skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Is xmpp that much heavier?"

Well, it depends. It is not commonly understood that XMPP is actually very modular. What I was citing you was the requirements for what you might call the "usual" XMPP server, what people tend to expect when they hook up Pidgin or Adium to something claiming to be an XMPP server for dedicated-client use. Huge rosters (in the hundreds is distressingly common, in the thousands not unheard of), server-to-server connections, avatars, conferences, frequent granular presence changes (some % of the users changing for every MP3 they play due to plugins), logging, etc.

On the other hand, throwing together a "shitty" web chat where no one chat room is expected to have more than, say, 20 users, where "chat rooms" are the only communication concept and rosters are more limited or perhaps nonexistent, no logging, sure, Node.js should definitely be able to scale to 100K no problem. Probably beyond with reasonable hardware.

I think you may be referring to Plurk's work, and please note I'm not calling their stuff "shitty", I'm specifically describing a minimal chat client up there. I actually don't think XMPP is all that much heavier than AIM or MSN (some, yes, but not really that bad), it's that IM has evolved past the days of ICQ. What kills you are the O(Roster Entry) elements; one guy with a 2,000 element roster (bidirectional) comes online. With XMPP, as part of the connection process you shove down the 2,000 user roster to the guy logging in, and have up to 2,000 other presence notifications to send out. And it's hard to make that entirely async; even if you do just grab the roster as a lump out of some data store, you still have to iterate over the 2000 elements of the roster to send out the presence updates, and even with GHz to play with that is going to take some time to formulate all the necessary messages. This is what would really worry me at the startup flurry I mentioned.

But like I said, you could still carry hundreds, most likely. Although even then I would observe that the value of having an XMPP server actually in-context to a Node.js process is really pretty minimal. You can still be a "part of the server" via the component protocol which is what you almost certainly really want. Let a best-of-breed do all that for you, and just implement the additional stuff you want in Node.js. Unless you're doing too many O(roster entry) things in there (which in general you aren't in a component), Node.js should scale quite well, and components can typically be sharded cleanly too (by assigning users to shards).
Apple picks death not compliance for open source iPhone game
Bienvenidos... r u f f a x . c o m
Couple of tips:

1) Look for people who are good writers (prose and such). They tend to be good communicators.

2) Look for programmers who admit their areas of weakness.

3) As always, you're probably worrying about scaling way too early.

Best of luck, and congrats on the grant!
So far I'v got threaded comments, rating of code and comments, flagging, GitHub integration and a very ugly layout :-p

The actual functional side of the code is almost done. I'll be starting work on graphic design/layout in the next hour or so.

I'd be interested to hear feature requests...
This exists already, in a few different forms.

The obvious ones are VNC and GNU Screen, but the fundamental problem with these is that the client is too dumb and can't adapt to different form factors. The client needs to talk to the server in much higher level, more abstract terms.

This is where REST comes in. If you can sync URIs between devices, then REpresentations of application States can be Transferred to and from each device, and you should be able to seamlessly move sessions around, in theory.

In practice, not all web apps are properly RESTful and so won't work this way, though the landscape is certainly improving in this regard.

Also, not all apps are web apps, nor should they be. But a URI doesn't have to be a web page. I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Android provides some sort of facility for native applications to intercept and handle arbitrary URIs. This could be used, for example, by a native Twitter client to show the equivalent native interface for a URI on the Twitter site.
The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.

You don't sell the client -- you sell the bit in the database that makes their account active. Let them have the client, for all the good it will do them. Downloading the WoW client lets you pirate WoW about as much as downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.

But yeah: welcome to the future. The game companies have heard your preferences and adjusted accordingly.
> It may well be true that lobsters feel pain, but it isn't obviously true without evidence like this.

Then at best the evidence is inconclusive. This is usually an issue that is trotted out as 'fact' a lot when it comes to debates about boiling lobsters/crabs alive for food. So really the 'general knowledge' of this should be:

We don't know whether or not lobsters and crabs feel pain.

and not:

We know for sure that crabs and lobsters don't feel pain,
because if they did, then I would feel bad about going
to Red Lobster for dinner.
Judging by the fact that 75% of Android users are in the United States, it may be safe to say that most of them chose an Android phone because it wasn't on AT&T.
Same here. Definite pickup in recruiter spam as well.

Hard decision coming re: lifestyle freedom vs tech challenge and career growth.

Hopefully, the more general job market will be picking up.
Apple Reveals New Service for Authors to Sell Their Books Directly
I'm pretty sure that wasn't my advice though.
It has always bugged me that some people boil live crabs and lobsters: I have seen them struggling to get out of the water. Quickly cutting out their brain stems and then tossing them in the water seems better.

That said, anyone who has seen live pigs piled 20+ feet deep in a pre-killing pen may think about being a vegetarian. The look of total fear in their eyes is difficult to forget. My wife and I had the misfortune of seeing that one time and we could not bring ourselves to eat any meat for a long time.
I get Wired magazine delivered to me by mail. The user experience is great, the pages turns just like real paper. The thing is indestructible too; I can drop it down a flight of steps without even a scratch showing up on it. My dog chewed up my first copy and it only cost me a few bucks to replace it. I can roll it up stick it in my pocket and read it at the beach, I don't even worry about getting sand in it. Can HTML5 deliver that experience?
Correct. If you screw up your landscaping, you wait a year for the shrubbery to grow back or whatever. If you screw up investing your money, it don't grow back.
> Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years.

Define "we". Take a look at China's nuclear power program sometime; they've brought the cost of their CPR1000 plants down to where they're cheaper to build than coal plants of the same size, and they're well on their way to do the same for the more modern AP1000 reactor design. They've got a bunch of new nuclear plants under construction, with more on the way as they pick up momentum. We're talking about 10-15 large reactors coming on line every year, with the production rate increasing as they ramp up.

Also, they've got their first commercial-scale pebble-bed reactors being built right now. If I remember correctly, they're also looking at incorporating thorium into the fuel mix.

Also, they're working on 40% and 70% more powerful versions of the AP1000 that will not add much to the cost. Nuclear power in China is going to be seriously cheap.

Also, they're working on fast breeder reactors, which use uranium much more efficiently. They're building two BN-800 reactors, working together with Russia, since Russia has been profitably operating fast breeder reactors in the BN series for decades.

If you're only looking at the US and Europe, then sure, the Nuclear Renaissance is looking a little feeble. But the US and Europe are not the whole world.
This is really inspiring. I think it's a mix of your determination to learn how to code and the line of "... The web app that supports my family". Maybe op can get someone to help them building the app with the 100k grant, but I'd certainly suggest they learn themselves too.
In 1979, a Gulf of Mexico oil spill went on for 10 months at about the BP rate.
How Much Time Do You Really Spend On Blogging?
Here are some options. Forgive my brevity, but I'm tired of people simply asserting that there's no way of managing nuclear waste.

* Throw it away. Deep-sea subduction zones work nicely for this. Tremendously wasteful, though; that "waste" is valuable fuel.

* Recycle the waste to decrease its volume. This isn't a full solution, but it makes the waste cheaper to store for a while.

* Store the waste for a while, and later we can use it in breeder reactors or fusion/fission hybrids. There's so much useful U-238 in that slightly-used fuel. After this, the waste is pretty much dead.
The analogy doesn't quite hold. The key idea behind a Redundant Array of Independent Disks is that under the assumption that disk failures occur independently with known probability, you can compute the probability of the array remaining intact.

In contrast, with a Redundant Array of Insolvent Banks, there is a very high correlation between bank failures -- but you're saved by the FDIC per-bank insurance limit. You're not modelling your risk based on known probability distributions; you're eliminating your risk entirely (at least as long as you trust the FDIC).
A shy woodland creature
Ask HN: Is there a HN threads history solution? 
The messages and topics discussed here are excellent. But once time has passed the HN system does not allow to retrieve past postings easily. I know some time ago the history capturing was already discussed, but even that thread I could not find again.
Anybody has a good method or solution?
Beyond a time consuming copy+past or bookmarking approach.
I've added my contact info to the top post at the end. Thanks.
How does Apple handle this? USD only?
Thank you for the encouragement. What you wrote out here, is what I've been doing for the last year or so. I had some good friends tell me to just man up and figure out how to make what I thought would help sell my stuff. So I did. Were it not for this grant money, I'd keep on trucking along making incremental improvements to my business. Maybe in a year I'd get up to 9-10k/month. I suspect it's quite do-able.

But with this funding, there's an opportunity to do something grander while still running my little business on the side. That's new territory for me.
I'm interested to hear more about this one... I'm working for a startup and my wife is in med school
Very well put. If you find your self with a few spare million, I would think it is good stewardship to apply that advice to selecting charities, with as much care as you would investments. It also helps with the "purpose" aspect paul mentions.

It would be pretty frustrating if you quickly did a sizeable donation (sizable compared to the norm for that charity) and find out a month later about some scandal, or how only a small portion of what you thought was a donation really was a donation etc... you would just get on with life, but it would innoculate you against further causes in future which is a loss for everyone.

So good advice, think of it as an investment (in terms of dilligence, time etc).

That and giving stupendous tips and totally making someones day, that must be a whole lot of fun.
Of course, but the point is that Blizzard is still interested in maintaining the game for the foreseeable future, whether or not battle.net is the chosen medium through which serious players compete.
People ripped the legs off of live crabs? That's sick whether or not they can feel pain.
The app launcher is in 3D and snaps to the closest row, so that right before you click on an app, it bounces forward or back about half a row and you miss or hit a different row.

To tell the difference between a tap and a scroll, you need to wait some period of time. Just a fraction of a second. However, if it's a scroll, that means that by the time you figure it out, the finger will be a centimeter or so from where it started. On Android (in the browser mostly), when it learns it's a scroll, the page jumps ahead the distance that it missed, totally taking you out of the "scrolling" metaphor because of the sudden, jerky movement. The iPhone and WebOS (I think) just start moving without skipping to make up ground. This makes it just seem like your finger slipped a tiny bit before gaining traction, which is seamless.

And forms. Do I need to say anymore? They just look terrible. Like a website from the late '90s.

There are some more, but I can't think of them right now.
This video's really good for visualizing the higher dimensions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCQx9U6awFw
I've seen that video a few times over the years, and it has always struck me as... how do I say it... not correct. Something in there just seems wrong. I do like some of the ideas in there, though.

Hopefully someone here can elaborate because it's been on my mind since I first saw it.
Disclaimer: I write PLC & SCADA system code for a living in the industrial and wastewater markets.

Real time plant floor control/monitoring is not an unsolved problem and an iPad/tablet accessible web app was not the solution. See page 12 of the link below[1] for an example of what industry really works with. In some applications seconds can cost thousands of dollars, a limb or even a life. I'd never leave that up to a web browsers JavaScript engine.

[1] http://www.automation.siemens.com/salesmaterial-as/brochure/...
I don't see why the personal finances of a CEO should be disclosed in a public offering.

What is the risk to the public/shareholders?

Would his personal finances ever be of discussion in the boardroom?
Hi, we can help you out. we develop internet applications for startups and new age enterprise using Ruby on Rails. We can surely develop something for you quickly. visit our website http://www.railsteam.com

cheers,
Chirag
Uses more storage, but faster by an order of magnitude the way we're using it. Worth it, in our case.
> infinite linear combinations of orthogonal functions

I'm not sure it's quite accurate to say that these can't even begin to be visualised. The theory of Fourier series means that someone picturing a 'reasonable' function on the circle has already begun the endeavour.
Ask PG: How are posts ranked for the front page?
Not the specific algorithm but the general principle. Why do some posts with lower points show up higher than those with higher points (I would guess it has something to do with age)
So that's why the Gulf has been so brown my whole life...
I admire this guy so much, Hope things pick up for Tesla.

It's a float issue. not like he's totally broke or financially incapable of taking future risks in his capacity with Tesla.
You are underestimating how important logistics and planning are to a large scale operation like this. This needs large pieces of equipment and a group of specially trained people assembled and brought to a place which is not easily accessible, with a carefully thought out plan to maximize their chances. All that takes time.

BP has all the incentives to stop this as quickly as possible; it is costing them lots of money and continues to be a PR catastrophe every day it continues.
It kind of is a risk to Tesla. Musk must keep a significant stake in the company in order to qualify for the DOE loan.
I know! We can vaporize it and spew it into the air, like the coal industry already does with their radioactive waste!
Therac-25 is the most famous incident, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. This is still happening, and it happens a lot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html
Also, unlike open source, there's no way for people to experiment en masse on leaking deepwater oil wells. Solutions can't be attempted in parallel.
Has anyone else seen an odd customer like this?
We have a retail website and we have a customer who continually orders around 200 dollars worth of product. He then writes in to cancel the order immediately. He's done this about 10 times this year. He's always polite and apologetic, but I can't figure out if he has some impulse control/shopping issue or if he's doing some sort of hack. Has anyone experienced this?
No, FUSE is really slow, it just depends what you're benchmarking.

That guy is really benchmarking the disk, not the filesystem. If you benchmark things that test the filesystem layer on its operations---that is, make it do lots of things to metadata but not read or write much actual data---FUSE gets the crap beaten out of it.

As an example, write a no-op filesystem in FUSE and a no-op filesystem under the VFS, and run postmark[1] on it. You should get some pretty drastic results.

My professor has something called FiST[2] (like yacc for filesystem devs) that gets about 1-2% overhead over a native FS, and I believe one of his papers contains a comparison with FUSE that shows how bad FUSE is, but I don't remember it.

[1]: http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/FreeBSD/postmark.html

[2]: http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-fist.html
I'm replying to both parent and grandparent comment. I'm really trying to be helpful here and not rain on your parade.

Do you expect to find a job in the future by submitting your resume? If not, then you can happily ignore what I have to say.

I run part of a growing software operation. As part of my current role, I've looked through well over 500 resumes to fill a variety of positions over the past few months. This isn't my primary task. This is just one of my many responsibilities. As such I have to develop filters to assess a resume to see if we are going to phone screen or pass. If we don't have strong filtering, then we would wind up overloading our staff with phone screening. They won't have enough time to do their "real" work. So we need to err on the side of caution and accept false negatives and skip over some capable folks because they fail a filter. Is this fair? no. Is this a reality? Yes. There is only so much time in the day. I'm not going to overload my staff and I don't want to spend my own nights reading resumes and holding phone screens.

So although you are a unique and wonderful snowflake who may be on the far right of the performance bell curve, if you've hopped from job to job, I won't really know why by looking at your resume. I will just see a red flag that you might be a flake, you might get scared at commitment or have poor staying power when the going gets tough, or you might have trouble getting along with people. Your 2 page resume is probably not going to address those concerns. If your resume is much longer than 2 pages, I'm going to find an excuse to mark pass on it to for a variety of reasons (but that is another story).

I'll give your resume the 2-3 minutes attention I can and mark pass and go on to the next resume.
Way #6 Mastering Fear
I agree with Apple on this. If a license says that "You must do this, this, and that" in regards to something, and you can't do "this, this, and that" because it could kill your business model, then it makes perfect sense to preserve your business model - one that is working very well - by sacrificing the restrictive piece.
P.S. Terry Tao posted a comment on the OP. Worth a read.
I wonder which has more enthusiasts. :)

Regardless, I think the analogy still makes sense.
On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout and is recognized as the second largest oil spill and the largest accidental spill in history.

So was the largest spill on purpose if it wasn't accidental?
http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_reg_AM.htm

This video series was linked by one of the comments, parts 3 and 4 had some interesting visualizations of various the 4d platonic solids.
Read the article...

Musk participated in every single funding round for Tesla, until the last one. The fact that the company no longer has a source of investment that it has depended on since its inception is pertinent.

And since Musk has so much money invested and such a big chunk of the company, I'm sure his personal finances have come up more than once in the board room.
What's with all these "i just got a lot of money" posts written by new profiles only a couple hours old??
Interestingly, a rather big/complex web ui was done in extJS and it looks like extJS will be abandoned for new projects, mainly due to: little control over generated html/css and big performance issues, not i18n support, no code splitting, no unit tests and some other problems that seem to be solved in GWT.
I, for one, am suspicious if GWT is really the better way, basically adding anotehr layer between browser and sourcecode. My feeling points me more in the direction of jQuery, which probably doesn't do all this out of the box but many of this from plugins.
I think the job hopping taboo varies between companies. I've done a lot of resume screening for a company of ~50 employees. I prefer to see a variety of interesting jobs (even if they were 1 year each) over one long stretch at a single position.
That'd be fine, were it not for that Apple's choice effectively cuts off open source software for their users as well. No one is saying that Apple should be forced to take undue legal risks, but by making themselves the single gateway to the iPOS platform, Apple implicitly assumes a lot of responsibility and, yes, legal risks. If Apple doesn't want the legal risks attending to GPL violations, then they shouldn't be the gatekeeper, period.
BTW one of the nice things about netflix is how well it treats its outliers :-) For example for ages I patiently filled in the "when did your DVD get to you" survey not expecting anything better being out in the boondocks (Hawaii) and them to my astonishment, Netflix opened a shipping depot in Honolulu.

And then there was the "multiple queues" incident where the company agreed to keep the feature even though only a relative small percentage of subscribers really used it.

It's a good way of doing business.
I don't see how providing the source to an open source app would kill the App Store. It would just add some cost that Apple doesn't want to pay.
The usual but unusual arithmetic conversion
Airport security: Intent to deceive
Yes. Saddam Hussein unleashed the world's largest ever oil spill during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Paul, while you're on subject, please explore the 'purpose' finding journey in a blog post. If you think out loud about this, I'd like to read it.
Venture Capitalists, who are these freaks?
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Successful Drug Policies
Oh ye gods, not that steaming pile of garbage AGAIN. Yes, if you want to make sure you never understand the true nature of higher dimensions and instead fill your brain with psuedoscientific garbage pulled straight from the cesspool of Star Trek, then by all means, watch that video a few dozen times. If you want to actually understand dimensions, pick up a topology textbook and start reading. (Or read the linked article.)

I can not anti-recommend that video enough. This video is anti-knowledge, convincing you that you know something when you actually understand it less well after viewing than before.

The actual truth is that there is nothing special whatsoever about "the fourth spatial dimension" (let alone the eighth or ninth), what's special is us. We're the ones that have trouble because we live in three spatial dimensions and our visual cortex is hardwired to work very well in 3. Four, five, six, ten, a hundred, or my personal favorite "n-dimensional" just means that you need four, five, six, ten, a hundred, or an arbitrary number of values to determine the location of something in a space. Nothing more, nothing less. Visualizing it a challenge, but mathematically it's nothing special.