skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't follow. Sinatra is light because it omits things. Rack is extremely light, too, lighter than Sinatra, but thats obviously because it omits even more things.

If I were to build the same Web site for the same audience and expected traffic using Rails and Sinatra, would using Sinatra (as compared to Rails) reduce the need for what the OP described regarding caching, load balancing, and other methods of increasing performance?

Perhaps it would, as would using Ramaze, or simply writing targeted Rack middleware, but the gains from using lighter tools such as these, as compared to Rails, is that you lose out on using many pre-existing libraries. And while Sinatra and Ramaze are faster than Rails I'm not so sure that they are so much faster that you'd see a big difference in trying to support heavy request loads.

That said I still approach Web apps with the intent of using Ramaze because of it being light, very fast, and feature-complete, but if I find that there are some requirements that are well-matched to some existing Rails extension I'll take that route.
IRC with a perm connected client/bot doing the logging?
and a nice web front-end (http://qwebirc.org/)
> In their first 74 days on the market, Flurry estimates that Google has sold 1.14 million Nexus Ones and Droids combined. In the iPhone’s first 74 days on the market, it sold 1 million units.

How long people will keep comparing other phones sales to the iPhone 1G sales, which was $500, edge-only, physically unavailable for the first 21 days, and sold without the App Store?

Besides, the 3G and 3Gs each broke 1 million in 3 days.

If you're going to compare numbers, at least compare numbers that make sense.
I think a great movie for all entrepreneurs is "Pursuit of Happyness": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/

For those that didn't know, it's based on a true story of a homeless black man that became a millionaire entrepreneur: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_gardner
marvellous!
The Complete iPhone Development Toolbox
Can you give some examples?

I am new to JS and would like to know what to avoid.
On Passwords
I logged in just to say that, but you beat me to it.

India and China are developing missile systems that can take out an American carrier in a single strike. Which, as a former marine who likes to blow stuff up, I think is really cool by the way. The problem is our response. We attempt to develop a laser that will kill these missiles inbound.

All fine and dandy, IF it works, which I wouldn't stake my guys lives on. But that's not even the point. The point is . . . why not engage in a sober and deliberate SWOT evaluation of the carrier group itself. Is it still useful?

I don't know, I am not an Admiral. But I really do get the feeling that General Officers in our military are addicted to big, complicated, and expensive systems. Do we really need these? Especially given that we are going bankrupt right now.

It's almost as if the Social Security - Medicare people and the Military Industrial Complex really don't CARE that they are sinking us.
This is a message to location service. There is no broadcasting to all Notificators in London simultaneously, and each requires a coin for each message sent. The message is only up for two hours, and is not tied to a user. The intended purpose was for a specific person to be present at the destination.

How is this analogous to twitter any more than say, the classifieds of a newspaper?
Visual Studio has a sidebar that's grey for untouched lines. On lines that you edit, this sidebar turns yellow, and it turns green when you save and red for errors.
Except, the article demonstrates that worrying about scaling right away isn't really necessary (even though it demonstrates how to do so later):

Note that I did not use Mongrel, evented_mongrel, Thin, or anything else sophisticated as the container for the application. It was just webrick, and it was just a single instance of webrick [.. benchmark done here, gets ~35rps ..] OK. I mean, that’s not horrible. Redmine isn’t a lightweight app, and that’s over 2.5 million requests a day on a single process.

Of course, everyone's idea of scaling and what level of requests is reasonable is different, but there are plenty of sites turning over big bucks doing less than 35 requests a second.

Unoptimized Ruby can "do" on modern hardware - even if it's less than ideal. After all, back in the late 90s, even top sites were running on hardware 10-20x times slower than now. So even where Ruby is 10-20x slower than the alternatives, you can still get 1990s enterprise level performance out of it ;-)
It's hardly a placebo effect if it has an effect for a few hours.

I've struggled with insomnia my whole life. If I'm able to fall asleep in the first place, I'm usually able to stay asleep long enough to get rested.

I only need the effect for about an hour, maybe 90 minutes. Long enough to fall asleep.
The cool thing about software is that the order should reflect uncertainties and risks rather than physical structure. The incomplete parts can be stubs.
Thanks for posting that—incidentally, something like awio sounds pretty useful, so you might see someone with my last name in the demo pool in the near future.
> ... I spent 4 years in high school quoting these sleep studies. Just like I spent 4 years quoting the Tinker decision, and debating Hazelwood.

What do Tinker/Hazelwood have to do with sleep? Or are you suggesting that siding with the Warren court decision was some kind of youthful indiscretion that thankfully the Rehnquist court backed off on? Though I was never a writer for a high school newspaper, I’m damn glad in CA we have some legitimate protection for student journalists and other student speech.

> But the truth is that staying out past curfew and putting my homework off [...] had absolutely NOTHING to do with my "biological clock."

How can you possibly assert this? First, your suggestion that you personally would have been fine if you’d just been less stubborn is counter-factual speculation. But second, your assertion is flat out contradicted by careful scientific research on the subject.

The whole “personal individual willpower is the only causal mechanism in the world” fallacy so pervasive in our society is really distressing to me.

It leads to terrible policy aimed at blaming the suffering rather than trying to help them achieve better outcomes. It’s great that poor diets; low-paying menial jobs; living in physically dangerous gang neighborhoods; getting stiffed out of insurance, pensions, etc. by unscrupulous businesses; deaths from “reckless driving” on poorly planned streets; getting imprisoned for decades for drug possession; getting straight-up scammed by not carefully reading through all the fine print on contracts intentionally designed such that their real implications differ substantially from the signatories’ mutual understanding; becoming pregnant as a teenager; catching a venereal disease; etc. etc. are subject to free will, and can be avoided by the smart and careful. But while that’s good advice for individuals trying to navigate the society – “do your work”, “get enough sleep and exercise”, “eat right”, “read the fine print” – it’s atrocious policy, because it ignores cognitive biases and intuitions and focuses only on narrowly construed technical responsibility. The result is inefficiency, poor health, unnecessary death, &c. &c. And we “teach” people to be “personally responsible” by condemning large numbers of them to bad outcomes, with nearly no evidence that any learning actually occurs as a result.

Most importantly, it eliminates empathy for those in rough situations. After all, if all outcomes are based mostly on personal merit, the down-on-their-luck must just deserve what they get.
Random thoughts I've had that I'm probably never going to get around to doing:

* Something that will let me automatically backup all my data that is on various services like Facebook, Youtube, Hacker News etc.

* An app that will join and make all my IM logs searchable from trillian, meebo, regular MSN, Skype etc. that I have lying around everywhere. It should let me join logs and people across different services and users on the same service.

* A conference and event directory that will alert me about interesting things happening close to me.

* Something that will let me filter my newsfeeds easier. For example I don't want to be linked things more than once, even from different sources and I want to be able to query say delicious for tags on a hacker news post and filter out things I'm not interested in based on that. I would also like to be able to filter out HN posts that are below a certain number of up votes and maybe put a days delay on when they show up in my feedreader so there will be comments.

* A things I read and watch, scrobbler.
Yeah, I thought about something like that (assuming I know what you mean), but since this is about parts of lines, not lines, I thought underlining would work better (especially since basically every line has keywords).

It's still a little difficult to indicate the minibuffer background, the frame border, etc, but I think those names are a little more obvious, and there's fewer of them.
I'd also suggest letting the user select from a list of pre-defined colors.
I appreciate that HN isn't Reddit, and expect that comment to be treated appropriately, but somewhere I hope there's a Hacker who loves Faith No More and just smiled.
Politics, free trade, violence
Google Maps: Which Highway is Which?
> So the al-la-carte carrier choice model may be too late in coming to have an impact

You're right, but it seems a safe bet that Nexus Two will launch simultaneously on a variety of networks.

Incidentally, the N1 just became available here in Canada, and I bought one because our carriers are even worse than US ones (standard contract is 3 years, or full price but still network-locked, non-rootable, etc.). i.e. the distribution channel was already attractive to me, though I admit I'm obviously "fringe".
You're right. I suspect there are users here who have semi-automated the process too. It seems like a fun project (from a technical perspective) to create a HN "bot" that gets as much karma as possible without getting caught - but I fear pg's wrath more than such a project would be worth in karma ;-)
Not necessarily. It's possible that he's always been submitting such articles, but only now are there people upvoting them.
it is not incredibly user-friendly
> For example, on a return, the app store agreement allows Apple to take the full sale price from the developer's account, keeping the 30% commission. So for each return of a $300 app, the developer could take a $90 loss!

This is incorrect. I know it came up a few months ago and caused a lot of fuss, but it's still incorrect. What is correct is that Apple may take the full amount they paid the developer. for example, if a customer requested a refund for a $300 app, this would cost the developer $210 and Apple $90.
that is the case. all databases have to be within seconds of each other - it's required for BCP.
If you're not making art, you're not taking part in the conversation.

However, you CAN learn the language, and then at least listen in on the conversation.

There is a reason that those paintings are hanging on the walls of museums like MoMA. The artists have engaged with the discourse of contemporary art of their time.

I could spend then next 6 weeks going over art history, but here's a quick example of the kinds of things that motivated artists in the beginning of the 20th century.

Before the advent of the photograph, the only way to capture a scene was by reproducing it by hand, using a number of different media. Once the ability to point a machine at a scene, capture, and print it was available, the working painters of the day had some serious questions to answer. What is being lost by taking a photograph? What is gained? What is the role of a painter? What can a painter do that a photographer can't?

With this context and these questions in mind, reexamine the course of art history in the latter part of the 19th century. You see a movement towards impressionism, the abstract, and expressionism.

Of course, technology is not the only motivator for an artist. There are philosophical trends and political events, that guide and inspire artists to create what they do.

I've found that my studies of the the history of various art forms, be them visual or aural, have greatly improved my understanding of how and why things are the way they are.

There is a lot to be gained by learning new ways of communication. I would push for everyone to not only learn the language, but partake in the conversation. The creation of art is truly a transcendent experience.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that part of the reason I'm such a huge fan of ING Direct is because they have Sharebuilder, which I think is the best platform I've ever experienced for managing my Roth IRA (and stocks in general).
The IRS Emailed Me Back
http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2009/09/an-introduction...
It fits emacs very well in that regard.
You can write Java-like code in Scala that compiles down to nearly identical bytecode to the Java version. If you're not using any primitives it will be 100% as fast.

If you write idiomatic Scala code, or use many primitives in Java code, the performance of Scala becomes relatively worse. Every first-class function you use turns into the equivalent of a new class and object at runtime, and the immutable data structures are slower than their Java equivalents.

I'm not sure how the performance delta differs between the JVM and Android's Dalvik VM. It may be that Dalvik's lack of JIT or less efficient garbage collector makes the Scala performance penalty bigger on Android. I would be interested in seeing some benchmarks.
I kept clicking on parts of the code hoping it'd automatically select the type of element I had clicked on so I could change its color. Looks like I'm the only one, though, judging from the other comments.
Ha, good call. Looks like I missed the point by a good margin.

Yet I still have to wonder where the desire for this functionality is even coming from. The "cure" looks by far more problematic than the disease in any case.
USAA has an 8% tangible equity to assets ratio. For capital adequacy purposes, the bank only needs 1.5% TCE/TA. They are well capitalized and I would say that their prospects for insolvency are nil.
Kindly direct your eyes to the first sixteen words of that entry...

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics...

...and tell me how this supports the assertion that there is "no such thing". When I read further in the entry, I see that, while it wasn't established by Alfred's will and is known more formally by a longer name, there is in fact such a thing and that the recipients are selected by the same royal swedish academy of sciences, and "in accordance with the rules governing the award of the Nobel Prizes instituted through his [Alfred Nobel's] will".

Maybe you meant to make a different point, like whether or not the most recent laureate was deserving of the recognition? Or maybe you're just engaging in obscene acts of silly pedantry over the commonly accepted shorthand name?

Either way, I was tossing you a link so you could take your existential claim to the denizens of wikipedia and get the entry removed. I'm sure they would love to hear from you.
So the author discovers the benefits of a quality product from a European company that has been making these things for 60 years.

Kettler isn't expensive for the sake of being expensive. It's just built well and it lasts. Families hand these things down. It just happens to not be built here (or in China).
blippy is beacon without the facebook. it didn't work then either.
The Labor Theory of Value, which is the intellectual basis of Marxism, makes no sense.

The claim is that the value of an object is equal to the labor put into it. That means a dell laptop orbiting Jupiter is worth infinitely more than my flat screen TV, because the TV took far fewer hours of labor to produce.

Austrian School economics, on the other hand, argue that value is a subjective construct - and that each person values things differently. That is why trade is so good - people who value A more than B trade with people who value B more than A.
I think you're mistaken. Cruise missiles, robots, and even nuclear weapons are a way to defend your home territory from other violent nation-states, perhaps at the cost of significant "enemy" civilian casualties. However, the nature of warfare is changing, if you look at the major conflicts in the last 20 years you see a lot more need for not just precision guided munitions hitting targets from afar but also smart, well-trained, well-equipped ground forces with the flexibility to respond to different situations.

The entire Russian army was fought to a stand-still in Afghanistan and later also in Chechnya by much smaller, less well equipment forces using modern insurgent techniques. The "press a button to win a war" methodology only works in the modern age if you're willing to carpet bomb the enemy and any civilians who happen to get in the way (see the horrible civil war in Sri Lanka as an example). If you're not willing to do that then you'll need more than just CPU guided munitions.
OK, I don't see why this got downvoted unless you misunderstood. If you grew up in the 1960s -- which I did -- there was no mention of homosexuality at all in the general culture and especially not to us kids. So it's naturally surprising to wind up in adulthood and to see who has been gay all along.

Anyone who thinks there is any hint of disapproval in this should go read two of my other posts elsewhere:
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2006/11/18/the-homo-fag-queer-...
http://mikecane.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/that-funny-that-nas...

And for those who dismiss what Randi did -- it was important for him.
this is somewhere at the end of my todo list, thanks for reminding me :-)
The term "open source intelligence" predates open source (software) as a name, or even as a concept.
I'll put it another way. Most code isn't performance-critical. If you choose to write everything in, say, assembler, most of it will give you little or no gain. Assembler's harder to write than Java, so every line is costing you money, whether it actually runs faster or not. The _effect_ is the same as speculatively optimising every line: substantial cost, uncertain benefit, potential to introduce bugs, etc etc.
A "pointless misunderstanding"? Average users don't understand the "complete replacement" that happens when you zoom-in. It's confusing to them.

"Slightly tighter in, one is more likely to be familiar with the area, and want to know the smaller details."

Someone usually consults a map because they aren't familiar with an area. Do you look at a map to find your way home every day from work/school?

The point of zooming-in is to offer a clearer view. How are you doing that if you're removing details? Instead of creating clarity for the user, you're creating chaos.

"When zoomed in a bit, there's more small towns that can be displayed (collectively covering up Miami)."

Except that the average user is more likely to be using the map to reference Miami and not the smaller towns. Larger cities are of greatly more interest to the average user than the small towns surrounding them; this creates a more than reasonable case for continuing to display the larger cities as you zoom-in. Just consider how many people vacation in Miami as opposed to Hialeah, the city that Miami is replaced with as you zoom-in.
Very impressive list of info for iPhone developers. Very. Lots of good stuff there. I can't find a comparable OSX development list on their site, sadly.
The scene with the term sheet was my favorite. So revealing.
You seem to have made a rather large inferential jump - one from trusting the Apple store, to trusting any store.
HYPE Framework by Joshua Davis and Branden Hall
This isn’t exactly the same thing, but for anyone interested in the tech/science side of photography (optics, human color vision, silicon sensors, algorithms converting raw camera data to usable images, &c. &c.), I recommend Dick Lyon’s series of “Photographic Technology” lectures at google, a couple dozen hours of material:

http://www.dicklyon.com/phototech/
Sorry dude I accidentally downvoted your you due to being foggy while waking up.
These icons look pretty straight forward.

http://aquamacs.org/

There is a nice File, Edit... menu that goes along with it.

Close your eyes and pretend the rest of the complexity doesn't exist and it will be no different than using Notepad, etc. When you want more, open your eyes a little.
"If you describe an idea or belief as a shibboleth, you mean that it is thought important by a group of people but may be old-fashioned or wrong."

"Candidates always simply rehearse their shibboleths."

Can you explain what you meant?
They moved from hype.jushuadavis.com to hypeframework.org today. Seems like this thing is getting ready to take on the world. I wonder if they manage to catch up with Processing. Oh and they're hosting the project at GitHub, fork and commit :-)
"The most important piece of literature in the past half century was written by Salman Rushdie, an indian."

Really? I'd put Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago way ahead of anything else I've read from the past half-century for importance. Or do you not consider that literature because it's nonfiction?

Either way, what was so important about the Satanic Verses (or do you mean a different book by Rushdie?) besides the fact that it pissed off some religious dictator?
A recent BBC film/drama called Micro Men chronicled the rise of Sinclair and Acorn and their intense rivalry. They dramatized the recruitment, design, engineering, marketing and financial operations of the two companies. It was a superb production.
Reminds me of Matt Mullenwag's plan for starting a bank: http://ma.tt/2009/08/starting-a-bank/
Think Globally
Start with Why: http://mixergy.com/start-with-why-simon-sinek/

Basically, start by talking WHY you and your company do what you do rather than WHAT it does. In conversation, people are constantly trying to determine the underlying motives and beliefs of the other party. Don't make them work for it, tell them.

ex: "As an engineer, I enjoy discovering new ways to do things more efficiently. I highly value tools that are pragmatic and well designed. I founded CompanyX to embody these values. We just happen to make the most pragmatic and most efficient Widgets currently on the market."

So you start with Why, and the What(product) will naturally follow.

Start with No: http://mixergy.com/negotiate-jim-camp/

The default answer people will give you is "no", because "no" maintains the status quo and is therefore always a safe choice. If you start by telling the potential customer:

"It's perfectly fine to say NO, I promise I won't personally be offended. If our Widgets are not what you're looking for, feel free to offer suggestions as I was the lead engineer and we are constantly improving our products"

They will become more relaxed and put more genuine effort into hearing what you have to say knowing it's fine to say no.Basically you want to disengage their defense mode.

Also, you can strongly leverage the fact you are an engineer and not a salesman. Literally tell potential customers "I am primarily an engineer not a salesman, but I'm very passionate about the products I've helped design and want to tell people about the cool stuff we've created"
Veterans vs. Up-and-Comers in Startups | Kellblog
the first one: http://www.backupify.com/
Maybe there's a way to do it that I missed, but it would be helpful if when I select a color from the palette, I could see the Hex/RGB value for the color and set it from that as well. That way when I want to set two elements to the same color, I wouldn't have to wait and change it in the config file (which defeats the whole purpose of this application).

Otherwise, great idea!