skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well...

In a dynamic web application, at first, you will nearly always be database bound. Faster algorithms and faster programming-language implementations on web servers will do nothing whatsoever for this (and increasing the concurrent load of requests the web server can handle will in fact only overload the DB even more).

That's when you start doing caching, and that's why caching has such dramatic effects.

Once you've got your caching going nicely and your DB humming along, you will end up bandwidth bound. Not by your own pipe, but by clients; you may have a nice fat line running out of the data center, but your users may be on anything down to mobile phones or even dialup, and you'll only be able to push responses to them at the speed they can handle. This is the spoon-feeding problem, and once again algorithms and language implementations on the server can't do anything at all to help it.

That's when you start putting fast, light, highly-concurrent reverse proxies (nginx appears to be winning the market share battle) in front of your actual web servers, and once again you will see a drastic effect. Or you combine caching and proxy into one component and do Varnish.

Once you've done this, you might finally start to reach a point where you're genuinely I/O or CPU bound on a server that's actually running your application code. Or you might not; there are other roadblocks you might run into first.

At any rate, optimizing CPU usage is, for the vast majority of websites, a waste of time at least until you've been through the phases I've outlined above. And, generally, I think you'll find that's the advice (the "myth") you've been hearing: fiddling with programming languages and algorithms is literally a net loss of performance until you've dealt with quite a few other (and more important, performance-wise) things.
I live in a college town. Some census tracts get sub 40% response rates. At least 5k students in one college town not counted or counted in the wrong district. There are plenty of reasons to doubt census data.
Awesome product; I'll look into it.

I think it would be great for custom PCs and of course for newly formatted PCs.
Max Barry - RISK & AIG - The Kelly Criterion
Applying for jobs as Undergrad: Stop with the bullshit school projects.
out of curiosity, what part of my comment made it sound like aiming to grow rapidly to scale was disreputable? i don't mean to pass value judgments on either small businesses or growth-oriented startups
What I would expect:

* fewer crappy apps running on startup

* improved startup time

* no unknown apps running after a clean boot

(Previous 3 can be monitored with e.g. SysInternals AutoRuns)

* no browser / networking stack hijacking extensions showing popups / interstitials / DOM modifications etc. at random intervals

(As evidenced by e.g. HijackThis)

* no unsigned DLLs / drivers of unknown provenance loaded in any process or the kernel

(As evidenced by e.g. Process Explorer's Verify Image Signatures option - look in loaded modules of the "System" process to see all loaded kernel drivers and modules), with a representative sample of applications running (browsers, productivity, etc.)

* no apparent rootkit-style hijacking of the process / registry / disk inspection routines, as would be shown by e.g. RootkitRevealer

And of course, a commercial virus scan, for what it's worth. I personally don't run a real-time virus scanner; I rely on monitoring what the system is doing directly.
You think PHP is more likely to decline in popularity because there's now a way to run it faster? I suspect you are in for a very long surprise.
This is another great into book on the anduino. I think it still suffers from lack of depth on driving servo motors and solenoids, something I think the majority of users would like to jump into fairly quickly.
what makes you think canvas or svg can't make ads?
I am skeptical of the spinoffs rationale for NASA. Let's say that we feel the burning, urgent need for freezedried food for humanity. OK, so let's just research freezedried food. That is pretty cheap, compared with having to blast a human into orbit in such a fashion that they don't die, and gains absolutely nothing from being associated with the space program.

Ditto everything NASA has ever produced except satellites. That is the sole example where spaceflight qua spaceflight was actually valuable to us.
I think there is a sensible logic here.

Bad Theories + Power --> Bad Results.

Bad theories come from all over the spectrum but power tends to fall into the hands of smart people.

I guess the problem is that the kind of intelligence needed to get into power and the kind needed once in power can be different. I view the latter as requiring a lot more critical thinking/questioning of your own ideas (although for the former you may need to question others ideas).
There are many more people working on PHP apps than there are people working on dynamic language runtimes. Facebook's work is of limited value to everyone else for a limited value of 'everyone else'.
"A story on Hacker News which comes from codinghorror.com or techcrunch.com will never appear on Hacker Newspaper..." - this made me actually laugh out loud.
antonovka had some interesting comments on why macports does the things it does when homebrew was doing the rounds a few months back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872072

It's worth a quick read, imo.
That was my editorializing, not read into yours, sorry. My view is that "startup" is a pretty broad category, that's mainly based on someone who has an idea they think is interesting or will be useful to someone (possibly a large group, or possibly a small group). There's a certain subset of those people who are mainly in it for the money: they want to get big and sell out quick. If those are the only kind who really count as startups, then I'd have to take a pretty negative view of startups...
That's interesting. I'm sure some people here, like me, believe the opposite, since I/O is so much slower than processors now. Can you give a bit more of an explanation as to what kind of applications are CPU bound and why?
If you're a one-man team who does the whole stack on your own personal project, something like HAML might be for you.

However I have to say, in 10+ years of working on multi-person, multi-discipline web teams, there isn't one to whom i could see having recommending something like HAML.

Just raises too high a bar for designers and front-end developers (ie CSS/HTML specialists), for whom learning a new language is actually a fairly big deal.

SASS seems to be enough like CSS that it wouldn't necessarily pose a comparable problem to the designer brain. I could see designers grokking its basic features like variables and seeing them as a thing that gave them more power.

If my experience is representative, though, configuration might be SASS' achilles heel right now. Really gave it the ol' college try and my SASS files never QUITE seemed to compile how and when i expected. Compass was even worse in that regard for me. I am getting old though, so maybe i've just lost a step or two :) Anyone else have similar experiences?
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Is that a question? Anyways, no I don't think it's cluttered. I think it's really improved actually.
Top blogs network
Peplas to be the number one entertainment website on the internet.With Peplas you can share everything that you want in your life.You can share thoughts, music, videos, feelings and most important love.
Because Amazon didn't work the PR machine like they should have.
Securitization: Increasing Liquidity in Base of the Pyramid Markets
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Well I also feel like a system which allows mob punishment tends to select "regulars" who are more homogenous in opinions, since they will fit into the thinking which defines the community.

But if you want a like-minded small community it's a tradeoff that's necessary.

Why do you feel dirty though?
Anagrams in array of strings
I think that's a little too broad of a category. That conveys the sharing of links, but not the voting and comments, which I feel are the defining features of reddit.
Firstly, there's the question of what problem HipHop solves.

It reduces infrastructure expenses of the top 100 web properties so much that the pain of building it, testing it, rolling it out, administering it, and maintaining it is worth it.
Don't look at twitter, fb, etc, etc. Don't see how that's hard, unless you somehow depend on facebook or twitter for vital information.
Ask HN: Looking for Upcoming Events Where I can meet Hackers
I'm looking to recruit an entrepreneurial hacker to our team. We're offering equity + pay to the right person. I would like to get some info for some upcoming events where I can meet some great hackers. Anywhere in California is alright.
It seems like you're both right. You qualified your statement with "under load". Are a majority of websites/web applications under a significant load?

I'd guess the real answer is that, for most websites, they're I/O bound due to the process of sending data between the client and server.

However, heavier applications and sites with significant traffic then require more CPU processing, thus becoming CPU bound.

I don't have any real expertise, but from everything I've read and seen discussed, this is my interpretation of the issue.
Not to mention releasing Darwin, libdispatch (Grand Central), OpenCL, blocks, Bonjour, Calendar and Contacts Server, Darwin Streaming Server, launchd and XQuartz.
pretty much every molecular biologist knows of Helen Lacks.

Considering her name was Henrietta Lacks, you just disproved your own statement. ;-)
My biggest problem with SASS is that it's turned into a full on programming language.
11,000 MPH is pretty slow for a space ship. If it really is an alien they must at impulse speed. The normal speed of NASA's space shuttle in orbit is about 17,580 MPH.
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CSS Edit gives me instant feedback on my changes. It's not always easy to know how changes to your CSS will display. You have to think about all the rules that are in play, as well as the defaults of a given browser.

HTML is much easier. You're just dealing with structure, so it's much easier to comprehend.
The fact is, it actually makes the experience worse.

I use Stanza, and it quite bugs me off, than I must do synchronizing songs (via iTunes) and synchronizing books (via Stanza) differently - one trough iTunes, one through wifi. With no good reason.
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I/O is slow if you actually do any, but RAM is so cheap that many Web sites shouldn't need much I/O.
This vaguely reminds me of FFTs (Fast Fourier Transformations). I wonder if there is any insight that can be brought in from that algorithm to speed things up a bit.
Solution for comment rage? South Koreans 2nd graders sing the netiquette song
This is an odd meme, and not really accurate. Yes, Sass has a few control structures that are not meant to be used in day-to-day stylesheet coding. But the language is wholly geared towards creating stylesheets, and every feature was added with that in mind. It doesn't contain any programming features for the sake of having programming features.

Incidentally, it's also not Turing-complete.
We've tried to get the CSSEdit folks to support Sass, but so far they haven't been interested. I think the best way to get that is to have more users say they want it.
By the way, this is part of a larger Frontline (PBS) episode on how our online lives change the way we exist and think as human beings. While it's a little over-serious, I recommend it.

View online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/
Honestly, I feel duped by the title. The title had NOTHING to do with the article. I don't think it's fair to readers when you dupe them into reading your article by promising that it is about something different than what it's actually about.
http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/
I haven't personally been but our NYC H&F meetups are always great.
Too much detail is bad in the same way that an intro biology course flooding you with chemical equations for bodily functions (when chem is not a prerequisite), literally hundreds of new terms, many of which are fairly isolated, and a hundred medium-rare diseases is bad. What do you end up remembering?

"Body-stuff is hard."

And 90% of what you read falls out of your head in a year, along with 90% of the useful stuff. If it's trimmed down, you may lose 50%, and 50% of the useful stuff, which covers all of the generally useful stuff in the massive 10-kilo textbook that covers more than a biochem grad student remembers.

Fewer relatively-unrelated (or seen-as-useless) facts also make it easier to form logical connections with the remaining facts, which help you remember and apply what you've learned.
I think you aren't giving designers enough credit. They're generally quite smart folks, and tend to pick up Haml and Sass just as quickly as programmers.

I'm sad that you found Sass's configuration difficult. What in particular did you have a hard time figuring out how to do? We're always interested in improving the documentation and UI.
Sass can actually help quite a bit with dealing with the IEs. Compass (http://compass-style.org) has a bunch of mixins that are fully cross-browser and make short work of a lot of compatibility issues.
"... Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess. .."

This tends to be perception only. I'd agree with @sjs382, a +3 browser here and I was surprised at the improvement in discussion from what I remembered. #2774
Thanks for the links.

I think, "Stay away from gizmodo, it rots your brain." is going a bit too far in this case. I know there's been a lot of talk about "linkbait" titles, but this one was clearly for fun/humour value. The whole article was tongue in cheek ("Spaceship-shaped"). I don't believe anyone on HN would actually read this article headline and believe alien spaceships were on their way (not with only 23 upvotes!).
I can't speak to your experience, but if you look at computing hardware, IO is still by far the limiting factor. Plus if you look at how applications could ideally be built and how they are actually built, there's a very different story involved. Many applications are CPU bound simply b/c of poorly designed DB queries.
The post is not about WoW. It is about his take-away from the game which applies to everything in daily life and for bigger things.

The list is terrific advice and preaching it through the example of a game is smart thing as one is hooked on to the reading part. Seems like most people just had a negative feel for the whole thing as they detest WoW as a waste of time. In the process they missed the gem of advice.
I'm pretty sure it is Turning-Complete, and it's something they were heralding a few weeks back. Their goal is to be a programming language.

Wikipedia: After its initial versions, Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein have continued to extend Sass with SassScript, a Turing Complete scripting language used in Sass files.

and http://wiseheartdesign.com/articles/2010/01/18/the-demise-of...
Light humour?
CSS, although a very cool and powerful language, leaves a lot to be desired in one key area: abstraction. Not coincidentally, this is the area that Sass is best at. Chris Eppstein has an excellent blog post (http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2009/09/20/why-styleshe...) explaining why abstraction in stylesheets matters.
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I agree with tptacek that this is a red herring, but I disagree about why. Maybe I've been lucky, but all the designers I've interacted with are plenty good enough to get Haml and (especially) Sass. And most of these designers have liked them.

The semantics of Haml and Sass are identical to those of HTML and CSS. The extensions they add are generally clear to anyone familiar with the base languages. And Haml has the great benefit of making HTML be written like CSS, which is much more comfortable to designers.
You're replying to the guy who writes Sass. He's right. It's not actually turing complete, but it could be made so with a relatively minor change.

And I'm the guy who invented most of the programming facilities of Sass and I'll tell you, they're not very good programming tools -- but they're enough to make some really great stylesheets.
Ask HN: Propaganda for creative salary manipulation?
Every once and a while (at least once a week) I stumble upon some essay heralding the euphoria of working in a good team, or on a good project, or of spending your life solving projects. They all seem to have the same underlying tone, that engineers don't care about money, they care about the work they do. Sometimes I wonder if these articles are some creative, subtle, under-handed manipulation to convince young engineers to feel guilty for demanding to get paid a fair wage for the value of their services.

Am I the only engineer out here that wants to scream, "fuck you, pay me" whenever somebody rambels on and on about how wonderful it is to drink the kool-aid at flickr, google, twitter, or zynga? (and for the record, all of my friends at these 4 companies feel very under-paid).
Diigo does allow you to search the full-text of your bookmarks. Actually, it is the only that does this that I know of.
In order to be Turing-complete, Sass would have to have some way of reading and writing arbitrary amounts of memory. Since it has neither anonymous functions nor any sort of data structures, it can only read and write from pre-declared variables.
"Makes sense to me."

Me too.

But: when I see code that refers to first and last, I expect that the first and last elements are special.

When I see integers, it leads me to think that all of the elements are about equally important.

I also find it easier to read the text form rather than the integers; I don't have to look carefully to see if it's 1, 11, 7; code reading goes more smoothly.

Having both forms allows me to express, and parse, intention better.
tenets :) (sorry, I just finished reading the OP’s other article, http://iampaddy.com/spell/ and couldn’t help myself)
Sass (not Haml) allows you to work at a significantly higher level than CSS. The parallel in programming languages might be Forth: the basics translate directly, but using the abstractions provided by the language you can make it work at a much higher level.

In the case of Sass, abstraction is primarily provided by mixins and functions. Compass (http://compass-style.org) provides an excellent example of using these to write CSS at a much higher level.
Living in San Francisco, it's getting harder and harder to get excited about conferences. I find myself at 7-10 per year, and the infrastructure events blend in with each other, as do the startup events. Generally the same people saying the same things, often in very self-serving ways .. like Mark Pincus telling everybody they will fail as entrepreneurs if they don't work for Zynga or Facebook first, or Paul Graham trying to make you feel bad if you didn't drop out of a university in exchange for $20k to build a web app.
Btw, these concepts are definitely somewhat distant and based on iMac sized tablets. I can guarantee that the first Chrome OS Tablet is going to look pretty much just like Chrome OS with an on screen keyboad.
Ah, it keeps the schmutz out!
> Once you've got your caching going nicely and your DB humming along, you will end up bandwidth bound. Not by your own pipe, but by clients [...] This is the spoon-feeding problem, and once again algorithms and language implementations on the server can't do anything at all to help it.

Here. Here is where you made the mistake in your assertions.

> That's when you start putting fast, light, highly-concurrent reverse proxies (nginx appears to be winning the market share battle) in front of your actual web servers

My point is that the number of web servers you need in this spoon-feeding case is inversely proportional to how CPU-optimized your servers are. The spoon-feeding problem, as you put it, is just bookkeeping in the kernel (keeping track of open sockets) and iteratively processing I/Os when they come due, and is CPU-bound, unless you actually have approaching 64K open sockets, in which case a reverse proxy won't do, you'll need DNS tricks etc.
Gizmodo describes their comment moderation system
* ahem * From the article you linked:

This performance seemed too good to be true until I monitored CPU utilization during a subsequent run of the same benchmarks on a compressed NTFS volume. The CPU utilization on the test jumped from an average of 10 to 18 percent on the uncompressed NTFS volume to a whopping 30 to 80 percent on the compressed NTFS volume.

And most importantly (immediately after the above, separated for extra emphasis):

In addition, performance significantly decreased when I used NTFS compression on larger volume sizes (4GB or greater) and software-based, fault-tolerant RAID volumes.

Methinks we're over the 4GB mark now. The article is too old to be considered accurate any more.
His design works really well if you have an extremely wide browser window. Unfortunately, most sites don’t, and so the web is most browsable with a narrower window (say, 900 or 950 pixels), and that makes Paddy Donnelly’s site stop fitting.
I can't get by this guy's prose. Something just seems off about it. Maybe I shouldn't be cruising HN this... late.

It always seems like anyone qualified enough to fix a computer could make way more per hour doing programming or IT work. Computer repair seems like a great idea but I don't think it's efficient right now.
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In the real world, all that matters is how the web app is actually built. There is always a bottleneck, and after you remove that bottleneck, there is always another. IO is just one of many things that can bottleneck an application, as your example points out.
Well the first thing that come to mind, would be an extension they didn't recognize and couldn't open? Like .ppt but they don't have PowerPoint installed. Of course, this somewhat refutes my earlier comment as well, because most of the unrecognized extensions might be more technical in nature.

Perhaps there should be a top sections with something like: "I like it dumbed down for me: .abc is a abc application file" and a section below that for "I'm 1337, give it to me straight: this .abc file is a windows me executable with blah blah blah..."

Aside from choosing better titles for the sections, that might be more helpful to everyone. All of the file detection only needs to be done once.
Maybe you hit the SEO hard enough and you are on the receiving end of "google the file extension".
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I don't suppose you've tried the ZFS plugin for MacFUSE, and just maintaining a separate partition? I haven't touched it, I have no idea if it's any good, but it might solve your woes (unless you're trying to ZFS your OSX boot partition...).
It's late for me too :)
More discussion on this topic here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094091

The previous submission was for a different site which also links to the original source here: http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-fac...
perhaps he could make more money, but maybe he enjoys the freedom and control of running this business more than programming/IT