skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found that on many types of data, xz -2 is twice as fast and compresses better than gzip -9. Of course gzip -1 kicks the pants off xz but there's absolutely no reason to use gzip at its higher levels, nor to use bzip2 at all. And if you want fast, LZO does it better -- the lzop tool provides a typical unix compress interface.

Using 50MiB from a tarball I had lying around, best of 3:

prog time(s) size(%)
gzip -1 1.703 38.7
gzip -9 14.670 35.1 (worse than xz -1)
bzip2 -1 7.714 34.0
bzip2 -9 8.035 31.4 (worse than xz -1)
xz -1 6.278 31.3
xz -9 42.445 22.7 (best compression)
lzop -1 0.670 46.1 (fastest)
lzop -9 18.144 38.0
They have certainly set the bar on some things, and met Google in others.

One thing that has made it easier for them is the decrease of Google's search quality.
You can elect to hide any/all your contact info from the theme options page. You can get to it by clicking the big colorful button at the bottom of the admin sidebar. You may also delete your account under options.
I've never touched payment integration before, so that'll reaffirm your assertion. I guess I'll have to review that code carefully. I'm a bit apprehensive about contracting out that part, but if I find someone who does a good job -- it's very possible that they'll have the necessary experience to avoid financial mistakes that I'd run into. Great idea.

And, I was going to consider contracting out the design but was a bit apprehensive about what I'd get back, but 99designs looks great! Thanks!
Maybe it's just me, but the only thing i don't like is the toolbar at the bottom. Maybe the site would look simpler without it.
And what's worse, the bar is almost useless at least in Chrome, as a link url appears at the botton left every time i hover over one, so that the bar is barely readable.
Otherwise great app. I think it will replace Google News for me.
I even included a tab with Ycombinator news.
I'm still working out pricing and tiers. Figured I should get feedback asap though. How much would _you_ pay for it?
If by having internet access at home means helping your financial future then Yes.

If you're concerned by a 1 year contract to TW then you've got commitment problems :) However what about going with a cell plan and tethering? of Verizon mifi?

If you use the internet at home primarily for work purposes you can deduct it from taxes. Not a huge saving but it helps. In addition if you do work form home you can deduct part of your rent or mortgage based on the space occupied.

Hope that helps
http://www.google.com/search?q=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)

http://www.bing.com/search?q=(5+MBps)*(2+hours)

And that's why I use google
All advice should be taken with a grain of salt. Interpreted and adapted to a particular set of circumstances. Anything 37Signals says is no different.

Personally, I've found a lot of wisdom in what JF/DHH have said. Does everything they say apply, literally, in 100% of situations? Of course not. But there is/was a whole lot of traditional/oldskool advice out there that is too extreme in the other direction, and what they advocate is a refreshing alternative that DOES work for them, and DOES work for other folks.

As always, YMMV and caveat emptor.
I'm going to assume by 'hot' you mean 'badass.'
I feel divided. The articles feel like two different articles mixed together. One extremely insightful about workings of the Enterprise world. And the other - bashing of Jason Fried on the grounds of awfully picked examples. Now I believe that Mr Olson is the one suffering the PLP.

As far as I perceive Jason Fried he's extremely self confident and may come across as arrogant to some. But personally I'm fine with that. I like people who know they're good and are not ashamed to feel good about it. And I like when they talk about it. I also like how this particular kind of people know better than talk about stuff they know nothing of.
Actually, Symbian is great for limited power devices like phones.

It's a real-time OS that has a long history of running on weaker hardware. Consider that most new Symbian phones have an ARM processor clocked at ~400mhz (the fastest have a 600Mhz CPU) and have 128MB of memory. This has a big impact on price, Symbian devices are (much) cheaper than the iPhone/Android devices.

The problems you are complaining about are connected to the UI, which indeed is no match for the UI of the iPhone or even Android. Even so, Symbian will make for a great middle-level and low-level OS. Due to the low hardware requirements Nokia can lower the prices and offer longer battery lives.
Why Travelers Go South: North Seems Uphill
Here's the deal: 37Signals is a so-called lifestyle business. Except it gives them a pretty damn good lifestyle. So if someone wants to lead the same kind of lifestyle, listening to them provides a model for how one might achieve that. If you want something different, or if you're going after a radically different kind of customer, their stuff might not apply.
Since when is a PR statement news? Obviously he won't say anything negative.
hehe. Nice reply and do agree with: "So OkCupid works well for a man dating in SF, because that's where the normal, interesting, good-looking women are." _ I think it works well for women too, as men are constantly messaging ladies more than the opposite, of course, I am one of those men. :)
.xxx to be a reality soon?
Apple gets "free publicity" from the line-ups
I was recently doing some research into writing compilers targeting NVidia GPUs, and I came upon some good info:

- http://blog.langly.org/2009/02/12/cuda-hacking-ptx-code/ -- Breakdown of some CUDA code compiled down to PTX assembly.

- http://wiki.github.com/laanwj/decuda/ -- Assembler and disassembler for CUDA binaries.

I'm really excited to see what people come up with compiler-wise here. GPGPU stuff is still very new; I can't wait to see what people come up with.
Depends what sort of startup you want to do. Personally I would need a multimillion dollar incentive to move there.
He should add support for the <article> tag (if he hasn't already).
It used to be, but Nokia seem to have gotten the message. Nowadays you can pick between Qt, Python and HTML + JS among otheers. I use Qt: it still has kinks, but the difference in productivity from Symbian classic is enormous, and the Qt team is doing a good job adding features and squashing bugs.
Yes, absolutely. I'm honestly surprised it's even up for consideration given your situation.

The Internet is the 4th (or 5th, depending on how you look at it) Utility (Water, Gas, Electric, Internet, Phone). I think it's a safe and fair assumption that an employee (especially a tech employee in a small startup) be able have some kind of access to the Internet.
Color perception drifts to Green as you get tired, resets after sleep.
Doesn't belong here. How about pictures of my wife's cats?
(Don't) Outsource your iPhone app
Chrome is not the fastest.

Sunspider benchmark (Win XP, dual core machine):

Opera (v10.53): 299.8ms +/- 1.0%

Safari (v5): 314.2ms +/- 1.7%

Chrome (v5.0.375.55): 326.6ms +/- 7.9%

Firefox (v3.6.3): 716.4ms +/- 1.7%
I am also disappointed that Nokia didn't promote the N900 more. The Maemo + Moblin merge must be the cause, because otherwise they have no excuse...
", listening to them provides a model for how one might achieve that"

As long as you've built up a massive blog readership and are selling them koolaid about how totally awesome you are. Oh and if you create rails.
Best substantive semi-rant I've read in months. And so true.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=999999999999999-999999999999998

http://www.google.com/search?q=999999999999999-9999999999999...

And that's why I use bing
It does help. Thank you.

To get to the thrust of my question: I feel taken advantage of that my co-founders are expecting me to get internet at home for work-purposes, while expecting that I'll be paying for it personally. I understand I am the CTO, and that creates some level of expectation that I have internet at home. But, at the end of the day, we're a funded company, and I feel they should pay for it if they feel that strongly about it. After all, when they want to go out to dinner to schmooze investors (as you would expect from a CEO), the company pays.
I stood up on a carpet floor, barefoot, holding the phone in my left hand in the "guaranteed to lose reception" position. And didn't lose reception. Repeated on tile, didn't lose reception. Repeated touching various conductive and non-conductive objects. Didn't lose reception.

As I've been saying since last night: if it's a defect, it's most likely a defect in some batches of phones and not fundamental to the design/present in all of them.
a common saying in the medic industry:

sometimes a zebra is just a horse.
Hum, what about upgrading FCP to Cocoa and 64 bits, for instance?
I'm sure the lawmakers will love this. How soon will we see bills introduced to make it illegal to host adult sites outside of the .xxx tld?
You're right; I had never thought about that. If I can afford it personally, I'd much prefer to contract out jobs this way. (Why I'm asking! :)

Any tips on finding developers for freelance/contract work in Argentina? I'm sure I could find a few outlets, but a native might be aware of some things that'd take me a while to catch on to.
The court action in the article actually says something totally different from the headline. The court denied a motion for summary judgment, giving the ex-employee her day in court to defend herself against the lawsuit.

You can sue anyone over anything. It would have been news if the summary judgment had proceeded, but that's not what happened.
It was/is a small side project. The whole n[789]xx series has been. They said as much many times. Including initial announcment of 5 device roadmap.
"By all accounts, the Mac Pro is a successful and profitable product, so why cancel it?"

By what accounts exactly? Cringely gave revenue numbers that show that their consumer electronic business is far larger than their pro computer business. This is a basis, you may disagree with the conclusion, but you are exaggerating at best.

Also, I'm not too concerned with them outright canceling it, but I am concerned that they won't particularly care about their computer business. Snow leopard was a very minor update, and I haven't heard anything about the vision for the mac in a long time. I think it's clear that Steve's focus has moved on to the consumer electronic side of their business.
He cited their revenue numbers, which show that the consumer electronic side of their business is far larger than the pro computer side of their business. This is a basis for a prediction. Please stop exaggerating.
Hopefully that was the last time you ever sat your foot in the us.

The bastards don't deserve us if that is how they intent to treat us.
Bad reporter. No donut.

"agreed to build Deliso's app for about $5,000."
"sold more than 5,500 copies. A year after its release, the 99-cent app still sells about 200 copies a month on Apple Inc.'s iTunes store. Apple takes a 30% cut of the revenue, leaving Deliso and his children with a nice little bit of pocket money."

Deliso won't break even on his initial $5k for another 8 months.
Yes, you should have the internet at home if you are the CTO and the only team member with expertise in scaling or systems.

But you shouldn't be the 5% equity CTO who is responsible for the scaling with two non-technical co-founders in the first place. Especially if you are a guy who likes to be away from the internet.

Make the company pay for it.

Personally, I agree with your viewpoint and am not having internet at home when I move into my next apartment. But I am also not the CTO of a startup.

Also, I feel the need to say "A startup with two business guys and a CTO who hates the internet: 'Only in New York...'"
Weak post; gets all its major facts wrong, such as claiming Apple never used a reservation system before (false), never had pre-ordering issues before (false), etc.
Why exactly are there so many attractive women? Is it something to do with NY being popular among women, or the culture of the east coast, or the presence of Ivies, or...?

edit: To clarify my question- why are there more women in NYC? Is there a clear cause?
Yes but this mean you MUST buy a case.
MongoDB administration talk from Mongo UK
Believing in the death of Symbian is very premature. It has been years where the series 30 platform has been on its deathbed, but it is still being developed actively, and there are still products being produced on it.

Now that Symbian is being pushed down in segmentation by Meego, it is getting closer to oblivion, but I'll have to see it before I believe it.
Yep. In that sort of business model, they have to set really high price points because:

1. they have to cover a much higher staff cost for the "non-productive" types (compared to the 37Signals model, eg.)

2. they have to, as you say, go to the conferences, strip clubs, steak dinners with clients, going really big with paid advertising early, etc.

3. pay for all the costly-but-failed sales attempts

If instead you forego all those extra costs, and try to keep it cheap and grow organically, you can sell at lower price points, and keep revenue ahead of costs, instead of the other way around. With no big upfront cash burn needed, then no big outside upfront investment needed, and therefore the founders can continue to maximize control, freedom and retained equity.
I'm mildly shocked that someone gets the title of CTO these days and doesn't have home internet access.

As someone else mentioned, you'd be getting it for work, so it's tax deductible.

Obviously we don't know your situation, but if I had system problems that were continually causing 2-3% downtime, I'd be working all hours of the day (and night) to fix it so that I don't have to stretch out the fix to an even longer period of time. I realize that's probably not all you're doing at work, but this sounds a bit like putting off stuff that's not fun. Plow in, head down, get it done so that issue (or those issues) don't cause you any more late nights.

That said, you also sound a bit unsure of the future - not much money left, trying to become profitable, etc. Are you looking for another position? If so, I would expect most other orgs would expect 'internet at home' from a CTO - especially one with an equity stake (however small).
I have never seen anybody describe the Ivy League as being known for having attractive women.
If you actually read the article, that's basically what they're doing with IceCAST.
Santa Cruz is still getting better, too. The gender balance has always been good, and the ratio of attractive females vs. unattractive ones has been improving.
This is an interesting article for me because I'm currently in SV and am contemplating moving away. My employees are all remote contractors, but it's time we got an office and moved together and there's just no way I could have them move here without at least doubling their salary because of the insane cost of living here. I can get office space elsewhere for half the cost and continue to pay my people what I do now if we get an office elsewhere, so that's what we're looking at.

Isn't an important factor in success of a start up to be able to run lean?
Ah, yes. You called it a toy because toys are known for disrupting the progress of other projects? That's what toys do, I suppose?

You're backpedaling. If you're going to rant, own it. Otherwise don't rant.
If you look at some of the stats people are posting, it's the compression that takes the most time, not the decompression. gzip has fast compression and decompression, which is why it's used for things like compressing network streams (http,ssh,etc). But when you want to package up large files for distribution to a large audience, then it makes more sense throw some extra CPU time at the compression to get a smaller package (so long as the decompression time on the other end is reasonable).
Redis in Ganglia
While I suspect your comment to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I feel the need to be clear about this: I do not 'hate' the internet. In fact, I love it. In small doses. While it allows me to run operations efficiently while in the office, I find it to be a horrendous time waster during my personal time.
If you live in NYC I'm sure you can find somewhere nearby with free wifi in an emergency. If you don't want a one year contract why don't you get the company to sign up for a verizon wireless card and use that. If they go under it's not you holding the bag.
…in the form of free bumper cases for all.
Social responsibility needs to be imposed on those in positions of power. Or would you rather we trust elites on their assurance that they are good and kind and just? That's how the old feudal monarchies used to work.
"But, with the exception of a rare few, it seems that neither male nor female programmers give a rat’s ass about fashion"

Yup. In the end, nobody can tell whether or not you were wearing a pinstripe suit when they examine your most recent commit.
There is the multicore package:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/multicore/index.html

My worry with parallel loops in R would be inadvertent race conditions. For example, is the random number generator in R thread safe? I doubt it.
You don't need a capital infusion.

Commodity servers are very easy to lease/finance. I know Dell and HP make credit very widely available. The server hardware lease will probably cost you less than than the lease on the colo/rackspace it occupies!

That said, at your scale, no one is going to give you credit on a business account. You will need to apply for credit in your own name.
I really hope MeeGo won't be as bad as it sounds. That name is just soo cheesy.

I really hope they do well though. IMHO they make great hardware.
In other news I am now a good lover.

No, it is just one of those things that isn't the case until other people tell you it is.
Yeah. I'm basically getting by by 'borrow'ing wifi from a cafe that's downstairs. Their signal is unreliable at best, though.

I'd love it if the company got a wifi card for whoever is on call. Both parties are refusing to foot the bill though.
I thought Bing was a "decision engine" and Google was a "search engine".

Isn't this comparing apples to oranges, metaphorically speaking?
And within 24 hours somebody, somewhere on the Internet will upload some sort of porn based on it, of course, and it will be to 4chan.
Why are they refusing to foot the bill if they have $1M?
It's only like $60/m.
My car in high school's cooling fan was wired directly to the battery, and the A/C switch turned it on and off. (Car had no A/C.) I figured that any thief that stole it wouldn't get much further than a mile down the street in the Texas heat.
You are really going to give them another $30 to finish their job of device packaging? If touching the antenna(s) makes the phone fail to function, then a case needs to cover the antenna(s), and that case should be part of the price of the phone to begin with.
Top Eclipse Helios Features
Interesting that for FM100.6 Bing algorithm ranks 100.6 more relevant than the literal 100-6, almost as if it doesn't know what to do with the "-" character. Using "Field Manual" instead of "FM" gives results closer to what you were looking for.
"Utter Originality Is, Of Course, Out Of The Question."
It's like you want them to write a book that says "And another thing I really like about what they do at Boeing...". I'll let Jim Collins write that book, and then wait for Boeing to go out of business like Circuit City.
FTA: "We've got a lot of work to do," Mehdi said during his presentation. "It's not like people wake up in the morning, and say, 'Dang, I wish I had another search engine.' "

This is the problem with Bing, not anything technical. Why start a business built around a service that you don't think anyone wants? A product which beats the market leader in one or several clearly defined niches has a chance in the long run, but no one wanted Bing except Microsoft. It was and is a product looking for a market. It would take catastrophic failure at Google for Bing to split the market.

I am not rooting for one team or the other, nor am I against diversity in the market. I just think the quote above reveals something about the product development process at Microsoft that I'd be wary of if I were an employee or investor.
There is no future in software designed for limited CPU and low memory. Moore's law all but ensures that it'll be completely irrelevant.

Symbian was designed for even weaker devices than I used when I developed for it years ago. As a developer, you're dealing with technology designed for hardware that simply doesn't exist anymore. When you have enough hardware to deliver what people want (like a full web browser) you have enough hardware for a decent OS.
RE: the CTO title. It's easy to be the 'chief' code monkey, when you're the only code monkey. =)

I agree with your sentiments about working hard to fix the problems. I have been heads down on this project for 2 years. The psychological strain from the 12 hour days, 6 days a week is really wearing on me. I'd like to have a personal life, too please.

No, I'm not looking for other work. I've told my partners that I'm in it until there is no more 'it'. If I were looking for other work, it wouldn't necessarily have to have some high-and-mighty title like 'CTO', though.
It's great - the only drawback is the lack of apps.
Yes, axod! Building things people want is indeed a prerequisite of 37signals-style success, and it is indeed worth noting that it is not a prerequisite of enterprise software success.

It is so weird to me, this "critique" of 37signals that says "but, they did all these awesome things, of course they're successful". This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
We're almost out of money. 3 or 4 months runway left.
It looks like it's mostly just that the job market is getting better overall; there are more jobs across the board. For example, about 9 months ago I looked up the number of jobs for PHP, Rails and Django on various job sites http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=805931 Here are the old and current numbers compared:

SimplyHired - PHP: 10726 to 15993, Rails: 2553 to 3823, Django: 328 to 926

Startuply - PHP: 280 to 488, Rails: 121 to 230, Django: 35 to 66

StartUpHire - PHP: 458 to 549, Rails: 119 to 152, Django: 9 to 25
What kind of living space do you have? Sharing a connection with neighbors in apartments is pretty common over wireless, just watch your consumption and split the bill. I suppose you could do that even in houses.
Initial thoughts:

- Intended for a very specific purpose, singlePAGERS layout and functionality are designed with that specificity in mind. - drop the thesaurus and talk like a normal person

- Learn more and demo links are hard to see on the homepage

- Pricing link doesn't show any prices

- I can't find anything telling me why I shouldn't just use vanilla wordpress + plugins

- sign up is free while singlePagers is in Beta - What happens after that?

- for something that is going to help me be socially visible on the net, I don't see a single mention of facebook or twitter or RSS or any "Web 2.0" stuff

- support link should give me contact information, not a hard to navigate slideshow
Anyone try this? I would, but my media's on a Linux box.
OK I agree that on low-end phones probably symbian has perfected its place over the years. But probably they run a simplified version on low-end ones. The high-end version is non-intuitive.
The explanation is quite simple: male/female ratio in NYC is ~0.9 and in Bay Area it's about 1.03
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html
You can get a virgin mobile prepay mifi for $150 + $10/m basic plan at best buy in union square.
Thanks for your input. I see that side of things too, though I am not entirely convinced of the implication that because I am an employee of a tech company, I need internet (at my own expense).

I'm curious if you could articulate that implication here?