; as the article observes, bzip is still a net loss for many cases, but gzip-style compression has been better-than-free for a while now, as long as your CPU isn't loaded.
Interesting, it seems they're using "LZJB" compression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZJB

I've been on the lookout for a fast compression algorithm that gives reasonable ratios, while having a liberal enough license. LZJB is licensed under the CDDL, which is GPL-incompatible, but it looks simple enough to be re-implemented.
Indeed, I'm looking into this at the moment.
This is the comment where I remark that I have downvoted you for complaining about downvotes, as I always do.

(Meta: it is bloody hard to balance the competing requirements of giving comments the votes they deserve for cleverness here, and giving them the votes the comments they're self-referential placeholders for should have had.)
A nice example would be this enormous thread (2mb of HTML), that drags on documenting the incendiary results of her 'moderation' on BoingBoing. Search for "TNH": http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Centu...

A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"
how hard would it be to do the same thing for Ruby... ?

Much harder, but not impossible. The two issues are (a) how much of Ruby the language can be compiled to C++ using Type Inference, and (b) For the stuff that can't be compiled, how often does it show up in production code?

FB's PHP solution relies on having a large code base with few instances of code that doesn't compile cleanly.

With Ruby, I suspect both issues are a problem. I think there's a lot more of Ruby the language that will be difficult to infer, and furthermore I think Ruby programmers tend to use those features a lot.

That's just a guess, mind you. You could probably do a lot if you make some major breaks with tradition. For example, if instead of compiling Ruby source code you load Ruby classes, run all the meta-programming, then reverse-engineer the source (ParseTree can do this with Ruby 1.8 but not Ruby 1.9), you could basically do the meta-programming in interpreted mode but run the resulting code in compiled mode.

I suspect that would work well for a lot of Rails programs where the hairiest stuff is run when classes are loaded, not on the fly when responses are being served.
Copyright is not patent. Patents expire inside our lifetimes. H.264 will be a viable product for startups to use in 2017.

(As an aside, don't cast this as a FF vs. the world, patent fees kill startups as well as open source companies.)
Adobe: HTML5 Will Throw the Web 'Back to the Dark Ages of Video'
Yeah, well, the navigation bar on the left has links to some of their open-source projects and their web APIs, and on the right you have links to a bunch of videos, and their news links are targeted at developers ... I couldn't even read the stuff on Microsoft's page because it's full of weasel-words.

Apple's page doesn't bother me much ... they have links to resources. They are efficient and don't pretend like they care :)
"It's not just the U.S. anymore. Europe has caught on as well."

Europe has taken on U.S. style risk taking? I have honestly not heard or read this elsewhere. Can you elaborate?
Pure CSS3 AT-AT Walker
Google's porn problem and how to fix it
Dan Pink: More than a Paycheck
What does "sane" mean in this thread? I can't figure it out other than "something that makes sense to the poster".

>> Need to find a PHP developer? No problem.

Not being able to hire just anyone to code for you is a good thing just as much as it is bad. It means you're going to have some pretty bright people working for you, which apparently is something Fog Creek values and can afford to do.

> Want a PHP IDE? No problem.

Most hackers have their own preferred editors anyways, and Emacs/vi/etc work well with any language if that's the editor you're experienced with.

>> A large community to handle bugs and any future development? Yes.

Again, that's a hindrance just as much as it is a benefit. If you need to make a change or fix a bug in the language, you're going to have much better luck if you know a bunch of people who are intimately familiar with how that language works, especially if their right down the hall from you.
How to Start
To Be or To Become: That's the Question for Advertisers
'A little longer' is being very generous.

I thought the meandering conversational tone with all of the asides was flat out tedious.

Which is a shame because it is a very important topic.
Some details not in the official announcement:

Currently works off of the PHP 5.2 language specs

Compiles to a stand-alone libevent-driven web server or CLI executable

Not based on Zend's runtime/code

Currently no windows support

Intended for 'drop in' PHP replacement - if it runs on PHP and doesn't use a few things like eval() it will compile with HipHop
Google I/O BootCamp Registration Open
$10 seems too high when all the out of copyright stuff is available for about $1.
Thanks for posting that. It seems to match up exactly with the problem vaguely described in the linked article. Scary.
Oracle unplugs Sun's Project Wonderland
If I were Adobe, I would start working on an IDE (and library set) for JavaScript + HTML5. Everything Flash does could easily be JavaScript and a library; their language is already JavaScript anyway.

It's time to let their proprietary VM die, because modern browsers already have all those features working better. Adobe's advantage is in making animation a point-and-click operation that doesn't involve programming. They need to let Flash die and embrace the open version of Flash; JavaScript.
(At least people seemed to be quite keen on sending their offspring to university when I lived there for a few months in 2008. I guess it could also be more of a status symbol, though.)
Hmm, this is one of those rare occasions where something has been released where I have a domain name that could be useful - hiphoperator.com

Now I just have to figure out what to do with it :D
JeffCroft.com: On Flash
Europe was heading to WWIII in 1947? I don't see it.
It just sounded to me like he was trying to make it sound like most of the top sites were using Flash for their own content, when it's more likely they are only displaying someone else's ad.

I don't have a problem with ads, though Google is a good case of not needing Flash to make effective ads.
Articles like this is what Homebrew needs. I was already using it and doing my own Formulae, now I know how to contribute back. Nice!

(Had a lot of pain trying to install GTK through homebrew and finally gave up. If someone succeeds, please ping me :)
I had a two-word reply to your opinions, but then I realized HN would vote me down into oblivion for expressing it in those terms.

So I'll pose it in different terms: why haven't you given into the network effects of, say, Visual Basic?
Yes, but it's not now. Unladen Swallow isn't exactly alone in blazing this trail, Rubinius is using LLVM as well.
Completely off-topic, but this makes me even sadder that I still can't have ZFS on my Mac and probably never will...
I thought Microsoft did a good job of adding a procedural-like feel to SQL with SCOPE's virtual views; see http://icme2007.org/~jrzhou/pub/Scope.pdf for more.

PigLatin certainly is a nice approach to the problem as well, of course.
How A Student With $1,100, Launched Whitepages.com, A $57 Mil A Year Business
Post Startup urls - contribute to this social experiment
The numbers in TFA mean absolutely nothing: he's comparing oranges and orangoutangs.

What would be nice is if PG could post the latest stats :)
Have you heard about QuickLZ? It's the best thing I've seen in the LZO class. http://www.quicklz.com/

Edit: Here we go, a list of compression tools ranked by speed: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf4.php
I think this is where many run into issues with this story. This project was never really meant to be something to help the PHP community as a whole. It was meant to be a tool to help Facebook and to that end they've succeeded very well. 3 engineers + 2 years = 50% CPU improvement without having to rewrite the whole PHP codebase from scratch? That's a great achievement for Facebook but YMMV.
Absolutely not.

XML has its roots in document creation for large organizations, and has a structure appropriate for that -- mostly an ordered graph of text nodes, which do not need to be declared (and indeed are not consistent between parsers), with provision for special node types with their own contents. But early in its history XML got hijacked by a lot of comp-sci theorists who wanted to create highly abstract notions of messaging, separating message validity and provenance from application logic. This gave the world things like XML Schemas and SOAP and worse.

Meanwhile, JSON is a straight representation of common scripting language data structures. Arrays, dictionaries. Simple. Node boundaries are syntactically explicit. In this philosophy is taken for granted that message validity will be ascertained at the application level. There are no fantasies of doing so at the document parsing level.
Where to start.

First off, he's comparing proportions of OS use from two totally different datasets--one is proportions of web visitors to ycombinator.com, and one is systems described in interviews by usesthis.com. You can't meaningfully compare two totally different populations like this, can you?

But even if you could, you wouldn't want to represent the results as some type of off-axis skewed 3D pie chart, because those only distort the data.

So you have dishonest data, represented dishonestly. If you want to make a blog post about this, ask PG for his ycombinator.com visitor stats for this past...whatever period is equivalent to the period he got his numbers from in 2005. And visualize it using honest two-dimensional pie charts. And then you might have something useful to say.
Will this be faster than less say... python?
Are Transportation Planners Smarter Than Mold?
I don't know anything about that graph, but I'd be happy to cede the point that there are many more installations of PHP than Ruby/Python on the web as long as you'll cede the point that this fact doesn't relegate them to "tiny niche languages." If you don't agree, let me know and I'll argue that point.

Obviously what you choose to use for development is your decision. That said, I am confused as to why it's so important to you that you use the most popular language. After a certain threshold of popularity, it doesn't seem that it should matter. PHP, Python, and Ruby all have the critical mass of developers and library support needed to render language popularity concerns irrelevant.
"The NoSQL movement is an alteration from traditional relational databases, to building databases that can handle larger scale demands, but sacrifice reliability."

Sacrifice reliability? This isn't correct at all.
I'm excited because package management has really sucked on OSX. Port usually works well enough for everything I need to do. But I always end up with dueling tool chains, the primary osx ones and Port's copies. Compiling in xcode is always odd since you don't which lib imports to use etc ..
Making High-Tech Aircraft Parts with... Cork
Maybe it's the circles I travel in, but I don't see the same git dominance you do vs. mercurial; I see them both really frequently. Among major projects I can think of off the top of my head, Python, Adium, OpenOffice, and Mozilla are all on mercurial.
Interesting point. But if we aren't going to trust SSL, what should we trust for commerce over the Internet?
This looks pretty interesting (and I particularly like the ability to have a package pointed at the bleeding edge), but I'm not sure how I feel about /usr/local being owned by an arbitrary user. What happens if there's more than one user on the machine?
Is it just me, or did the author of that post not make the argument for why the safe search options are insufficient? Is there some obvious reason I'm not getting?
Not having to wait fifteen minutes for your app to compile and link, for one thing. But seriously, the C++ implementation comes at the cost of many of PHP's features; a "more complex solution" would allow those features to be kept. And while C++ is fast, a script translated into C++ is not going to be as fast as if you had written the application directly in C++, unless the compiler is very, very smart. (I have not seen any implementation that does this; GHC's native code generator produces faster code than it's "via-C" code generator, for example.)

Also, static compilation precludes runtime-based optimization techniques, which has made a lot of code run "faster than C" (including C, ironically; see LLVM).

So anyway, all this is is a way to compile a limited subset of PHP to C++. In doing so, you have to write a special dialect of PHP, without PHP's easy deployability and code/test/debug cycle.

In that case, why are you using PHP to begin with, when a language like GHC or SBCL would run faster and without any compromises?
Macmillan books still missing from Amazon following spat
I think the problem is you state your opinion as absolute fact. Your model for programming appears to be 10,000 monkeys typing away at the specifications handed down from On High. PHP does work in that scenario. It's simple. It's easy to think in because it's so simple. You can do complex things, but it'll be by gluing infinitesimally simple parts together over and over and over again. (Think of PHP programs as an essay written by a 2nd grader. Lots of simple sentences. Lots of repetition.)

If all you have available is a bulk of mediocre people, then PHP is a great way of making sure they produce what you want right now. Of corse, in this process, they will remain mediocre and never become more than your "average programmer" stereotype due to being forced to only think in the absolute simplest terms.
Google adds multitouch to Nexus One browser, maps, and gallery
That is simply not true. Flash 5 == JS+HTML5.

I know you don't want to hear that, but you might have to actually face the fact that HTML5 is not the Flash killer you want it to be. Not yet, anyhow.
Intended for 'drop in' PHP replacement - if it runs on PHP and doesn't use a few things like eval() it will compile with HipHop

This sounds a lot like Python's 2to3. This technique worked so well that the Python 2 series is a distant memory of the past.

(Oh wait... the opposite.)
Security prices have two basic outcomes: "up" and "down." Usually they fluctuate, so almost any call will "eventually" be proven correct. Sporting events are also mostly binary outcomes, so "the Cubs will reach the World Series" will probably be right if given 200 years.

But with technology predictions, there's an almost infinite set of outcomes, so being right in direction but not timing is significant. For instance, someone who says "Little Rock, Arkansas will win the Super Bowl within 5 years" will look pretty smart even if it takes 6 years for Little Rock to (very unexpectedly) get an NFL franchise and 9 years to reach the Super Bowl.

Granted, technology predictors can use also use some tricks to narrow the possibility space in their favor.
No, you'll probably see no changes in your day to day life as a result of this. There's no "interpreted version as opposed to the hiphop-able version", in terms of the code you write.

As the article mentions, almost no one is really running straight PHP, they're running it through FastCGI or are at least using an opcode cache like APC. So you could be swapping out APC for HPHP, but this is at a level of abstraction below the one you're working in.

Regarding future control of PHP, this does not change anything. Its a compiler for the language, but does not propose any changes to the language itself.
I can't find a link anywhere about how to purchase this. Anyone have one?
Okay, I'll cede that point. Python (don't know much about ruby) has the support you need to write your own web apps. But try to find people who you can pay to continue your work - very difficult and very expensive. That's my main reason.
That's a lovely graph you've got there from 2006.
Flash 5 == JS+HTML5.
He didn't even appear to try.

It seems that he wants Safe Search effectively always On, so that he can leave his (now pointless) preference switched to Off.
The guy's a retard. His beef is that he gets porn when he turns off safe-search. There is a reason why safe search exists. Believe it or not, people use words other than cock and tits in the vicinity of porn images. gasp shock
You can play full-screen, streaming, 1080p video without Flash, you can render vector graphics without Flash, you can use OpenGL without Flash, you can play sound without Flash, and you can write code that is dynamically compiled to native machine code... without Flash.

So apart from missing libraries (which Adobe would port), I fail to see what Flash is needed for. Modern browsers have the ability to do everything Flash does; and if they don't, the ability can be added. (Adobe could even add the features themselves; every relevant browser is Free Software!)
You can have homebrew reside in any place you want on your hard drive. The Readme actually suggests to first install it into a directory "brew" in your home dir. You just need to adapt the $PATH in your bashrc accordingly.

From my own experience: beware with moving that directory after installing some formulae somewhere else. It caused quite some trouble for me and i wound up recompiling everything in the new directory.
it's about results relevancy, here Google is saying that the #2 best result for "red top" is a porn image.
Actually, git supports more workflows, you could simply implement read-only branches with a naming scheme and a hook.

In lots of ways git is a superset, branch workflow included.
DOM = Frame buffer
The Withering Away of Flash
No. No, you eejit. If it is somehow a crime to search for porn with the term "Soviet steel production" or "cheap overall shopping", then convict me. Safe Search. Use It, Or Shut Up.
I hate to say it, because I haven't played the game or read the case study, but maybe Schilling would be better as an angel as opposed to a startup founder.

As for spending his personal fortune, he has a lifetime of employment as an ad pitchman in the Boston area -- at least if he wants it. He broke the Curse for the Red Sox, and people here will never forget that.
Sounds like a non-issue. If you work in someplace so draconian that you'll get canned if an illicit image accidentally graces your monitor, then you probably shouldn't have turned off SafeSearch in the first place.
Please read the article, it's already going to market for direct sale to consumers.
That domain is parked and the pdf link is broken.
His point was math has to become relate able again, and in todays world everyone (under and over educated people) can relate to software as a way to solve problems. There are tons of great math problems with practical application out there. Couldn't agree more with that because that's what drew me into math was programming and the practical application of that.

He could have said this in a more direct way without all of the asides and weak socialist plot bait. Clear and concise communication is a mutually exclusive to math skills.
No, here Google is saying that the #2 best result for "red top" with porn included in your results is a porn image.
Wyvern on an iPhone. That's exactly what I want to see, and what the other games I've been playing don't quite match up to. It has a low demand on the graphics and network side of things, but has a rich and rewarding game play experience. For me, obviously.

I haven't played that for a few years. I'm going to have to start again.
I must say congratulations to Amazon, punish the authors in the midst of a recession whilst having no effect on the publisher. Bravo!
Indeed. Fortunately, btrfs is shaping up to be a fine substitute (http://www.codestrom.com/wandering/2009/03/zfs-vs-btrfs-comp...). Including compression.
Just want to point out that Gaia GPS did a great Haiti maps app for the emergency workers over there.

Mad props
The WBC are professional legal trolls -- the original point of their asshole activities was to bait the authorities into doing something illegal, so they can sue for damages. They misjudged how far they could go when they started picketing soldier's funerals, and got cases brought against them instead and lost.
Exactly. A Reddit frontpage for 1 user and 10 articles should be about 90 lines of code.
As I pointed out in his comments section, I'm thinking the author needs to try out Ruby.
It could be possible that the porn image is actually one of the more desirable results if one is searching for "red top" with Safe Search off.
I forewent a comments section on my own blog for a philosophical reason: I feel there should be some greater investment to commenting than creating an account on a blog. To comment on anything anywhere, you're free to use the platform you feel is most appropriate for it, be it your own blog, your Twitter account... or perhaps a link submission to a news discussion site like HN.
Hand-coded C++ is much more than twice as fast, but 2x is what you get from machine-converted HipHop at this point.
Let the market sort it out? He's the CTO of Adobe, his job is to push the market one way or another, this isn't bitching, this is exactly what he's supposed to do. If this was just another blogger going on about Flash yet again then I might agree, but that's clearly not the case.
Let's make it an even 0.
MyHeritage Buys Germany’s OSN, Now 540 Million Profiles Strong
And will btrfs ever see the light of day as a kernel-mode FS on OS X?

You have to realize that most Apple applications make extensive use of bit-twiddling in the HFS+ filesystem. Resource Forks are used extensively in the OS X software, particularly the iSomething programs. These would all have to be extensively modified to work w/ a different FS.
A country that can draw from a larger pool of "geniuses" can afford channeling that resource into a larger set of activities. Dividing China into 4 will result in a set of nations with a reduced set of talent to distribute in key national industrial and scientific efforts.
> Woz != god. Woz != says so therefore it most likely is so.

It doesn't mean that he is necessarily right, but he is definitely worth paying attention to.
Is it good or bad to use ZFS for hosting a database?

This article alludes to a claim that ZFS has fragmentation issues: http://antydba.blogspot.com/2010/02/mongodb-backup-with-zfs....

Because ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, Eliot Horowitz says he wouldn't use it for a database: http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/msg/731111475835...

However, a controverting opinion is offered by Jason J. W. Williams, who claims that ZFS works well with large MySQL installs: http://groups.google.com/group/mongodb-user/msg/e94712bc287a...

[edit: Updated links]
SenSage (a log aggregation tool with many security-related features) has used compressed per-column raw data at the lowest level in its distributed storage engine since 2001. Writes are fast, and when reading raw data at the lowest level to fulfill queries in its multi-level multi-node map-reduce style query processor it wins big-time over traditional RDBMSs because (a) it reads only the columns relevant to the query, not having to pull fields out of rows/pages; (b) it's faster to pull & decompress than pull uncompressed data. Storage typically is 10x+ smaller than the original logs, even with redundant copies. RDBMSs inflate the data size instead.
Try here. http://www.der-nano-shop.de/
What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope?

In this case, your tone.