skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you read this quote near the end?

"Shared-memory multiprocessors have never really 'taken off', at least in the general public."

The assumptions that held in 2002 seem to be gone these days. There are many 8-16 CPU users these days, especially in OCaml's main public (academia).
To be blunt (we are talking Reddit..) Conde Nast were chumps when they allowed Chris Anderson, high on his own supply, convince them to buy Reddit for its supposed "Long Tail News" value.

Now they're chumps for not putting a grown up in charge of converting 280 million page views/month and a dedicated community to enough money to support 4 engineers and a bunch of servers.

The comparison to Gruber etc is misleading, since Gruber never got bought by a major company. This is more like 30 Rock asking you to donate to NBC.
1. I'll concede the network effect, but if you are having trouble supporting - for example - 10,000 users with a .5% conversion rate, 100,000 with that same conversion rate isn't going to help you. You need to change the ratio, not just grow.

2. You'll need to find me some stats that back up the point that there is a relationship between the length of time a user is on a site and their commitment to purchase. If this is true, all websites should see increased per capita conversion rates over time. I don't think this is the case, but please prove me wrong.
Don't Be Afraid to Ask
Ask HN: Who's hiring a designer?
There are plenty of designers here on hn and a lot of people are looking for them. Lets connect.

I myself am a designer and have found HN a great resource for clients/partners. If you'd like to see my badass work, shoot me an email at hajrice@gmail.com
Paying users aren't the only way. Reddit could have started at the outset with adverts. They could have made that decision early on that they were going to generate revenue. But they didn't - which is why Reddit has attracted the sort of demographic that don't click on ads.
Taken for granite.

Amber-lamps.

Mind bottling.
You can even try it online: http://ideone.com/l7Nqw
> Yikes. What else could reddit offer for subscribers other than a png?

Isn't their code base open source? More money may mean less time spent fixing slowdowns and more time spent on the core code. If you're using their code for something of your own that could be one motivating factor.
Unfortunately there is a basic economics lesson here: Value is in the eyes of the consumer.

The fact of the matter is that people do in fact value giving $5 to a giant corporation for leisure activities more than they do giving that same exact $5 to some person in need in Africa.

(That isn't to suggest they aren't giving a different $5 to Africa, just that they are rich enough to do both.)
I have to say, this looks bad for the whole "users first, revenue later" mantra. Now, admittedly, the founders got paid on the flip. But there are users, and now it's later, so... where is the revenue?

I heard this moment described as the "where is the land" moment. The crew has been sailing the ocean for a long time and they're running on slim hope. They grumble, then complain, and finally they confront the captain and say, "You promised us land. Where is the land?!"

This doesn't look like a good resolution to the "where is the land" moment. Why decide to plead for cash? It's the business model of last resort.

So yeah, this is definitely a cry for help. Unfortunately, it's one that reminds me a lot of the drowning article. I think this is Reddit grabbing its users and trying to climb on top of them.
That parenthetical only applies to the clause about result ordering. if you read the whole TOS, it's quite clear that Bing doesn't want you to do what DDG appears to be doing. In particular, mixing results from different services is a no-no in most search APIs.
Or, you know, get rid of the horrendously unsuccessful and hugely destructive policies of prohibition.

If you want to make the world a more dangerous place with more motivated and well-funded organized criminal forces: outlaw as many drugs as possible.
Writing my first programming language... And VM, and lexer, and parser, and compiler!

Good clean fun!
Something I do for fun. Children's stories.
I need to update the site, but yeah I am behind as I have been really busy on my job. It should say "September" or better, "sometime soon..." :P

http://www.storyfun.com/spacecat/
My initial reaction was to agree with you, and certainly you have a good point about it possibly being more ethical to give money you don't need to charities.

But at the same time, Reddit is much closer to home for redditors. If I spend 30-60 minutes a day on Reddit, and like it, it has a very measurable impact on my life. It is in my own interest to keep it running. Whether it is a large corporation or not is beside the point. And by donating, I can become a "part" of the site, I can invest in its future (including upcoming premium features, if all goes well). In some sense, donating to Reddit is extremely capitalistic.

Contrast with charity, which is non-capitalistic and much "better" in the sense of ultimate moral good, but where I'm never likely to see my $5 again or even hear how it was used.
Ask HN: Is this a snail mail Hack... or just a really bad idea?
This is really a question about how mail routing works, because it's something I really don't understand.

Imagine the following scenario: You are a cheap bastard that wants to hack the mail system to mail a package. So you take your package, put insufficient postage on it, address it such that the "return address" is actually the target shipping address and the "shipping address" is actually your home address. Now what will happen when you drop the thing off at the post office?

The mail system seems as though it should allow a package to be mailed from anywhere regardless of the zip code of the return address, but if the postage is insufficient, it seems as though if they have an established way of dealing with it, then there wouldn't be any way for them to stop people from "hacking" the system like this other than making all returns C.O.D. Is that what they do?

Note: I've never done this, but it is a thought I had a while back, and a recent encounter where I was asked to put someone else's return address on a package I was mailing sparked it again.
FWIW, a few of the items seem to be specific to Sense UI; the unlock swipe, for instance, is L > R on my Nexus One, not top-down.
To be honest Reddit isn't that techie anymore, reddit's demographics have shifted to teenage and young adult males and girls who are "geeks". Not only that but the default reddits are becoming a cesspool like Digg. Essentially the community had so much Digg hate in the beginning but at least Kevin Rose kept his site running while the demographics shifted.
It's not quite so easy. The kernel is in a special position in that it can distinguish between and defend against two types of race condition:

- races caused by different CPUs accessing the same resource. Unlike userspace, the kernel knows what each CPU is doing (roughly) at any given time.

- races caused by preemption. Basically, this means the running thread/process is paused and the CPU is scheduled to run a different thread/process which then does something that interferes with whatever the original thread/process was in the middle of doing.

First, the kernel can prevent the latter altogether by marking sections of code non-preemptible. What this means for races is that you can stop the CPU from being forced to context switching while accessing a contented resource, thus guaranteeing speedy progress out of the critical section.

Secondly, there are spinlocks. This means that if a thread of execution tries to gain exclusive control over a contented resource, instead of relinquishing control over the CPU (thus rescheduling/context switching), it just sits there in a live loop waiting for the resource to be freed. On the surface, this seems like a bad idea: the CPU can't do anything while it's waiting for another CPU to do its stuff with the contended resource, and it's just wasting precious cycles. However, because the kernel is a known entity, it's possible to guarantee that all resource accesses will be extremely short because the critical section running on another CPU is non-preemptible. Generally, this technique is used when the critical sections are (much) shorter than the cost of a context switch.

In userspace, the two types of races are indistinguishable, and you don't have separate weapons for fighting them. Spinlocks are a really bad idea in userspace unless you know your software is the only (major) user of CPU time on the system, and only runs in as many threads as there are CPUs.

tl;dr: The kernel (a) has more information and (b) more control, so you can't apply those techniques to Python.
I'm the biz cofounder at Timetric, so I've spent quite a bit of time on local and transatlantic phonecalls and taking meetings.

We're a really technical company, though; the three of us who founded it met as postdoc researchers doing materials simulation. That means we all can code, though my cofounders are way stronger than I am, but today I've got the chance to do some programming. Internal editorial-awareness tools, mostly.
I think it's OK to have an opinion on anything you like. You shouldn't expect anyone to fix it for free though.

I've never written a VM, and I don't think I'd be very good at it. I've written useful modules other people use, spoken at a Python conference, and have other OSS code in various places. I'm not a succubus, at least I hope I'm not. I don't even mind multithreading in Python, since I use Threads and Queues and they work just fine for my purposes. But I'm sure, other more cooler things would happen if CPython had the same kind of multithreaded coolness that Jython and IronPython have. I don't think it makes me a bad person if I say that.
So my customer has a critical production database that was hit by excessive locking issue on a table that slowed everything to a halt. It looks like an abuse of existing feature, so I worked on collecting enough information to help the developers find the broken feature and abusing users.

This also seems to be impacting parts of the app that shouldn't be touching that table, and I'm trying to figure out why that is happening.

Life is exciting at operations :)
a 45% estate tax? That seems kind of insane! Is that on all your assets, or the property you own, or what?

I can't believe the government gets half of everything you've got when you die. What ever happened to wills?
Nice! :) IMHO, better link here:

http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme/
Rebirth (at least from daily perception, I ultimately believe that consciousness does not cease with death, but 'attaches' to new organisms with perception), and enlightenment (the cessation of clinging to phenomena).

Very hard, if not impossible, to prove scientifically, although there has been interesting research into this very topic (http://tinyurl.com/36avxgq). But, I have no idea how memories from 'previous lives' would fit into this.
I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I'd recommend against learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time. While the tight REPL integration can be difficult to set up in vim, you can use a separate REPL/editor environment to get going, and then ease yourself into a more integrated environment once you get a little more familiar with things.
And with this law passing, the death of the family farm is complete. Now instead of the midwest being full of family farms passed from father to son, we'll only have corporate farms, since the typical family can't come up with the cash to cover half the value of their land that now belongs to the government.

I have little sympathy for the mega-millionaire trust fund kids this impacts, however, the estate tax completely destroys a way of life for millions of people in fly-over-country that has existed for generations. Sad.
(

(

(

(

(cool)

)

)

)

)
I don't see how that works. I happily put my real email everywhere, I also use my real name... Is that supposed to be a problem?
Live manhunt on BBC News
ah yeah good ol' "but Africa" reasoning. You can apply that logic to almost everything. Sorry but why don't you return your freshly bought iPhone and donate the money to charity's? And do you really need a car, can't you ride your bike? Do we really need Reddit if we could buy food in Africa instead?

Maybe that's a little harsh, but we spend money EVERY friggn day on things that could be invested in Africas problems. Making this point leads to nowhere and Africa's problems are far more complex anyway. There's defiantly nothing wrong in donating a few bucks to Reddit.

(also pacifism is neither extreme nor wrong)
* Zend Studio

* Subversion

* JIRA Bugtacker (It's cheap and I like this a lot)

* LAMP Stack on an inhouse dedicated 64 bit Dell development server
If you're going to criticize someone else's source, you really should have something better than your personal recollection of the 80s to base it on. Try this:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc...

With regard to whether raising taxes at all is good policy, I'd say it's better to pay as you go than it is to borrow the money.
if your audience is hard to monetize, then you go for CPM advertising. That way you get big name brands that want to raise awareness about their products rather than convert users to buy a widget.

This way they'd get more or less guaranteed $3-4 CPM...the fact that reddit has 4 engineers and 0 sales people goes to show that they aren't even trying to monetize the site.
Definitely seen an article stating Digg had 70 employees.
Being able to preserve wealth within a family is a skill in itself.

If anything, million dollars fund is one of the biggest challenge that any kid would have. Any kid who have managed to keep their fund growing deserve a kudos in my book because they didn't squander their money in questionable investment schemes.

Remember, lottery winners typically all went broke. Very few have the financial skills to grow it.
I am not so sure about that - Reddit is one of the only sites that I turned adblock of on - their ads were too interesting and too funny to hide, which is an amazing accomplishment.

And Reddit never did try very hard to moneytize their site, obvious things like self-serve ads that can be specialized on a subreddit (which means that you can target /r/haskell with job ads - imagine how many adds you can get for the price of one recruiter), the ability to pay to have ads turned of, merch that isn't to benefit a charity, etc.
It won't be fun when talking about garden path sentence without bringing up the epitome of them all, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo....
with only four engineers, this is what I'd focus on, personally. hardware is not as hard or expensive to deal with as people seem to think, especially as they already have a SysAdmin.
Your parentheses look lonely :(.
> If there is a problem that Africa does NOT have, it's drugs. Africans transport drugs, but they don't consume them, and as a result, there is very little drug related conflict in Africa.

Yet. Transit countries inevitably become user countries.
It's interesting that people clamor for a language feature that doesn't work well if you don't have:

1) Cheap immutable data structures

2) Excellent language support for managing mutable state

3) A sophisticated VM designed around concurrency (parallel GC)

Python has none of these. Getting rid of GIL won't make parallel programming in Python any easier. It'll just show you how hard it really is.

The other option is to adopt a language that does provide these things. I can think of a new Lisp that celebrates pragmatism over purism that fits the bill pretty well...
A performance tool to pull raw data out of a process without slowing it down very much. Today, that means reading through the gdb sources.
Redditors contributed $185,000 to Direct Relief International to help in Haiti. Subscribing to reddit and donating aren't mutually exclusive.

DRI donation page: http://dri.convio.net/goto/reddit
From what the article says, it sounds like the tax is reverting back to a previous level. I'm sure this will do little to help family farms. However, if it didn't kill them off the last time it was there, then what makes this time around so much more terribly.
The argument for this is that you're getting a large windfall (and in most cases you haven't done anything to earn it) so you must be taxed on it.
free is fine; the problem is that you can't make something with a high marginal cost and then give it away for free... This is why I think cheap infrastructure is so important.
A very good point -- the characteristics of a website's community is determined usually well before, and only rarely after, its point of big growth. Reddit definitely ended up with, um, less-monetizable DNA, and didn't want to "sell out," so that characteristic never changed.

It's also a good illustration of what Joe Kraus said in his brilliant Startup School speech -- when you put your product into beta, put your business model into beta at the same time.

They could at least make their ad display scripts deposit tokens for the user via async requests, and throttle users who run out of them. It's a better way of thanking me for not running AdBlock than a PNG of the alien giving me the thumbs up.
I believe I'm a p-zombie, but I don't have the consciousness to prove it.
How can you ruin the usability of a pen?

I've got a pen (some vendor's freebie) that lights up an LED inside when you click the button on the top. To expose the pen tip you have to twist the bottom half. Normally, that is not much of a problem but the clicky thing throws me off every time. I try to click it, it lights up, I curse under my breath... every time.
Having met a couple of the reddit guys, I gladly donated. They're the ones running the site and deciding how it evolves - not some faceless corporate drones at Conde.
Mostly, yes. This particular program evaluates effectiveness of features given an existing log-linear model. So, you can evaluate the effectiveness of features in parallel. For each feature, you can also partition the training data, process the the data in parallel, and apply a reduction step[1].

But 'map' in MapReduce is also a typical data-parallel task.

[1] In practice, there is a trade-off: the vectors are usually so large for the average training set, that you do not really want to copy them for memory-efficiency, so the mapping and reduction are interleaved, requiring some locking.
What's the hit on passing your estate to your kin BEFORE you die?
The funny thing is that I was going to leave this answer: "And your categories aren't mutually exclusive: I fall into all three of them and would never use a service that requires Facebook connect," but when I hit "post" (or whatever), a login screen came up with a big "Facebook Connect" logo, and I shut it down.

Maybe the login screen is part of the problem: I might've posted anyway if it had four fields: "User name" "email" "password" and "retype password." As it is, signing up sounds too invasive or too tedious to bother for a short comment.
I lived for several years in the Netherlands and was delighted to learn that the Dutch word for squirrel, "eekhoorn" is pronounced, essentially, "acorn". I'm not aware of any fun-spoiling etymological connection, either.
I wish you having this freedom you're talking about on all your projects.

The RL is that in most shops usage of appserver & Maven is tighly coupled to the high ends of pain, and you don't decide the next big thing that could replace even parts of this sick marriage. Of course maybe you're talking about a situation when you decide about the whole infrastructure but then there are big chances you wouldn't choose Java in the first place. So please make a distinction if you're talking about theoretical "who could do what" or practical "what's already going on this planet" or even more practical "I'm gonna conquer the world with the new X and I really have freedom to choose it" :]
Ask HN: have you used an HTML slicing service?
There are a great deal many companies who perform PSD -> XML 'slicing' for a set fee per page.

I've been looking at W3 markup, primarily because they seem to emphasize clean code (microformats and all) and support @font-face. But their customer service also seems to be offshore (their English isn't so great) and I'm concerned they could be a chop-shop.

Anyone on HN used a slicing service? Any recommendations or thoughts?
This whole mantra was build on being bought by Google anyway.
This is essentially how Shacknews worked since '99. People who subscribed got a lightning bold next to the name and got uncapped downloads on fileshack. This worked out very well for them.
Are you unaware of the shortage of engineers? Have you tried to hire a good developer or engineer lately? We need more, and women are an obvious underutilized talent pool.
Him getting to stay in the house for a year is due to the lengthy foreclosure process, a legal artifact, not due to any compassion on the bank's part.

I'm confused why you're using the word "compassion" at all, and coaching your argument in terms of how "compassionate" banks will be in their terms next time around.

Banks exist to make money, the terms they offer are a balance of how much risk they are willing to take, how much return they can earn, government regulation, and competition.

The OP does not owe the banks anything other than the terms of his contract, and the terms say that if he doesn't pay his mortgage he'll lose his house.
True. In that respect the situation has changed quite a bit and you might imagine that the potential gains might be significantly higher.

The extra complexity still sounds pretty daunting though. You're going to make development of Python core for the common case (single-threaded) a lot harder for the benefit of the exceptional case. I think it's fair to say that most of the people that really need full-bore SMP performance are going to want a faster, lower-level language than Python to do their heavy lifting in anyway. Game developers are probably ahead of most of the rest of us in this area.
Startup Profile: TeamSupport.com
I bet I could get us into CoCo (The coworking spot in St Paul) if we wanted it.

Either way, count me in. Ill watch this thread, and drop you a line
Sure, I think their demographic has shifted away from techie. Now it's anti-consumerist adblock loving pot smokin' gay marriage loving liberals.
> The risk analyses were improperly done by the ratings agencies, and their basis were not (or should not) have been primarily Fannie/Freddie data.

You mean the rating agencies that were granted a monopoly on ratings by the SEC.... That monopoly meant that their ratings were unquestioned.

> Stop getting your lies from Fox news. You're completely and utterly wrong.

I note that none of your points actually refute my claim.

Fannie and Freddie's market share isn't the whole story. In fact, the bigger story was regulatory treatment of mortgage backed securities, which is why I emphasized it.

> Also, do you have any evidence at all besides the ravings of Fox news personalities about the government suing to force issuance of bad loans?

You've never heard of CRA?

From Wikipedia.

"The new Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act's FDIC related provisions, along with the addition of sub-section § 2903(c) directly to Title 12, insured any bank holding institution wishing to be re-designated as a financial holding institution by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System would also have to follow Community Reinvestment Act compliance guidelines before any merger or expansion could take effect.[61]"
Good to see a fellow NS player! I've also gone for the "special edition" preorder - knowing full well that there's a non-negligible chance that the studio may well fold before they ever ship a product.

Sometimes the worth of something, and the spirit of those pursuing it, is worth reward/support in and of itself.
YouTube Future-proofing: 4K Support