skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're dominated by function calls, you're already wrong. Function calls are way expensive, because you're resetting like 4 registers and screwing over the instruction cache.

Give me a non-contrived example where this tiny amount of function call overhead makes an actual difference, and I'll eat my words.

A "non-contrived" example would require a whole-app benchmark; a micro-benchmark is already provided by the post author.

Nobody said the sky is falling (or that we're making a "mountain" out of it), but it is slower, and if it wasn't important to optimize function prologues/epilogues and register allocation, why exactly do we bother doing it at all?

To turn it around, give me a non-contrived example of a large code base where this "tiny" amount of function call overhead doesn't make an actual wall-clock difference, and I'll eat my words.

To put your complaint in context, you seem to be saying any micro-optimization of functional call overhead is not worth noting because it's noise amidst I/O, syscall overhead, or a million other things that are also expensive. A position which ignores the fact that the cheaper you make everything else, the more time you have left over for things you can't make cheaper.
Why would I pay $10 a month to watch old TV shows with ads in a Flash-only player when I can pirate and get hours-old ad-free HD TV shows that play anywhere?

Fuck DRM. When the video-distribution industry gets rid of DRM, then I'll buy video online. When my favorite TV shows are available for $10 a season in 1080p without DRM (and with episodes released before the official airtime, preferably), I will be the first to sign up. Until then, the pirates provide a significantly better product. For free.

The music industry figured it out. I have no trouble buying music I like in a lossless format these days, and there is never DRM. So why not the video industry? Their product is significantly more disposable than music, and yet it costs more and they use more "technology" to "protect" it. It doesn't make sense.

(I listen to songs over and over again. I watch a TV show once, and then delete it to free up hard drive space for more TV shows.)
FontFonter: Just enter the URL & testdrive web fonts on any site
Gird your loins, boys, for the influx of disillusioned redditors!

(a good chunk of whom were disillusioned meme-spouting 4channers before they were disillusioned redditors)
There should be a third category for "improperly licensed" software offenders. I find that uses of personal software for commercial purposes is quite common. So not quite piracy but still not 100% legit.
My wife would not have left me over the move. I understand yours did but your wife was likely good looking and desirable. My wife is a little more average.

I could have used some extra firepower for my resume, I ended up working for one company this entire time until about 8 months ago. I have spent a lot of years doing ASP Classic / SQL Server and find myself not very employable now. I have had to take a job making a cool $3,500 a month after being unemployed for 4 months. My wife's car was repossessed, I could no longer maintain her credit cards, and our electricity was shut off. None of those things made her happy either but she didn't choice but to accept them.
Terrorism
Do other people hate the vertical Get Satisfaction tab as much as me? I think it really interferes with this design (and many others).
The article presumes we live in a meritocracy. That appears to be more myth than objective reality. Akin to the myth of "the American Dream".
True. I guess what I really meant is that if you're using a platform where most everything is free you don't really need to pirate software. Macs, in my opinion, could almost be lumped in with Windows.
I see no evidence that the upper crust actually has become homogenous. Whether defined by education or wealth, the "elite" probably contains more unlikely members today than ever before.
The Dangerous Art of the Right Question
So if everything went according to plan, why are they canceling it?
> Very interesting. What other ideas do you have for sweetening the deal for a customer willing to signup for what is essentially vaporware?

Well, as I understand the term vaporwear, it means stuff that's never built that's never going to get built. It's a result of either a company grandstanding (Microsoft) or a company with perfectionism issues (Duke Nukem Forever). Taking preorders demonstrates that you're not grandstanding and forces you not to be a perfectionist. So I wouldn't call it vaporwear.

Beyond that, running a successful company people trust and delivering value to them helps immensely. Give them things for free - write a newsletter, write a free tool (even a simple one! simple tools are awesome), give some useful case studies, a blog, whatever. If Patrick McKenzie (patio11) announced that he was releasing an ebook in 30 days and charging $80, but it was $20 if you pre-ordered now, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat. Because I respect him, trust him, and would be happy to give him my money, and I know he'll deliver.

Beyond that - solid concept that's demonstrably possible in the real world. If you announce something that seems difficult to impossible and you haven't figured out how to get there from here, people will be skeptical. But if you're doing a version 2.0, or you're selling media (a book, an album, whatever) where people have seen dozens/hundreds examples of it created in the past, or if you're just known as a guy that always delivers - then you should be able to get some preorders.

Really though, I didn't take preorders for the cash, I didn't need the cash. I did it to make a promise to other people. Most people take promises to other people much more seriously than promises to themselves.
>Then you have chosen completely the wrong license, because that is not what the BSD license provides.

You're silly, you haven't read the license. It's not BSD.

http://github.com/bitemyapp/Scroot/blob/master/LICENSE

There's no problem, and you aren't going to argue this into anything productive.

I've made my decision, I'm going to let people do anything they want except relicense it in GPL or sue me.

There is no debate here. I'm sorry I shared it in a fit of feeling 'cute'.
Even a deity who could create the universe couldn't make 4 a prime number.

Unless a deity made it a sin punishable by some horrible method of torture for believing otherwise. At least then you might reconsider your statement. But at least we'd know the truth about deities.

A little OT, but a solid argument for a relativist universe.
I would be happy if HN didn't have karma at all. I don't think it adds anything to my use of the site.
I challenge Hacker News...
It's not new and it discusees race. The time is 19:07 CET. How long 'til it's deaded?
Why do you care about DRM on the TV show if you only watch the TV show once?
I believe they prefer to be called Swashbuckling Americans.
Haskell's hash tables revisited
Moody's gives Motorola positive outlook after Nokia deal
Yes. I pirated WinXP in order to run IE for testing purposes.
Looks like the Zune was a good investment into consumer friendly software
I think culture does play a part, and reasonable pricing. It's easy for someone to justify pirating windows, especially if it's not their main operating system compared with OSX which is at a price point that no one but a broke teenager would really consider pirating it.
Re: 7. Yes, the app (http://sexbyfood.com) also charges. "one of the first" would be lol.
I agree with you, image resizing is simple enough that an average programmer can get it done. The reason we are offering it, is because it fits very naturally with our architecture, and people who handle video through us will probably also like us to handle their images.

We do a few tricky things so. HTML5 multi uploading is one of them. We actually start resizing images as they come in, that means by the time you are done uploading 100 images, we are done resizing them. Another thing is upload progress without flash, that will usually require a custom-compiled web server of some sort. And there is meta data extraction and uploading to S3. If you just need a fraction of all of that, sure - we have little to offer. But we'll try even harder to make people regret their decision to "build it themselves" in the future : ).

Let me know how far you get this afternoon!

Edit: Our pricing will go down substantially. We basically decided to launch with the highest price we may get away with in order to go down with pricing over time instead of up.
Tell HN: Let's have a HN meetup in Hong Kong
Who would be in? How's the weekend of the 31st of July/1st of August sound? I'm here until 7 August and would love to connect with local entrepreneurs and hackers. Reply or email me if interested, we can meet on Kowloon or HK Island.
Clearly Mr. Douthat means something very different than I do by "meritocracy." If "meritocracy" means existing political leaders or (as in his linked article) "D.C. elites", who appear to come by their positions through some combination of oligarchy and cronyism, then I suppose I am against it.

On the other hand, please bring me the "meritocracy" comprised of leaders who have the intellectual capacity and willpower to make rational decisions based on actual evidence and honest debate. You know, meritorious ones.
I would not be concerned if I would write a web based product.
But I am writing a desktop application in Java. Someone with more resources than me can copy my stuff very fast and beat me before I can get real traction. My most important competitive advantage is in the applied algorithms which I was refactoring so much; it is inside the source code. If they steal that, they not only steal my idea, they steal my execution. Of course they can also do it otherwise, but in that case it last more time. The key is in my opinion being ahead 1-2 years, especially in the beginning. So it might be a good idea to obfuscate the code. On the other hand it is better to be open, so it would be cool if I could ship the complete source code so that customers or consultants could customize my product, (or write plugins) which is quite important in the case of this product.

It is a really hard decision whether to:

- ship only the obfuscated class files

- ship the non-obfuscated class files

- or ship the whole source code with the product.

Being too open too early can be dangerous. Even big companies had problem from being too open (see IBM PC), not to say about a small company which has no traction.
Play Framework – The template engine
Because DRM'd files do not play on my phone, under Linux, etc.

Plus, I want to decide how many times I watch something, I don't need some shitty computer program to do it for me.
Good point, post edited. We've learned during the industrial design process that concept drawings can be difficult to realize. The wristband is close to being something we are very happy with.
The last non-freely-licensed software I actually wanted to use was Mac OS X 10.2. These days if I can't modify it, I'm not interested. That said, I've paid money for several free software projects since then. (Clojure, Rails, CyanogenMod, and a plugin to let me use skype from Pidgin.)
Raytheon unveils anti-aircraft energy weapon
Definitely impressive. I can't imagine the framerates with this engine being practical though.
This is the original Google post:

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/01/encouraging-more-chromium-s...

Seems like $500 for normal security bugs and can be upgraded to $1,337 for severe bugs (judged by a panel)
I made a comment in that thread that seems to have disappeared where I said the same thing, but I think there is more that you guys could do to entice subscribers.

Things like image hosting would be huge. Let me save images that I use frequently, show me some relevant ads, I don't care.

Email alerts would also be big. Email me (include an ad in the email) when somebody responds to a message of mine (but please, not for if they reply to a self post).

Let me have the option of displaying images in the thread. yeah, yeah, I know there is javascript that I can use to do this, but do it on the server side for me. That would be great.

One thing that we do on my website (which isn't big enough for it to really be a huge feature) is the ability for users to write blog posts, these carry a lot more weight than self posts.

Here is a blog I wrote using it:

http://newslily.com/blog/permalink.cgi?blog_id=96

can you imagine this as a self post?

What's cool about this is that users can link to it as if it were an article of their own.

I think you'd get a lot of really amazing articles out of the reddit community if you opened up something like this. Let the gold members do something like it; they'd love it.

Here is another thing we do that I would love to see reddit do:

http://newslily.com/hn/hnlily.cgi (wrapped up in the HN clone layout that I did a while ago)

It's a feed of what your friends are doing. I saw that you guys added a "friends" link that shows me links my friends have submitted? That's cool, but I would love to see their comments as well. I'm sure that this would be more server-intensive, but it would also be a great way of finding more stuff to talk about. I think gold members would think this was really cool (I would).

I'm not trying to say that the things we're doing are oh-so-cool and that the things you're doing aren't, I'm just saying that you guys have got an amazing opportunity with a community that completely loves you, is very loyal, and is FREAKING HUGE. (Okay, there is a bit of jealousy there...I wish I could try ideas out on the scale that you guys can).

Howabout custom colors? HN does this after you hit a certain karma threshold. Sell this to the gold members for $4/mo.

I hope this reddit gold is a huge success for you guys. Just please invite me on the yacht someday :-P.
I came here to provide just those links. Not only are the rules of conversation written down, but they're often very heavily discussed and analyzed—even by people who aren't autistic.

And of course, the rules of conversation vary very widely across the globe. Of particular note is the rules of conversation in Malagasy, where to be polite is to be so oblique that in America folks would think you're being purpusefully rude.
Its fun to see your page about badges to HN users. A badge I would like to see would be "Philosopher". It should be given to the person who gives the most insightful comments about how things are supposed to work. There are in essence two kind of posters on HN. First are those who give technical comments. They can debate you about many concepts of CS/Management (or whatever is it they are talking about technically). The second class is, the once who give comments about how things are actually supposed to work in real life. I can scale my app whenever I want. There are plethora of comments about how to scale on HN. But there are few who advice you on when to scale and why to scale and how much to scale. I think these people deserve a badge.
I don't pirate software because I have no need to. I mostly use my computer for recreational purposes, and all of the software I use is freely available. For professional programs, my employer has covered the cost, so that isn't an issue either. It seems that most regular consumers have no need to actually purchase software as long as they are savvy enough to know about the multitude of free options.
I know I'm in the minority here, but Photoshop is worth every penny to me. I don't upgrade to every version (I usually skip every other one) but I don't steal it, and I certainly don't find GIMP to be an honest substitute. If you dabble in graphics, or are making things for the web, it's fine. If you do some of the things I do, GIMP just doesn't have the workflow or the features yet.

I really don't want to turn this into a holy war, but I have found Photoshop to be an exception to the "the more you pay the worse it is" argument. As a general rule, though, I agree - most everything I use is open-source.
On the negative side, the potential use of an engine as advanced as this in the world of 3D porn will almost certainly result in more furry sex.
Hey thanks for the suggestions, what browser are you using?

I agree that our visuals are not the best - hopefully we can add a real designer to our team at point.
Oh! Old and intelligent one, will you please educate us innocent and unintelligent ones over the issue of the golden usernames debacle?
SO when a citizen is videotaped in public without their consent can we arrest the entire city government?
You should definitely live in San Francisco. You'll miss out on some things, but you can live well there without a car.
"They cannot steal your market failure driven pivots"
"They cannot steal your analytical insights"

I believe that after 2 years of prototyping costing thousands of dollars and significant effort, my widget is ready for release. If someone blatantly copies what I have released, they have stolen all of that prototyping experience. That experience contains test market feedback and prototype rework based on market testing as well as any analytical insights that have been gleaned from initial user testing. All of the pre-release trial and error is built into that release design.

I have to say I'd like to believe the whole "ideas are cheap - share with everybody" mentality, but there are good reasons that large companies spend millions of dollars on patenting their legitimate inventions. Competitors can come in and steal years of your work overnight simply by copying your design. That gives them an edge. The last thing you want is to help out any competitors by giving them an edge that allows them to catch up almost immediately without spending a dime.
FoundersSpace - a place for founders to get questions answered
Maybe you should provide both graphs on a full scale (from 0 to 4.8) to show just how little, in your benchmark, -fomit-frame-pointer brings to the table in 32b (under half a percent using your mean cycles count) versus how much is lost due to it in 64b (nearly +30% cycles)
Check out the source for, e.g.

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stringtable-atom

There are a number of generalized memoization libraries. This one

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/data-memocombinators

doesn't use `unsafePeformIO`, but instead imports the Array package. If you check out

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/array/0.2.0.0/do...

you will find 696 uses of "unsafe" in one module...

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/MemoTrie

by contrast takes a different approach.
Not every player/device plays DRM'd stuff?
There are some fashionable memes running through entrepreneurship circles these days that are routinely mentioned in blogs, etc. (fail quick/often, ideas are cheap, etc). They certainly have merit, but are usually generalizations that can break-down when applied to specific situations. This concept of ideas being cheap/worthless is one of them.

Certainly, business ideas on their own usually have little value without execution. But it really depends. If your differentiator is the idea, you are at greater risk of direct competition, and so spreading the idea around without first gaining a foothold is risky, especially if you discuss it with people who are entrepreneurial minded. Sometimes a startup needs breathing room to find a true differentiator beyond the idea. I bet there is a long, long list of people being "wronged" after discussing their plans with others. Feedback is certainly hugely valuable, but people need to be judicious with what, and to whom, they reveal.
If they leave it at our gates, we probably shouldn't bring it inside... there could be more than meets the eye.

I'd down mod myself if I could.
Sometimes I'll forget to turn the A/C on in the summer and I'll wake up drenched in sweat. The new wristband looks like it will soak up an awful lot of sweat and probably start to smell rather funky after a while. Is it washable?

If not, is the monitoring device removable so I can fasten it to my own elastic wristband? I'm thinking along the lines of a FitBit style component that I can clip to my LiveStrong bracelet?
Vizio isn't Costco's in-house brand. It's a legit. http://www.vizio.com

Insignia, however, is an example of an in house brand by Best Buy.
Aloha Editor: an awesome HTML5 browser based editor
Thanks for correcting my grammar, and thanks for explaining why you think my statement is "utterly ridiculous".
Favorite episodes of This Week In Startups - a Listiki
You might want to try to snag a nice used monitor from Amazon's used electronics site: http://www.warehousedeals.com/
Some would argue even democracy could not accommodate such things.
I created this plugin for developers running a wordpress blog or site that would like to include custom JS on their pages or posts.

An example might be to include some jQuery code for an accordion or lightbox. The intent is to separate the presentation logic from any frontend code you may need on the given page.

Benefits of the plugin also include handling tab characters for proper indentation of your JS.
People over a certain karma level (I've forgotten how much, but I was one of them) had their username colored differently (gold IIRC) in the comment threads. That meant that comments by high karma people stood out. This made it look like their comments were more important.

The community here rebelled (including me) because there was a feeling that high karma and something interesting to say were not necessarily correlated.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468239
Yes, which means if they do something that seems outrageously silly because it only would matter the 0.0001% of the time they pull over a psycho, they're actually protecting themselves. It's like wearing a helmet -- you do it all the time for the one time you crash.
http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html Mozilla's bounty was raised to $3000 recently on security issues.
If this isn't real time, then this isn't that impressive. This type of fluid rendering has been possible for almost a decade:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/water-sg02/

That said, if it is realtime, then yay.
Uh-oh, if 3/4 of people can't conversate, couldn't it just be that people aren't meant to do that?
If the scales were flawed, it's in defense of -fomit-frame-pointer: according to his bench, it reduces the cycle count by ~0.3% in 32b, but blows it up by nearly 30% (29.7) in 64b.

I have put both graphs on the same image and scaled them correctly, then extended the canvas to the whole scale and finally shrunk the graph back to the original 600px high, this is the result: http://imgur.com/yG3R9

64b on the left, 32 on the right, blue is without -fomit and red is with it. On the 32b graph, you can barely discriminate between with and without, whereas on the 64b graph you can very clearly see it.

If he lied, his fault is to have dismissed his own findings as less important than they are.
"As far as we’re aware, no commercial product has made use of Apple’s authentication 2.0B coprocessor chip over Bluetooth yet so we’re not surprised by the number of strange issues we’ve encountered."

Is this why there is a dearth of iPhone/iPad accessories? How much can they talk about their experiences given the fact that the protocol is under an NDA?
It was new to me, and It was interesting to read. But I'm very interested in interpretations since I actually found it hard to understand the tone and pov of the author.