skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I had to idea OSX did that, I only use Linux and Windows. Well, I guess things aren't as constant as I thought they were.

I still think the overwhelming majority of software uses base 2, and that base 2 for that reason alone should be the standard. Neither standard is really better than the other, the more popular one should win.
The article addresses the market share argument:

And that's not just because [Chrome] has small market share (5.6% according to Net Applications) Apple's Safari's market share is actually smaller, around 4.5%, and yet has fallen every year at Pwn2Own.
Because I sometimes want to do math. Lets say I want to put 6h33m of video on a 4.7 GB DVD. What bitrate do I choose? Ah, 4.7e9*8 bit / 23580 s = 1.59 Mbit/s. Now what happens if we use powers of two? I have to type a lot more into my calculator.
Refactoring wars and how to avoid them: what is "simplicity" in programming?
Just a slight quibble:

> R–recitation. He wrote that by "recitation" he meant, "speaking the English language." He did "not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or the textbook." The children would be asked to talk about topics that interested them–experiences they had had, movies they had seen, or anything that would lead to genuine, lively communication and discussion. This, he thought, would help them develop the capacity to reason and communicate logically.

He means "rhetoric." That's what the second "R" of the "Three Rs" (a.k.a. the Trivium) is supposed to mean.
That conflates Safari's market share with Apple's, since Safari is also the primary attack vector for OS X.
How To Make Facebook, FedEx, And Amazon More Fun
Were we arguing? I was just saying that Linux isn't a "usable" operating system just because nerds like us manage to make it work.
Lots of these comments (including mine, for example) were made before that comment was written.
This basically states that Puppet is more established, which is an important point, but not exactly a conclusive "win" for everyone.

Unless I misunderstand #9 ("explicit dependency management"), Chef does indeed have this. It has resources that can both "listen" and "notify," just like in the Puppet example given, and things are executed in dependency order unless execution is specified as "immediate."

I agree with the point about Chef's Rails-oriented deployment. It's a little frustrating having to negate the default Rails settings while doing a PHP deployment.

To me, the major downsides to Chef are quirks/instability as changes are made during active development, and somewhat sketchy documentation in places. Still a great system though.

(Also: check out the reply from Adam Jacob, lead dev of Chef, in the comments. I noticed this after posting here.)
ride a unicycle
Chrome has more market share than Safari, nice try.
This occurred to me when I took my first college psych course, and we were talking about "operational stages." The whole lecture was about how kids can't work with disconnected mental abstractions until they reach a certain level of cognitive development (the Formal Operational Stage.) It was also enforced that moving between stages of cognitive development just takes time, not more or better prerequisite education. In that light, it's kind of obvious that young children shouldn't be being taught math, any more than they should be being taught first-order logic.
Facebook Password Scam and Protectlifesoft.com Rogue Antivirus Alert
This article feels like it was heavily "inspired" by Jesse Schell's talk at DICE 2010:

http://gigaom.com/2010/02/22/video-reality-tv-iphone-the-fut...
It occurs to me that MySQL started off as a thin SQL wrapper on a NoSQL database: here, have a SELECT and WHERE, but you'd best not JOIN, and forget about transactions or referential integrity.

Then, over time, they tacked on a few more relational features, but they had yet to solve the hard problems of relational databases.

Meanwhile, the people who were originally drawn to MySQL as a dumb-and-quick datastore got frustrated with this line of development and christened the NoSQL movement. It's not so much a departure from relational databases (they were never really there), but a return to MySQL basics, w/out the SQL.
"Who else is the target audience for this?

My wife's parents — they're not ready for the complicated computer world. They have these old computers."

How much is Woz worth? And even with that kind of money, he won't spring for a couple of iMac for his wife's parents??? :-)
The physical hardware involved, rather. You can write whatever you want on the box, and you can disable as many sectors in firmware as you want. Doesn't mean that NAND flash doesn't come in power-of-two units.
> a highly customized data store (likely, a pure in memory one)

That's when we stop calling it a data store, and start calling it a data structure. Data stores are where data goes when it's not part of the working set. With that definition, it's perfectly sensible for AdWords to use MySQL as its data store.
The original E8 theory of everything paper by Garret Lisi was written around 2 years ago. The paper mentioned in this article, published about a month ago, claims to prove that a theory of everything cannot be based on E8 http://www.springerlink.com/content/h3h4wh813606ggq8/?p=6d2b...
Perhaps developers wouldn't be going nearly as crazy for NoSQL if Apple's CoreData had a platform-agnostic FOSS equivalent.
I was mostly just calbrating my opimization decision making.

I think only considering wikipedia visits is underestimating. A visit is many http transactions, and a webserver is targetted for many times the traffic of wikipedia. Still, it is likely no one ever felt a better user exprience from this one optimization.

But what if all the code is 33% faster than strcmp style code? That would be nice, but also seems unlikely.

My biggest two takeaways:

— beware your OS. The freebsd (mac) strcmp is about twice as fast as the GNU glibc.

— forget about gnu's gperf, it is extra complexity for no benefit. Maybe it would win on very long word lists, but I don't know.
No one has ever explained this to me: why are we partitioning this space? Why can't a single database management system:

* have individual tables, indeces and views that are either relational or document-oriented, or graph- or object-based while we're at it, on a case-by-case basis,

* manage them all in a single, well-known distributed pool,

* and present a unified API to access all of them (e.g. a Structured Query Language of some sort)

* that allows tables of disjoint types to be joined in queries, with appropriate warnings when it creates non-optimized query plans?

In other words, why can't I say that my reports table should use the "relation" backend, while my messages table should use the "document" backend, and be done with it?

It's as if, when you went to a car dealership, they asked you whether you wanted to see the "cars with cigarette lighters" or "cars with automatic windows" section. Why can't my car do both?
Approximations only get you so far. Try telling picky cyclists, who compare your calculated elevation gain/loss to ten other sources out there, that you just want to approximate :)
Would be decently accurate, though their approximations would lead to a misrepresentation of gain/loss. However, their daily limits would really inhibit use of this service for said purpose, since my Garmin bike computer records easily 2000 points in a 30 mile ride, even on smart recording (every few seconds)
If anyone is curious about some real-world data with lots of specific details, Linden Lab published tons of details around their most recent MySQL update here: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/...

Short version is that currently primary MySQL server now peaks at 11,500 queries per second.
Chef still feels like a set of disconnected tools waiting for somebody to integrate them nicely. The codebase is rather volatile (coming back to it after a few months required a lot of extra work) and the documentation right now is definitely poor.

That said, I think Chef has a lot of potential. It's just waiting for a solution that brings it all together. I'm highly looking forward to the upcoming opscode-managed Chef server. I'd like to see something like Heroku, where deployment is simple and easy, but is based on community-provided recipes (instead of Heroku-provided addons) and is closer to a fixed monthly cost (to provide the chef server) instead of a per-server-resource cost (dynos).

As for the article, as other haves stated, it largely talks about how Puppet is more established. The only points that matter to me are #3 and #9. #3 seems to be a direct result of Chef's entry into the market and the value of #9 seems arguable.

So, to summarize:

* Puppet is definitely more established and better documented

* Chef is not there yet, but has (in my opinion) more potential for the future
We are working on some cool ways to fix GPS tracks that have drop-outs in signal/accuracy. I am going to use some signal processing tricks to smoothout the points along the route. I am using a Gaussian filter on the elevation data, and I think this will also work good on the actual lat/lng points, which should also help with total gain/loss accuracy.
"Let me ask, since you seem quite knowledgeable - do you think the British meant well in India, or not?"

This is one of those meaningless questions imo. I'll just say that the British were probably better than the other colonizing powers. (The french had a presence in some parts of India for a while and were no worse than the British, but Germans or Belgians would have been worse I guess. So in that very narrow sense we got lucky).

As for books, Try "The Lotus Throne" By Abraham Eraly for the Mughal period and "India After Nehru" for Indian hiatory from 1965 or so.
Well I am glad they listed a helpful analogy with a room and a bunch of chairs that cleared everything up for me.
"it's also not fair to compare present India to colonial India, and claim that the current government is better because certain indicators are better now. "

Huh? If indicators are used to prove life is worse off now in Africa say, then of course indicators can be used to prove life is better now in India. Besides, I used "indicators" for life 9 years after the British left. Penicillin doesn't account for dams and roads and schools and hospitals and no more famines (for example).

Besides, I was explicitly countering lionhearted's (original) claim that India had devolved from colonial rule, an assertion for which there was (and can be) zero evidence provided, but a lot of people here accepted and voted it up. So it seems "colonialism was a good thing" is a popular idea among people who were never colonized. Sometimes HN surprises me.

On a lighter note, when I was living in America, a co worker wanted to know if we still used elephants for transport, like they used cars! Well I preferrd the flying carpets but we had a spare elephant or two in the stables for when it rained :-P

Ok now I am done with all this historical discussion. Back to hacking!
It DEFINITELY depends on your site. I've been far more successful with facebook ads because my site targets males 18-35 who smoke and have certain words in their profiles.

It kicks the shit out of adwords, but I imagine this is due to my content.
I wonder if he ever visits Steve Jobs, whips out his Nexus one and says "Man this thing is awesome!".
It is customary to tag articles that are year(s) out of date with their year.
They lost to Intel for me a long time ago. I don't need a proprietary driver to cause me compatiblity problems or a second rate lip service job of an open source driver. I want one that just works.

I presume they are on such shaky patent ground that they can not expose the workings of their chips to scrutiny.
I found the comparison with 'Real Businesses' particularly funny, given Wal-mart have have 2.1 million employees worldwide and Twitter has 75 million users...their scaling requirements are different by a factor of 35.
I am so glad we have a black president, because now everyone suddenly remembered there is a constitution which actually limits the presidents' power.
Weddingbook was acquired (fbFund). Not sure of the price.
We don't have a listing for it up on the jobs page yet, but please email us at jobs@mixpanel.com if you're interested.
Subject to many of the same criticisms, as well: http://www.iftf.org/node/3384
Git submodules pretty much solve this problem in many cases.
It's like the space shuttle. They use three decision-making computers for redundancy. If two say "turn left" and one says "turn right", you turn right.
I hope it's not vaporware!
HTML5: new features and showcase examples
I think they do care about Linux for the proprietary driver, since Linux workstations are a pretty decent share of the market for their high-margin Quadro cards.
That is one of the best demo videos I've ever seen. The background music was sweeeeeet. Congratulations!
DIY Turing Machine, in the Classic Style
I'll second Spreadshirt. I've bought a number of shirt from them and I'm happy with the result. The price is pretty good, too.
Depends if your doing something with comsci classes in it to. There has never been a time I couldn't get a computer at uni but if you didn't do comsci classes you can't get into those labs and the library has a lot but usually all being used around peak times.
I can speak to the specifics of last summers class at Betaspring (our first class), if anyone here is interested. tsondermann at betaspring
You can do prototype-style inheritance in ruby, but no one does it. In fact, most new languages that come out express no interest in this style. It makes me wonder why the Javascript people are so convinced that why they have is that good.
For me, the issue isn't that they're dropping their open source driver (as other commenters have mentioned, it was nothing more than a token "get something on the screen" driver in the first place). However, it would have been nice if the announcement had pointed people towards (or at least mentioned) the reasonably solid Nouveau driver, rather than just telling people to use vesa until they can download the propriatary driver.
> Say what you like about colonialism, but this kind of shit never happened under the British Empire. They'd come in, kill the local armies and resistance, then they'd start building roads, hospitals, and schools and generally managing their territories fairly well.

If they are coming for good, why do they kill the resistance and the local armies? If you are going to offer free services that benefit us, why do you need armed soldiers? You Don't! If you want to make use of our resources for our benefit, so that won't really be a matter for 99% of the population, they'll be happy.
Point two: Resistance didn't exist before colonialism, it appeared after and it was a result of colonialism.

Question: British contributed in the Iraq War. What was the result? Roads, schools, hospitals? No, but hundred of thousands of deaths under the US and British army, more violence than ever and a corrupt political system.
have individual tables, indeces and views that are either relational or document-oriented, or graph- or object-based while we're at it, on a case-by-case basis

This is already the case. Nowadays, almost all relational databases (except, of course, MySQL) support XML columns. PostgreSQL supports them rudimentary, and DB2 and MSSQL have even special storage strategies and index structures for XML, i.e. for generic tree structures, data-oriented as well as document-oriented ones.

Also, abstract data types ("encapsulation", the base of OO) are implemented in these databases, too (except, of course, in MySQL), as well as other OO features such as table inheritation and some kinds of polymorphism.
Yes. A preprint has been on the arxiv since May '09. Lisi has also responded to the criticism at length, and others have weighed in too.
Rails 3…

and typography (I consider it an important part of copywriting, not just touchy-feely stuff)
It seems the writings were sped up or the users were using tablets. It sure seems a neat program, but I doubt I'd ever use it to write anything. Maybe for using during a call, for example?
On top of this, has everyone really being "going Gaga for game mechanics" ?

I had no idea the noted sites have had achievements. Upon noting this, I still have no inclination to venture to them.
Surely one long function is very much harder to test than several shorter ones? So in the context of unit-testing at least, testability is in harmony with Fowler's definition of simplicity. Seems like a nice goal to me.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
so you want me to add some JavaScript code before knowing what it does? Not good idea.
I'm always re-adjusting when I do long-term reading, every 15-20 minutes at least. My arms do get tired, I start laying down, rest the book on the mattress/couch and just hold the page open, but then the arm gets tired and you have to roll over and do the same with the other arm. It's arduous work, reading is.

And that's with paperbacks. This thing is 1.5 pounds.
I'm with Fowler on this one as well. If you divide out parts of the logic of a single complex function, you can take it one level at a time. Furthermore, if you've divided it well, you can more easily reuse logic. Having a single monolithic function is like having a single monolithic program: usually a bad idea.

Granted, I don't like spreading related logic over several files, but that is Java's fault.
As opposed to giving you a graduate education in math & physics and many years of research besides?
Opens the page.
Small flash interface appears.
"Oh noes, a flash pdf! I hate those..."
UNEXPECTED TWIST

I simply loved the way the story was told. Even more than the story itself, but that's a compliment, not a critic. And because it was about creativity, even more points to you.

The rest of the blog is really good too, following the same lighthearted style: http://betsystreeter.blogspot.com/
Are we seriously at the stage where people want "an Apple product"?

... when was the last time you talked to a college girl?
For putting her videos on YouTube or for putting videos of her on YouTube?

This looks like another marketing flub by Sony, but in all likelihood it is their copyrighted work and not Beyoncé's.
Yes.

And with testability comes flexibility and maintainability. I think the author is focusing too much the simplicity of familiarization and conceptual weight where, very often, the real challenge with imperative code lies in maintenance.
Shocking images of 4 year old boy with large scissors impaled into his face
this entire blog post reduces thusly: "hiding complexity with abstraction and encapsulation is not simplification, but further increases cognitive load as the abstractions must be undone to fully comprehend the function of the code." It is an interesting point, sure. I think the example as given makes his point fairly well.

The question becomes: when does hiding complexity improve your ability to reason about the code?

I agree with the author that this is ultimately a personal preference. One guideline that I appreciate is that your code should operate at a consistent level of abstraction. For instance, in the routine that defines the business logic, the details of the protocol used for persistence should be "somewhere else." This complicates tracing the execution of the program, but it makes understanding the intent of the business logic easier as there are less "implementation details" to ignore.
Shouldn't be a problem, as the internal representation of size is still bytes.
Maybe it's my physics background, but I never understood the "base 2 is more logical" argument. The only time I care about file sizes is "how many files can I fit on this {DVD,external drive,iPhone}?"

It's so much easier to translate GB to MB by multiplying by 1000 and vice versa.
The problem with putting jokes on HN is that you always have to explain the damn joke afterwards.

So yes I think good analogies can be helpful, but this particular analogy made no sense whatsoever. I mean what does it mean that one has to put two chairs on top of each other? And why does that make the theory invalid. Theories do not have to look nice or symmetrical to be valid. In any event the analogy is completely baffling.

If you cannot come up with an analogy that actually makes sense you may as well resort to authority and just say this was published in a peer reviewed journal so until someone refutes it, it is probably right.
Ack, yeah-- mispoke. You can afford to pay $50/customer. Conversion rate is obviously a big part of that. /facepalm Sorry for not paying better attention to what I was writing.
Some places you can improve your numbers:

* They start with ~7%, but almost all funding deals mean they get diluted. The bigger the acquisition, the more funding the company has taken (in general), so the less equity YC has (which means figuring out the average, even if you could, wouldn't help you much because the bigger funding deals would get overrepresented when you multiplied average equity * big exit where they actually were down to <1%).

* The average investment is more like $20k. It's $11k+$3k/founder, so $17k for a 2-person company and $20k for a 3-person. I think that changed fairly recently though. I remember it being all 5's and 10's when I first heard about YC. Maybe $10k+$5k/founder? So that'd be $20k for 2 founders, $25k for 3.

There's also probably a decent amount of money spent to fly people out to the interviews. $600/startup, if you assume they interview 2-3x as many as they fund, that's ~$1200 more per funded startup, or an additional 5% or so.

Plus there's the cost of the office and utilties and dinners and such. (Just wondering, how nice/expensive is the food at the dinners?)

But I think they're operating with a trend that shows that they will be highly profitable when you consider all the startups that they've already funded that will exit.
Inside a global cybercrime ring
Accelerometer. Flip over about the horizontal axis? You'd have to be fast to ensure no peeking.
I'm pretty sure that Walmart's databases track way more interesting things than tweets.

I'd assume that they know where every pallet of product is located anywhere in the world and what's in it, where every truck is and what's in it, the referrer for every click on their web site, details on every purchase at every store, location of every incoming product from every supplier.....

And then I'd assume that they take all that data and de-normalize it, move it to a whole different series of databases, poke it into star schemas and warehouse it for further analysis - 'cause y'know - red wieners might be more popular than blue wieners next xmas, and they'd better anticipate that by at least 6 months, 'cause the wiener factories have to re-tool.

Real business have real data, not tweets.
Walmart also has a few products they need to track.
It's good, but quite often, I've faced the problem of an information overload, where there are just too many things to read. How have you all tackled it?
The only way to combat automated DMCA of content is to counter-notice ASAP.
There's no penalty for corporations to "go nuts" and block everything by default, so guess what they will always do.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf
So iPhone and iPad should come in double packs to actually be useful?
There are so many on the list that I know will continue as apps but essentially aren't companies anymore. Those kinds of transitions don't come with a press release. So don't trust any math about those that have not exited.

Further, the really important stat for YC is the number of big wins. They still have not idea how many there will be.