skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, I've got had more problems updating from CPAN in general than any other package systems -- but that's just a data point. What I meant is that when anyone writes any claims about "everything you need", my fanboy detector starts beeping. No - it does not have everything I need - and that applies to almost anything...

I'm not even saying that CPAN is bad in any specific way. But it's by no means perfect, or close to the description he gave. Neither is any other language / package system. It's just annoying when someone claims something like that.
Centralizing computing is good, though. When you buy a PC, there is no real incentive for the manufacturer to care about efficiency. 200W vs. 300W is a few bucks a month for you and no bucks a month for them. So who cares.

But when one entity is running all the powerful computers, then shaving off a few watts makes someone a lot of money. So they'll do it.

As for the green issue... I think it's good that Greenpeace is reminding folks that just reducing the number of watts you use isn't enough. You need to get those watts from something renewable or clean; not coal. Otherwise you're still destroying the Earth... just not quite as quickly.
Sounds like from all these postings that its appropriateness for "big, serious projects" just isn't there. Now that it's over 2 years old now, I'm underwhelmed (yet not at all surprised) by it's lack of adoption/popularity.
It turns out that RabbitMQ's throughput of tens of thousands of transient messages per second per CPU is enough for a lot of cases. Similar story with latency.

ZeroMQ does a lot of neat stuff to make it go faster still, e.g taking out the server, and removing all routing info from the messages, but ends up being much more like an alternative to sockets as a result, which makes it less useful for general work.

In summary - RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ are complementary, rather than really being alternatives to one another.

alexis

RabbitMQ
Great to know! You should add a small entry to http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry#Haskell_i... ...
It is remarkably similar to the native email application. However, so was the iPhone one. Just had a few much needed upgrades like the hovering menu bar.

Oh, and did I mention the threading? I could probably never switch from Gmail simply because of the threading.
Seems you're going strong, though! Hang in there! :)

fuel: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/04/03/ipad-sun-rethink/
I don't have the complete answer to this problem, but no discussion of Facebook opening up their data set is complete without mentioning that there has been a lot of work done on uniquely fingerprinting people on stunningly small amounts of data. In Facebook's position, I would in all seriousness say that I see no reliable way for Facebook to release this data in any form with the reasonable certainty (by legal standards) that the data will not be used in a privacy-infringing manner. I can imagine some ways, but I sure wouldn't be willing to guarantee any of them. It is possible and in some sense perhaps even likely that it is not possible to have both a nontrially-useful data set, and a privacy-respecting data set. Information theory is a harsh mistress.
Wikipedia "books" on Amazon: 170 per day
I did a very simple game on GAE in its early days and the biggest trouble were very costly writes.

Basically you could forget about applications that needed to write game state to datastore in each step.

Even the simplest possible writes were already triggering CPU quota warnings [1].

I didn't touch GAE recently, so maybe they already relaxed it a bit, but when it started, it was usable practically only for read-heavy applications (for which Google strongly suggested to use memcached wherever possible).

Also moving larger amounts of data between your computer and GAE datastore was massive pain (e.g. backups or initial state load). You had to be very careful not to blow over your quotas, as such imports were doing a lot of writes.

---

[1] For example, in early days they counted CPU use in "megacycles":

* memcached based ajax request costed tens of megacycles
* datastore-read based ajax request costed hundreds of megacycles
* datastore-read-write ajax request costed thousands of megacycles
"limiting a person's exposure to premature grief"

This reminds me of the story of the Buddha and how his father tried to protect him from all suffering while he was raised.
Vegetables are gross

What kind of bizarro, fast food nation, high fructose syrup environment did you grow up in to make a statement like that?

Visit a farmer's market and check out the vegetables on sale there; almost all are edible raw, and all are terrific.
I've often wondered if enabling the capture and transmission of this type of knowledge would be one of the killer applications for ubiquitous-ish wearable computers (or to put it more fancifully, one of the advantages of the Borg).

Someone who is good at something but isn't good at explaining how they do it could wear the rig and the task could be recorded a few times through from their perspective (they could say how they think of the task's steps or whatever if they felt like it, but it wouldn't be needed). Other people, better able to describe things, could annotate the replays, break them into steps, explain motivations, put in branches for various cases, etc. A kind of first-person wikihow.

That seems to be along the line of translating the non-verbal into video and text formats, making the non-textual wisdom more like text so we hyperlexics can sift it our way.

Various trials using wearable computers to aid inspection and maintenance tasks have been done, but I guess we are still waiting on the tech and interfaces (or maybe more the social acceptance or right marketing) to catch up to the idea.
Is it just me or does that look a lot like Microsoft Entourage 2008 ?
huh? do you mean links to movie trailers? or sending them as attachments?
Well, it's a tradeoff. As long as your ThinkPad has sensors (which it probably does) you could set it up to warn you at a certain temperature. The trade-off being that if it actually overheats you can get various random and undefined behavior from the hardware, so you have to set it somewhere below that threshold (which means finding that threshold and setting the warning level some distance from it).
I've had 2 people who had horrible issues uploading media. Unusable levels of can't upload things.
Stewart Brand was a pioneer in sharing information even before information was easily shareable (2400 baud modems)

"In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that, given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings might reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable. The fact that he had builders, designers, and engineers as friends surely influenced his reasoning."

Father of The WELL (One of the first and most influential BBS)

And: Whole Earth Catalog

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
>>>I wonder what caused the heat warning, a defective unit or something else?

He had it outside in the sun. Must have been some sunlight!
I think Google is trying to position itself to have solid market share over mobile browsing. If you use gmail on the go instead of the Mail app, Google can give you targeted AdWords ads.
April 1st Post Mortem
> "After all, the reason to learn a programming language is to do something useful with it, not simply to know the language."

Probably not for people who create languages and that's one reason why programming language tutorials are what they are. They assume knowledge of some language and just go ahead with that.

Isn't that a good thing? Once you learn programming, you're really interested in learning a specific language and can discover the rest yourself. Should every language tutorial begin with a programming tutorial? I think it's a good thing they're not the same.

PS. One of the best language tutorials I've seen is: http://ooc-lang.org/ - assumes basic knowledge of other languages, in a couple of pages describes most of the stuff a programmer would be interested in. And it reads like a book, not a specification.
Hey CleanCode,

I'm also 20 with very similar interests as yours. You don't have an email listed, but I'm hoping you could email me at loganfrederick@gmail.com to talk to you more about quantitative analysis and computational finance!
Yes, I like Apple, but not without valid complaints (I've done posts blasting them for book banning and recently for ignoring book metadata). But I still don't see how this can be interpreted as a complaint.
I have a giant seek 1 from last year and I love it. Bascally I wanted three things in a bike: 700c wheels, a hub shifter, and hydraulic disc brakes (probably overkill for you, but we have hills here).
Compression wouldn't be much use if it were applied one opcode at a time, so I suppose you'd have to either read the code one block at a time, which could make jumps very slow, or the compiler and instruction decoder would have to do somewhat crazy stuff to turn code paths into compressed blocks.
Not only that, but I suspect that the iPad needs a lot of power from a USB port. If the port can't provide enough power, I think the iPad doesn't draw enough to charge itself. I thought that there were power negotiation protocols built into USB for this purpose.
+1 for i.love.html5@gmail.com being the sample Johnny Appleseed email address used in the demo screenshot.
Print-On-Demand Publisher VDM Infects Amazon
It charged fine on my MBP 2009. But only after it was activated through iTunes. (9.1 is crap by the way consistently crashes when trying to play music.)
Are you having an imaginary argument with me?
There's a difference between accepting MS software being ported to Mac or Linux such as Office or... I think that's it and what he wants. But Miguel wants big parts of the linux desktop to be built on .Net and C# some parts of which are patented. Why take that risk when we already have gtk/C etc and Qt? Even Steve Jobs wouldn't drop Cocoa and build the whole OSX on top of C#, and he'd be right not to do so.
Look, I really hate to go into some meta-crap here, but really, you are just looking silly now. You yourself even said in this very thread:

I knew that moisture could be a problem. I'd never heard of heat before.

I'm sure you'll now come up with some way of saying that a problem does not constitute a complaint, that moisture is a problem but heat isn't or that it's only a problem on the iPhone, not the iPad ...

I wasn't even saying that it was a problem in the first place, I was jumping at your comment that it could not possibly be seen as a negative thing.

Full disclosure: I have pre-ordered one (Europe).
People don't care. If they have an AVI file then they want to watch it. If their netbook plays it, but their iPad doesn't then they're going to blame the iPad for not managing to do something that open source software can manage.
When someone fronts their own PRIVATE struggles(by attempting to rationalize the way that they earn a living) as PUBLIC philosophy regarding open-source then counter observations will be made. Nothing unusual really.

Once you graduate from your insulated world in academia and spend some time in industry you will realize just how "ignorant" the previous comment is. Profit determines many decisions. The quicker you learn this the better. Or just stay in Academia forever.

Welcome to the desert of the real ...
By coincidence, I had just revisited this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183986

They're pumping out about 170 Wikipedia "books" per day ...

P.S. The "infects" in Slashdot's title doesn't seem to refer to PDF malware (cf. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/31/pdf_insecurity/ and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/09/adobe_reader_attacks... ). They could have gone with "pollutes", as in algal blooms in rivers ...
I just purchased goodreader for 99 cents and it is better than dropbox alone. (I love DropBox by the way) this lets you import data from multiple places in your filesystem. Not just from the dropbox folder hierarchy. it will even let you use the app to download stuff from the web into your iPad. Well worth a buck.
I already have a lot of movie files. Why do you want me to pay for them again when they're on my hard drive?
Anybody remember Transmeta?
"And I cry bullshit on FB trying to protect privacy."

Absolutely. That's why I rarely use it; I've read their privacy policy (especially the privacy policy concerning facebook applications) and realized that if I wanted something to be just between me and my friends, facebook is not the place to do that.
(I wrote the book.) I think you exaggerate my criticism in your comments.

I tried very hard to portray my teachers accurately. Many of them gave me what I believe to be legitimate reasons to be upset, and in some cases, angry.

In this case, on page 60 I wrote, "Mrs. Derrick had been no aberration. Teachers lied, even when they told students not to." I didn't say (as you state), "all adults lie." Her name actually doesn't come up again until page 334, which is "Acknowledgments," where I praise her and other teachers by stating, "May the world’s teachers aspire to your example."

Perhaps I'm too critical, but on the other hand, none of these stories were embellished. I think a teacher lying in a disciplinary context is justifiable cause for a student to be at least temporarily unhappy.
You shouldn't need more than one day to learn it.

Depends how well you want to learn it of course.
Consider if government did not exist. A company can still use it's established might to artificially prolong it's existence.

If any thing regulatory measures are actually designed to prevent this. Whether they are effective or not is a different story.
While we're on the subject, does anyone here have experience using Clojure with GAE? I'm considering that configuration for a useful-but-not-mission-critical application, and wondering if Clojure on GAE is robust enough for that.
This reminds me of http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Curiousity: I have made the argument a few times that literate programming has failed to take off in large part because Knuth-style literate programming set off to solve two problems simultaneously: Poor documentation, and poor ability to structure code. Poor documentation remains a problem, but the poor structuring was largely solved. Nowadays, if a program is poorly structured it is most likely because the author wasn't going to structure it well no matter what tools you handed him. With one of the two pillars of Knuth-style LP removed, it didn't have enough vitality to capture a large chunk of programmer mindspace.

Please note that A: I'm just referencing the argument so we are all on the same page and B: I intend it strictly as an analysis of why it did not take off, it is not a normative statement about whether it is a good idea.

A language like Haskell really thoroughly obviates the structural part of LP; it arguably has radically more powerful composition capabilities built into the language than LP does. Yet here you are writing Haskell with LP. I am curious why you are doing this, and whether you plan on continuing to do so or if this was a one-off.

(Incidentally, I have come to loath the style of documentation that Hackage affords, in the UI sense of "afford". I'm generally skeptical of LP, but I'm not asking this because I think the Haskell community has great docs that remove the need for LP documentation. Still, I would be interested in your thoughts.)
Greenpeace are anti-nuclear power.
About where do you usually hit the limit for free usage? Are we talking hundreds of daily visitors? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I know this varies heavily depending on your code, but does anyone have a good rule of thumb?
Main memory is already read a block at a time anyway, to get the gains we all expect for space locality. I'm imagining the blocks (probably equivalent to memory pages, in practice) would be kept uncompressed in L1/2 cache memory, with an additional layer of cache added on top for compressed blocks. Then, a near jump would be a read on a low-cache hit, and a decode on a high-cache hit, while a long jump would be a page-fault+decode as usual.
So, how do you feel about Moose? Is there any better OO implementation in a mainstream scripting language?
Ycombinator.com - ServersInside Analysis
Watch Roy Jones Jr vs Bernard Hopkins Live Coverage Live boxing
GAE is ideal for nano web apps. I wrote an HTML5 Canvas Plasma Benchmark using GAE/P:

http://speed.okaq.com/

It clocks in under 10kB compressed, is very fast, very accurate and I use it to test devices all the time.

Under current quotas, I'm able to serve ~200k users per day at no cost and am actively developing 2 more nano web tools.

The development environment is certainly restrictive, but the risk for web app prototyping is absolutely minimal.
If you argue web apps, at least locally, PHP is kicking ass with Perl, Ruby and Python. Amongst others.

(And then, the hype and FUD is quite heavy on the ground, re Perl. Not least on HN.)
That is no longer a limitation as of the 1.3.2 release. I quote:

URLFetch API - We’ve expanded the number of ports you can access with the URLFetch API. You can now access ports 80-90, 440-450, and 1024-65535.
Towel-Folding Robot
Does anyone know why the Gmail app won't run full-screen when you launch it from the home screen? It really annoys me that so much of my iPhone's small screen is taken up by Safari instead of the app.
It'll only work on USB ports that support 10 watt charging.

It's explained pretty well here: http://www.macworld.com/article/150356/2010/04/ipadcharging....
This is deeply mysterious to me. My email client (Forte Agent) has done email threading for about 15 years. It's much better than Gmail's web interface for email lists in particular, because it can make them look like newsgroups. You can watch threads, ignore threads (and subsequent replies), etc.

Do other folks' desktop clients not do this?
What books do you recommend?
According to your strict parsing of that expression, you should also complain that scripting languages like Perl are not "everything you need" to write kernels for mobile phones..? :-)

Edit: My point was that the interpretation was a bit ridiculous, considering the context. Don't drag up examples of kernel modules written in scripting languages, please. (I think I've seen some articles myself.) :-)
At PayPal we spent tens of millions in marketing through our referral program (get a friend to join we'll give you $5-10)

Assuming a good business case (which PayPal had: bootstrap network effect with pure money), could a web startup ever get funded to do something like that today?
Some people love math and algorithms, and hate web/GUI/iPhone programming.
We rarely go over the free limit -- I think we've stayed under $10-20 for the entire year, while serving up several million pages. Most of this is due to bandwidth overages from our comic: http://www.wolfire.com/comic

The times we are charged tend to be for burst traffic when something gets picked up on Digg or Reddit. Recently, one of our blog posts was featured on Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. at the same time and Google dutifully served up a couple hundred thousand visits over the course of a few days. They charged us about a nickel! Granted everything is nicely cached so we were not doing much heavy processing.

It definitely depends on your web app. If you can cache it, App Engine is essentially free. If you are doing something CPU intensive for every visitor, it's going to be expensive.
Bayes' rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don't work
Well that will be nice that I can then talk to 2195
" So I'm very grateful to all the early adopters who are so passionate about Ruby."

Ruby is 15 years old. When do users stop being considered "early adopters"?
this is, to me, evidence of why Perl is a great language. it's not something people pick up to write web apps. you can write very good web apps with it, but there are better options. but you can also use it to write virtually any kind of application - and the libraries and supporting modules already exist to allow you to complete it, quickly and well. you can probably use Perl for a wider array of apps than any other language (largely due to CPAN). i just wish people who don't know how to program with it would stop picking it up and getting things done.

my company's 10-year old Perl webapps are still chugging along just fine, btw.
What bike to choose is a very personal thing.

There's no substitute for riding lots of bikes. Pay attention to how upright you like to be, how far forward you like the cranks, how wide you want the handlebars. Pay attention to whether the shifter and brake positions work well for you. Pay attention to how stiff you like the frame to feel.

The only specific advice I would give you is, don't think too small. Right now you just want to do a daily routine in the park, but if you get a bike that just barely lets you do that, you might miss out on some of the other joys of biking-- touring, day rides, grocery shopping, whatever might grab your fancy in the future.

You might also prowl around EcoVelo (http://www.ecovelo.info/), an advocacy site for sensible commuting bikes. That site should give you lots of ideas about what, in general, other people value.
That's just a theory. I've never experienced joy/sorrow as a zero-sum game.
The article states that it will charge from lower power ports if it is asleep.
They (G'peace) would no doubt decry energy and resource consumption at factories were America ever to regain its much-missed and sorely-needed position as a thriving manufacturing economy.

The posts below bring out good points. Energy use is not in itself evil. One must consider what good was done with the energy. Watt-for-watt, those server farms are doing a huge amount of work on behalf of people.
"Programming language tutorials shouldn't be about leaning languages. They should be about something interesting, and you learn the language in the process."

-- I'd say this is the approach Michael Hartl has taken with Railstutorial.org. Learning the language is important, but it seems to me that, having been through this tutorial and his previous "RailsSpace," the most important stuff I've learned is how a programmer thinks. Programming language tutorials shouldn't be about leaning languages. They should be about something interesting, and you learn the language in the process. Re-Factoring. Test Driven Development. Version control.

Needless to say, if you know anyone with zero programming experience who wants to get up to speed quickly on web development, so he or she will know what you're talking about, what's possible, and what's not, I highly recommend Hartl's work.

-- Fred
I tested this on safari, theres no scrolling
Fires in Flint MI since public safety layoffs