skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Twisted's @inlineCallbacks decorator basically does this for you; whenever you yield a deferred (Twisted's representation of an ongoing operation), the rest of the generator is registered as the callback for when the operation is finished. Your example becomes:

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def A(x):
x = yield B(x)
C(x)

@defer.inlineCallbacks
def B(x):
factor = yield AsyncCall()
defer.returnValue(x * factor)
Perhaps what is wanted is an easier/better threading model? If I read from a file, my code to blocks while the operating system reads the file. If I want to do something else, I can create a new thread which does the reading while the original thread does something else.

Unfortunately, our current model has threading a bit like a bull in a China shop as it creates a whole host of concurrency problems in anything more complex than a trivial example. The 'select' call is a reasonable half-measure, as your 'read' call is non-blocking when you get to it.

I question the threading model, as it definitely has problems, but in terms of having multiple tasks, and an event loop, and scheduling those tasks, the operating system already has that, should we really re-implement it?
Interview with Michael Talve, Founder of Vivo Natural Products
Leonardo da Vinci's Resume Explains Why He's The Renaissance Man For the Job
Is Facebook Really Just AOL 2.0?
What would you do if you found out, right now, that you have exactly 2 years left to live? Nothing more, nothing less. Exactly two years, and then you'll die in your sleep.

What would you do with those 2 years?

PS: "I'll train myself not to sleep" is not a good answer.
I was thinking of publishing some of my attempts at solving problems with Clojure on my blog to see what kind of criticism/feedback I would get.
How to import contacts into Gmail using CSV? Never know it is this tough
Funnily enough, both of them are available for VS2008 as well (although they're not shipped with VS2008) so if that's the only reason, you don't need to pay for the upgrade.

I would mention .NET 4 / C# 4, improved intellisense, multi-display support. I suppose the enterprise types will appreciate the new UML tools as well, personally however I try to stay away as far from UML as possible.
Writing "C" Code for Android
aww poor google I almost feel sorry..
Power Up Linux GUI Apps
What we've done is outlined in this blog post: http://www.woobius.com/scribbles/posts/0017-construction-col...

Basically, make the tool so easy to adopt that it gets adopted from below, by people who are actually using it, rather than needing to be imposed from above. This obviously doesn't apply to all tools and all industries.
IPhone apps: British Airways, Ocado and Oasis explain why they did it
As one of those that has lived (through a car accident) this resonates so strongly. There are elements of my life that I'm deeply unhappy about but I'm working on changing them.

These changes won't overnight but what scares me more than anything is that it won't happen quick enough. I've seen the end game and it isn't scheduled months in advance or decades away in our future...

...it might be that you kiss your pregnant wife goodbye in the morning and simply disappear.
Education can help you, yes.... but I've never heard anyone who succeeded say that their degree was pivotal in their success. They've all pretty well said it takes some smarts, some guts, and more hard work than ordinary humans should be able to accomplish.

(Of course, in some fields you must have a degree just to play, so YMMV)
Yes; some people have also been (ab)using C# iterators to try and make implementing this easier. But to bang on the same drum again, it shouldn't be necessary for the programmer to fiddle with all the methods on the call chain between initiating request processing and the point of any I/O (which may be deep in e.g. database-handling logic, for async DB I/O). The compiler or runtime ought to be able to help out.
I get that, I meant cached as in persistent across runs :)

Then you can specify some kind of time-out (say 3 days or so), after which it does get refreshed.
The future of web publishing, part seventeen million and six.
The beauty of node.js
Or simply enough to support your lifestyle. If you don't have investors and you stay close to the ground then it's surprising how little you really need.
He using amazon cloud services , instead of 80 legs for the crawling.

Wasn't the economics of 80 legs was supposed to be much better then amazon ?
TDK plots route to 3TB hard drives
The moral argument defended in the article is mute in the business world, because there are some people that can have fun doing anything (even selling crappy $1 products). If you are not happy with competing with them, then find something else to do, but don't tell them that they shouldn't be doing it. You are just trying to apply your moral standards to somebody else.

If there are people willing to create $1 "crappy" products, and people that want to buy them, I think this pretty good.
They don't realize it because the rates are the same whether you get a free phone or not. If you buy your phone you'll be paying the same monthly fee as some other person who got his for free.
The OS should definitely supply some kind of user-side task scheduling framework.

Ideally your task scheduling framework will have as many threads as the machine has processors, and will use e.g. work-stealing queues to dispatch work without needing a kernel transition that a thread or process context switch would require. But if every running process implements its own task scheduling framework, and creates as many threads as there are processors, there will be too many threads running around. The OS needs to help out with balancing the load.
Why Being Slimmer Doesn’t Always Make You Fitter
Wow, thanks! I hope you find good resources to draw from so it doesn't turn out disappointing to you. I would look at things that Joe Armstrong writes. Not so much erlweb and stuff like that.
While the Email number caused no more than a "meh", I am seriously impressed by the USPS number.

200 billion is about 650 per American. That's crazy.
The first thing they do in any suburban construction in Mississauga is scrape the terrain flat, then add in artful hills and curves as dictated by the blueprints, not as nature had them. The end result is this homogeneous, entirely manufactured landscape.

The roads in Mississauga were designed to handle traffic twenty years in the future. Unfortunately they were built in the 1970s and are now feeling the strain.
That's a pretty misleading headline: Not that Mountain View will be providing technical support as such, only enquiries into the ordering and shipping process will be dealt with by Google - everything else gets directed to HTC or T-Mobile as appropriate.

For paid services like AdWords you (sometimes) can get sales support. It's the support for actual issues that is a black hole.
Google Touts Search Engine During Superbowl
Now live Google Nexus One Phone Support Hotline
What Third Parties Know About John Doe
This just talks about your personal skills (or lack of) in C. I know people that can write an application in C faster than most can do in Python.
I've been running beta 2 in a VM with ~1GB of RAM without too many problems. If performance increases, that'd be swell, but I don't think beta 2 is horrible.
6 Tips for Choosing a Great Domain Name
Publishers Gain Leverage in E-Book Negotiations With Google
It certainly wouldn't involve sitting around pondering improbable situations.
The problem is, despite all good intentions (which famously pave the road to hell), I am still not sure how to live a meaningful life. It is easy to make decisions on the spot, but really hard to stick to something over the long time. I don't have any working system for staying on track.

What do you use to manage your life? I have at times put down my goals on paper, but those sheets of paper just got lost under the pile of other papers (bills, other plans and what not). Maybe daily checks would be the thing - just write a new plan every day, with adjustments from the daily experience?
How does a development boom burden tax payers? Were there no business created in the "unrestricted development?" It stands to reason that a healthy business climate generates tax revenue, instead of increasing the taxes of existing tax payers.
My guess is that it uses OpenSolaris in some form under the hood. Just like Nexenta does.
Ask HN: Posterous Intercepts?
This is going to sound crazy, but every now and then when I click on a link in HN I end up over on posterous. The other times I thought perhaps they were posterous articles, but the last two times I've double-checked and they're articles from somewhere else on the net. Somehow instead of going to the link target, I'm whisked away to a posterous sign-up page.

Anybody else getting this behavior?
It gets even better. If someone was interested in investing in a startup then they wouldn't have to be paid to listen to pitches.

So essentially you're buying access to people who aren't looking to invest.
10 burning questions about Apple's iPad
And is based on having the HQs of global corps there.
As soon as another city offers a better tax break those HQs will move in a nano-second.

Look at Ireland when the bank crash hit the US
Then write essays that matter. Every assignment is an opportunity for greatness. The same is true after school too; every project is an opportunity for greatness.
LOL! These kids are great at friending each other on MySpace and watching videos on Youtube, but people our age built the Internet one metre of fibre at a time. We're the creators, they're just consumers.
Everything you say is probably true. But like many trivial things, this could be a stepping stone into deeper insights. Some academic/marketer researches this data, which leads him to a question that can't be answered by the data (and which he may not have thought of otherwise). So he does that data collection and analysis.
Should Individuals Be Regulated Like Wall St. Banks?
Someone should start a black list of funding groups that ask entrepreneurs to pay to pitch, and we should give it a bit of press here on HN. This is absolutely absurd.
If the exact same kind of astrology (not different variants) were used, and it was shown to have predictive power, perhaps I could see the equivalence between gold and astrology.

Example: I time travel back to 500AD, do some kind of service, get paid in gold and bury it in a specific place so I can retrieve it. Then in 2010 I get the gold - it has retained its value over that broad span of time.

Astrology - I use it in early September 2001 to predict a massive upheaval in US economy - I buy a bunch of short positions on September 9th, 2001 and make a boatload of money.
Have less; do more.
I am a fan of design first. If it is a community failure, than so be it. However, there is certainly something to be said for not passing on debt to your kids. As both an aspiring planner and a father, I appreciate communities that seek to be as neutral as possible with their finances. Peace.
IE6 users to be evicted from Gmail, Google Calendar
Or realize that these moments are just part of a relationship's ebb and flow. To have someone die during the low point doesn't erase all the previous positive experiences.
Worse Is Better
No - they were mostly just housing suburbs.
That brings in income from fees when the houses are built - but you have roads, sewer/water, schools, hospitals to fund forever.

That's fine as long as the people living in those houses are tax-profitable middle class dual income. As soon as they aren't you have just built a 500,000 person slum to fund.
I WISH that this were the case. I feel like it would finally set me free. Until then, I remain a slave to my insidious ego, and do not really feel alive anyway.
Using Codesion for a hosted subversion platform
I agree - while this new feature from S3 makes sense for a segment of users, just like in normal S3 usage, the complexity is left for the client application to deal with. This is a non starter for most companies.

Full Disclosure - I am an employee of Nasuni. We just (today!) launched a versioned, encrypted filesystem sitting on top of cloud storage (including S3) (http://www.nasuni.com).

You are right to point out that this implementation put the burden on the application developers. The fact that each version is a complete copy of the object means that your storage growth could be massive depending on your write pattern.

For example, take MS Word - the number of changes generated when editing a file means that if you were to use this feature directly you could end up with hundreds of versions of that single object.

This is a good feature that will apply to certain types of S3 users, but those S3 users will not likely fall in the class of generic file/file system application users. Amazon is the only cloud vendor that supports this right now - if you plan on using multiple cloud storage vendors you'd need to consider a design a cloud-neutral application yourself to handle this.
What personality is that blog?
Do or dance
The 300,000-email archives of Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska's Governor
Oh, sorry. I didn't even think of that :)

I'll look into it. Or, if some intrepid volunteer would like to contribute to the project, maybe they could.
PG has asked a number of times that people avoid scraping HN, because it thrashes the server.

HN is also running really pretty slow today.
Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API
The four Northern European countries that lead the US in household leverage
How do you know that? post them on the internet, I'm sure someone will read them.
That's not true of T-Mobile, Google's provider of choice:

The plans that subsidize their phones start from $60 a month for unlimited, and the unlimited plans that don't subsidize phones start from $50 a month.

This may, of course, vary from provider to provider. I'm only familiar with T-Mobile.

http://www.t-mobile.com/Shop/Plans/Cell-Phone-Plans-Overview...
"GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail."

Except that Conversation View is the only reason I avoid using the GMail web interface at all costs.
How are you going to move ~400 million people to a new social network?
I guess Woz was right.
The lack of picture is the only thing that stopped me trying it.
Why do so many sites prevent special characters in passwords?
This might sound lame but for me it's Twitter. I'm back on Weight Watchers try to drop the 20 pounds I put over the holidays and new year, so I'm tweeting my weigh ins every Friday. I slipped up a little yesterday; everybody at work brought in their superbowl leftovers. But you can bet that I'm back on today, because I'd really like to have something positive to tweet about Friday, and "the whole world" is watching :-)

I'm doing the same thing with one of my side projects (or trying to anyway). I'm tweeting about little updates, every step closer to a closed beta, and I plan on continuing to tweet about the ups and downs as they come. I have enough followers who I greatly respect that I'd feel pretty silly if I didn't follow through.
Or it results in the run-down no-investment nationalized industries of europe in the 70s.

Look at airports that are owned by the municipality, they have no construction, no investment - because that would look like a deficit.
Then look at commercial airports that can borrow money. Or compare AMTRAK to a commercial airline.

Not building new water treatment plants, or new transport links or new hospitals but just spending money patching up the old ones = fiscally responsible zero deficit?
Now imagine a corporation whose plans were to spend no money on sales, expansion, R+D etc what would it's share price do?
The Buddha tells me I will not be punished for my anger, but by my anger.
European Debt Worries: Why Greece Matters
Cool sms text messages collection website.
Afraid to Lose Money? Congratulations, You Have a Healthy Amygdala
That looks like no scoping at all? I think JavaScript is a bit like that? But most languages would prevent that kind of thing?
Very interesting point. I think one has to be aware of one's inbuilt limitations; it's not possible to be doing meaningful stuff all the time as you'll burn out.

Hence it might be better to simply aim for a somewhat meaningful life; choose a goal you think is worthwhile and do something towards it every single day.

Over time, if it's making progress and bringing you a measure of happiness you can slowly tweak your life so that you spend more and more time pursuing this goal.

The trick is probably to realise that a) there is no optimally meaningful experience and b) life is a marathon, not a sprint (generally speaking), and getting worked up that you're not moving fast enough is not productive. It's just that you'd better be running in the first place.
How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt
Reminds me of "Instantes" by Jorge Luis Borges:

If I were able to live my life anew, In the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I've been, In fact, I would take few things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I've never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments.

Because if you didn't know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don't lose the now.

I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again, I would travel lighter.
If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.
Thia is Richard Gabriel's full treatment of the thesis over a decade or so, well worth a look if you've found the first paper to be of interest.
Doesn't sound lame at all. I've actually tried Twitter, too. But I have created a separate account to tweet about my progress in programming - what I have learned today, what I am currently working on, stuff like that. Unfortunately I let that slide, too, but I want to take it up again.

Of course with the separate account I don't have the social pressure, which might be essential.
What does the modification actually do?
Given a healthy parent-child relationship, things would probably have been mended again a few days later. If she realizes that, I don't see why that last goodbye should be such a regret: it is a normal and essential part of life together to fight.

In fact, you might even view such a thing as a shining example of the way you and your parents loved each other: despite strong emotions, despite your mutual passions for life clashing, you know that you would still reconcile, because you loved each other.
The name of the C programming language does not have quotes around it.

I hate it when authors add those ugly after-market addons...
I just realized that because Facebook makes "unfriending" so public most people never do that, which leads to an ever-growing circle of friends. You can hide people, but you can't hide yourself form them without them knowing it. The only way to politely terminate unwanted relationships is to quit using facebook and move on to something where you have more control, or at least something fresh.
There are similarities between Facebook and AOL. But one significant difference is the interface. AOL had a proprietary client to access its service network. It made sense at the time, but it was often clunky, had not-insignificant bugs, and generally behaved like an application separate from the rest of my user experience. The client also wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as a web browser (though AOL CD's were so common that we used them as coasters and frisbees).

Facebook itself may be a closed network, but it's a closed network running in an open client---my web browser, which works on all my computers and my cellphone. Since the Facebook team doesn't have to build the end-user software, they can focus on their core competencies of the network and the user experience inside the browser. That takes a lot of the complexity off of them that AOL had to embrace (in my experience, the Mac client was never as reliable as the Windows client, for example).

Facebook could go into the business of making its own client apparatus (such as a branded phone), but why bother? The web is serving quite well for them as a transport medium. I think that AOL suffered badly when the state of the internet became "There are these closed networks, and then there is everything else, and you need two end-user clients to access the two separate systems." As walled-in as facebook is, I still use the same client to access it as I use to access the rest of the web, and hyperlinks inside facebook and the larger web can still interoperate between each other seamlessly. That's an architectural strength that AOL didn't get to leverage.
I think they stand a good chance of learning quite quickly as they have smart people and a corporate culture that favors rapid change. So "delivering a final product to customers" could become a core competency of at least part of Google over time.
Joel-in-a-box
I'm having trouble following your argument. If something is fun to make, then it is moral? How on earth are those two connected?

His argument was that regardless of how much fun it is or how easy it is to do, it is crap, and filling the world with crap is bad from a basic moral standpoint.
Making your life meaningful and managing it are not the same thing in my opinion. Intrinsically, from the perspective that we live on a pale blue dot, our life doesn't have meaning, but we give it meaning, and we'll give it meaning no matter what we end up doing. Your life is both never and always meaningful.

Managing time requires some understanding of how our bodies work and personal motivation. The greater the change, the harder the work, the longer the ramp up, and the longer it will take. Not always the case, but usually. Once you fail, and many of us fail all the time, the further the regression the harder it will be to try again. Failure is easy to achieve, although denial may hide it from us, exacerbating the regression. Success is not so easy to achieve and even harder to identify.

The good news is that the hardest part is the first step. One small action makes the next action easier, and eventually if you persist the change will become routine. If the change takes too great a toll on the limited amount of willpower we all have, or on our physical body (lack of sleep, energy, etc) you'll hit a wall and probably regress because physics is an uncaring bitch. Nature doesn't care about what we want, you have to work on her terms. Figuring out what those terms are has been at least for me trial and error.

A Marine General once said to my battalion that you never stay static, you're either improving or deteriorating. You're either getting stronger or weaker, you're never not moving in one direction. My high school principal said, if you fall down, get back up again, and don't ever stop trying to get back up.

That's all I got. Anyone know better please let me know.
I'd really like to see the source of that overhead. I'm looking at the Zend source and only seeing 16-20 bytes of overhead per `zval`, depending on alignment.
Probably some of that is people like me who accidentally hit enter instead of ctrl-enter after typing google, causing it to go to google and search for the word google.
Blocked by my workplace (Springy plane designer: sounds like Boing) :(
The bandwidth is awesome. It's the latency that kills you.