skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see nothing in this yet that differentiates your product in any way. In fact there are many ways in which your service seems worse (I purposefully didn't read the about to see if it says something about this subject in there. I'm treating this as a first time user)

First you have a paging mechanism to find my city! Que Horror! I realize you have a filter on there but that's painful craigslist finds out where I should be by IP geolocation or has the complete list on page one!

Then my city (San Francisco) isn't supported - it is in the list however? I realize that there is a common theme on HN to put your site out early an often. But if my city is in the list but is not supported, I'm not coming back to find out when it is. Say distinctly on your home page that this is a limited trial for a small set of cities. Both craigslist and Yelp started with a small geographic area, start with that.

Once I get into a city - there is nothing here that differentiates your offering from craigslist. Its UI/search doesn't seem revolutionary and you have none traction. There is no reason yet for me to try to transition to your service.

Don't just remake craigslist - figure out how you're going to make it better - and not a little better a lot better. Then go from there. Realize that taking on craigslist has been done without success numerous times) how are you going to do better.
Craigslist only auto-selects based on your previous visits.

When I clear cookies and go to craigslist.org, I have to select cities too.
A lot of people want to quit that day job. For some it's the flexibility that offers and for others, they just want some change.
Help save the newspapers -- Seeing Interactive (YC W10) needs Ruby hackers.
We're growing rapidly and we need your help.

We would love to hire people who:

- Are familiar with Ruby, Rails and Merb
- Think about how technology can make a difference in small towns

Know anything about developing software for the iPhone or Android? Be sure to mention it. We'd also like to hear about it if you have any experience with statistics and data mining.

Seeing Interactive (YC Winter 2010) builds products to help small-town newspapers improve their revenue on the internet. We're funded; we're looking for people to join our San Francisco team.

Learn more about the job: http://seeinginteractive.com/company/jobs/software-engineers...

Apply: jobs@seeinginteractive.com

Be sure to mention that you saw us on HN.
Joel Spolsky has blogged about the process for launching these sites, and there is a sort of trial period to see whether it will fly or be closed. He has also said that each site will have its own logo, branding, etc. Maybe this one hasn't gotten it yet because it hasn't proved itself to be viable yet? It does say "beta."

I'm not saying this is a unique submission, but the UI may not be final.
so what is the common use case for using Node, and what in that use case eats CPU?
My opinions regarding HFCS is based on my limited review of the science, and I promote that view to friends and family. Coke stands no chance of winning by throwing advertising against word of mouth. Word of mouth takes awhile, but it's stronger. I think Coke will offer a sugar version of their main products in the USA soon.
I thought about this though and there is a serious problem.

Let's say I've created a robo car system that is 100x less likely to be involved in an at-fault accident. If everyone installed the system nationwide, I would be assuming about 2.3 billion dollars (1% of the accident cost figure quoted above) in liability.

However, that's not likely to happen since the first time such a system fails and crashes it would be horrible publicity that would put me out of business.
> You want non-lawyers drafting laws? There's a good reason why most congress people are lawyers.

Congress people don't draft laws - staff does. Or rather, staff cuts and pastes text provided by lobbyists.

> The law is very tricky and English is an ambiguous language that needs to be made crystal clear from a legal standpoint (which typically becomes unreadable to laypeople).

Laws typically aren't crystal clear from a legal standpoint - that's (part of) why they're "interpreted" by courts and "implemented" by regulation.

And that's not even counting the expansion due to either malicious or stupid drafting. Consider RICO - it was touted as "for use against organized crime". It's now SOP for almost every criminal prosecution. (If an organization may have committed two crimes, it's subject to RICO.)
Absolutely. If you hear the startup life glorified enough on sites like this, there's a chance you're going to want to start a startup, but you won't have an idea yet. Also, some people just naturally recognize ideas, whereas other people might have just dismissed annoyances as "the way the world is."
Absolutely worth it in terms of overall system speed.

I bought the 128GB drive, though, which was only $300 more at the time.
In Firefox, Tools -> Clear Recent History -> Active Logins

Yes, it's terrible
Kill the paged list on the homepage right now.

I can't imagine a worse user experience than seeing 10 cities I don't live in, with the only way to find mine being to randomly select pages in the hope of landing on the right one. Or, of course I can page through every city you have.

I never made it as far as finding Seattle, and finally just clicked one at random because I'm explicitly giving you a shot. Had I found your site while browsing the web, I would have left and never come back.

So please, stop it. Just give me the whole list and let me pick from it.
Dance Classes Manhattan
The best dance instruction in Manhattan. Learn to dance Salsa, Mambo, Argentine ,Tango, Swing, Ballroom, Latin and more at New York’s largest Latin and Ballroom dance studio! DanceSport offers you the best dance instruction from the finest instructors.
Hmmm, well in that case, both sites are doing it wrong. :-)

It wouldn't be too difficult to use geolocation on the user to determine the nearest supported city and store it in a cookie for them.
Since Node.js is still fairly new technology people are starting out with 'hello world' examples such as static file servers. Obviously specialised servers like Traffic Server or nginx handle these cases faster.

That said Node is a programming environment so the question is, when on a multi-core machine (which all DC machines are) how can we scale to use all the cores so we can do much harder stuff.

What about a node system to deal with 100k concurrent long-poll connections? When some of those are active they could be really active, requiring all the cores, etc. There are lots of scenarios in which more compute power is useful.
This hoists all dependencies to the top level, it looks decent because the dependency graph is entirely static. Suppose you want more runtime flexibility, such as replacing every instantiation with a runtime choice between 3 implementations. Note that this usually changes the topology of the dependency graph since each implementation requires a different selection of internal objects (involving more runtime choices).

Some applications don't require this sort of runtime flexibility and they have dependencies that are not likely to change in future versions, in which case it may be fine (even preferable) to dump all the dependencies on the user.
That's why we don't have 'mob rule', i.e. Democracy in the USA. Instead we have a constitutional republic.
New Safari 5 extension NinjaKit brings greasemonkey compatibility
This guys discovered a new Safari5 extension called NinjaKit, that lets you install GM scripts on Safari. Pretty cool!
Basic auth is insecure except over SSL.
Digest auth is secure, but Internet Explorer ruined it for everyone.
I'm very sceptical whether the site will appeal to foodies.

SO is a great place, and a completely amazing resource - but people who code are generally quite unique in their ability to rise through the ranks of pedantry. The ability to see things logically, and keep things on topic is essential for software development .. but I don't think it's wise to translate these requirements to a food site.

I think debates over 'is this a question' and 'shouldn't this be closed' and 'move it to community wiki' are all ridiculous. I believe cookery is very much an art - not a science. There's aren't correct single answers for a lot of things - because different things work for different people.

I honestly think putting a bunch of coders in charge is a huge mistake.
Indeed. What would be a nice addition to github is a way to mark another repository as the canonical one. I've been lucky enough to have a couple of my old projects taken over by new maintainers, and it takes a while for people to realize it.
I think it's safe to call them "ex friends" if they read this ;-)
It really depends what kind of stuff you are into but I'd recommend checking out the Computer History Museum. There is a lot of awesome historical stuff there, and it is free. It might be quite boring if you're not into computers though.

http://www.computerhistory.org/
flickr, freshbooks and github
I agree there's cases where more CPU power is useful, but I'm just not sure it's a good idea to firstly assume you need it before it's an issue, and secondly to split the whole thing (networking IO) over multiple cores, rather than just shell out the CPU heavy stuff to multi-cores.

Networking IO isn't CPU heavy. There's no reason to increase complexity and slow throughput in the hope that more CPUs will help...
Actually, yes, I do want to see non-lawyers writing laws. I see this as an issue of competence and self-interest.

On competence - I'd agree that the law is tricky, but I don't think it's impossible for a non-lawyer to learn it. Law isn't like advanced mathematics. Sure, you need to be astute and pay attention, but you and I can read legislation, whereas non-mathematicians really can't access the literature on abstract algebra.

Also, I actually doubt that most members of congress actually write legislation. I doubt they even read most of the legislation they vote on.

As for self-interest... well, how big should dog's teeth be? To me, that depends on whether the dog is defending me from an attacker or, well, attacking me. Honestly, I think that the legal cartel has not had the best interests of the American people at heart. A fifty thousand page tax code is good news for tax lawyers. Software patents seem to do a lot more good for patent lawyers than for software developers. Non-compete clauses? I hate them, so do lawyers. Guess what profession is exempt (by statute) from non-compete clauses in all 50 states? (hint: it's the people who write the law on non-compete clauses).

So overall, I think that developers are smart, literate people who absolutely could learn how to competently create legislation, and that even if they aren't quite as good at it as lawyers, they'd be far more likely to represent my interests as a developer.
FTFA:

'Other developer communities should be taking notes. There’s no reason in particular, it seems, for this to not be possible with Javascript, Python, Clojure, Scala, or any other “progressive” language. But it hasn’t happened. The thriving open-source platforms like Ubuntu and Android are hampered by having central authorities in Canonical and Google. Maybe the regional conference phenomenon will always be unique to Ruby.

How the Ruby community got to this moment is utterly fascinating, at least to me. But beyond the reasons above, there must have been other contributing factors. What have I missed?'

I'm curious about this as well.

Some (many) of the listed Ruby conferences are one-day, single-track events, not full-blown confs per se. Still, there's time and effort involved in arranging even "simple" gatherings.

Do other language communities really not have this level of self-organized activity? I'd love to go to a one-day unconf on Closure or Haskell or JavaScript, but I can't really afford to fly off to some remote city to do it.

What I like about the proliferation of Ruby events is that there's some variety. Many of these events have a notable personality. You can find a conference that suits your interests (I happen to think MWRC is about the best.)

Ruby has become less interesting to me over time, but I'm impressed by the people arranging these events.
Corellation != Causation

Why do high schools keep abusing statistics?
This is one of many cases where I have seen a high school find correlation between an act and grades, and then made policy decision assuming things like attendance and extra-curricular activities caused increased grades instead of considering the alternative that kids who have a nature that causes good grades also causes attendance and participation in extra-curricular activities.
"I note that you latched on to the one comment here that would support your own opinion of your own relative intelligence -- the one that posited that memorization served as a proxy for the understanding of the text for students that couldn't understand it; thus, you required no proxy and clearly are more intelligent than the those who did require one."

Just because I don't need to memorize something to understand it does not mean I am more intelligent. I don't understand why you've turned this into some attempt of mine to self-aggrandize. If you find that memorizing something forces you to understand it, great - I'm happy that works for you but understand that the understanding of the text is the end-goal. My point is that whether or not you've memorized something has nothing to do with whether or not you understand it. I think a real problem is that you don't understand that one can understand something without having memorized it first.

At the exclusive (no low-IQ or low-performing students need apply) private school I attended, memorization and recitation in front of the class was provided as an extra credit assignment for those students who were especially interested in the text, not as some sort of booby prize for the non-existent less intelligent among us.

I'm seriously glad I didn't go to your school. But I see now why you believe so adamantly in the virtues of memorization since it has so clearly defined your idea of academic success. The fact that your school handed out extra credit for reciting back text is ridiculous. That basically defeats any meaning a GPA would have.

[Edit: And wow can you stop editing your comments so wildy? If you have something new to say, hit the reply link]
Intelligence (with a healthy dose of diligence) plays a big part in success in college. If you don't think so, then you're either not challenging yourself enough, or your college is not challenging enough.

Why do so many people on HN love to disparage school? Did they have horrible experiences? I had an incredible experience and learned an amazing amount of stuff. I almost never felt like I had to "put up with shit" to get a degree, or anything along those lines. Maybe I'm the exception, but I doubt that's the case.
I don't understand what his last statement means:

"So please, do not call all functions where the last function call in your source code is a call to itself, tail recursive. A function is tail recursive, if the last operation is a function call to itself."

It reads to me as "Don't call functions that call themselves last tail recursive. A function is tail recursive if it calls itself last."

That's saying the same thing, if my reading of it is right. His oddly-placed commas don't help.
Thanks for trying this out!

I use Twilio (http://twilio.com) for sending text messages, and rely on them to provide somewhat global support. UK should be supported, but their logging does show that they couldn't deliver your text message.
I filed the issue with their support system, so hopefully they'll resolve this.

I will add list of countries that are supported though!
Forget the limited science, the HFCS version of coke just tastes worse than proper coke.

I suppose if you grew up on the HFCS version you might be accustomed to it, though.
Think of all the amazing campaign slogans you could have though:

* "PG - He's for me!"

* "Paul Graham - He's the man!" [sic]

* "No more DC slackers, we want YC hackers!"

* "Paul Graham: Invest in America"

* "PG: Bringing the 'start' back to Capitol Hill!"

Related note: I'm available for campaign management jobs. :)
Ryan Dahl — Introduction to NodeJS
The URL gets a ",", but it doesn't work. If you instead go to:

http://www.swippet.com/swippet-domain.html?area=Washington%2...

It works.
Would people who can't find startup ideas be interested in paying for a service that provides a stream of ideas along with basic market research?

I don't know what the exact mechanism would be (subscription of some sort most likely, with an additional "Pay to remove this idea from all the listings" fee).
Totally agree. The more you read through the story, the more you realize how big of an idiot he is.
I was looking for set comprehensions but couldn't find info about it. Thanks for the tip.
I can comment on the JRuby results.

For the base perf numbers, I'm not surprised. We've known that we're roughly on par with 1.9.2 for some time, and many of the benchmarks in question have started to reach a point of irreducible complexity (e.g. you can only slice and dice strings so fast). It's good to see JRuby remains at or near the front of the pack as far as performance, especially considering we've made no major performance-related changes in almost two years.

The Linux versus Windows numbers are a bit surprising to me. If I were to make a guess, I'd guess that the JVMs used were not identical (perhaps like Isaac Gouy mentions, one platform was 64-bit and the other wasn't) or some other detail altered the performance characteristics of the test. But the performance drop does seem to be in line with other implementations, so perhaps Windows really does suck and there's not much we can do about it.

On the memory issue, I have a few recommendations.

JRuby by default allows the JVM to use up to a 512MB heap (the default is usually 32-64MB, which is rarely enough for most nontrivial apps). The JVM likes to use as much memory as you're willing to give it, to keep GC times low (nearly free) and to give it lots of room to breathe. Almost all these benchmarks could run in far less memory (maybe 1/5 as much or lower) if the JVM were choked down to that level. So it's not surprising to me that the memory sizes for these very object and CPU-intensive benchmarks start to approach that 512MB limit; the JVM is just stretching its legs.

Expect to see a lot more performance work coming in JRuby 1.6. I've blogged about it here: http://blog.headius.com/2010/05/kicking-jruby-performance-up...

Also expect to see more work on picking a "winner" as far as lightweight servers go. Something that works as seamlessly as Passenger could be the "last mile" we need to get folks to make a move.

And watch our two Ruby Summer of Code projects: Ruboto, bringing JRuby to Android; and C extension support.

We're working very hard to bring JRuby to everyone and everyone to JRuby. The reasons not to use JRuby are rapidly disappearing.
I'll look into that, but it would be nice if it could be commoditized and automated. Like if there was some webapp that presented you with some examples of styles to pick from, took your size information, and then periodically shipped you clothes matching your chosen parameters.
In South Africa, pigeons are "faster than broadband": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248056.stm
Why are they using multiple processes rather than multiple worker threads? IPC is much costlier than using shared memory, even if it's just passing the initial state.
> The best thing they could do with it would be to just hand out a copy to every 9th-grade student.

What makes you think that the folks who dropped out would be affected by that graph?

Assuming that someone does something because they're ignorant is almost always a mistake.

Example - smokers know that smoking is bad for them and they knew it long before the warning campaigns. (The phrase "cancer sticks" is quite old.) If you don't understand that they smoke because smoking is better for them than doing without, you can't possibly help them.
Mongrel2 Is Now BSD Licensed
Schools vary so much that if you recount an extraordinary experience, either positive or negative, you should give a hint of where you attended. What country/jurisdiction? How organized/funded? What size?
There's a pretty cool place at 1600 amphitheatre parkway
An SSD is definitely worth investing some money on. I would not recommend buying one from Apple. Get the MBP with the cheapest drive and then buy the SSD from a site like Newegg. You can get a equal quality SSD for about 40% less than what Apple is charging.
> Vote for a candidate you do support, even if you know they won't win.

I respect people who do this tremendously.

However, my position is different. I say - the system is not legitimate, and I do not acquiesce to it. It would be hypocritical of me to try to take a share of power that I think is immoral, wrong, and shouldn't exist. In the meantime, I obey mandates that I don't believe in from a mix of fear and cowardice. I'm not proud of that, though, and it makes me sad to think about and acknowledge.

But I do respect the people trying to change the system from the inside.
Agreed. Or a stylized map (some geolocation magic would be nice) that lets you click in your general area then select the exact city of interest.

The Craigslist city picker is bad, but the paged list is worse.

Keep in mind one of the big Craigslist complaints is the city segregation making it harder for people in areas between a bunch of cities. This is an area to improve on, not to mimic.
i agree that there is nothing worse than an empty location or category. it tells me that your focus isn't on my experience with the site. the pages you have for philadelphia serve no purpose right now other than demonstrating feature parity with one of your competitors.
My teacher in seventh grade was a tenured paranoid schizophrenic who had it in for me as soon as I corrected her on the first day of class. This was combined with an altogether toxic social environment. For me, school seems pointless -- a failed exercise in education cited within in a social disaster zone. I'm glad I got out. But the general inefficiency of the educational process has spread as memes to most corners of western society, so I am never truly away.
What does this even mean? The existence of the button? If you're talking about "secret codes" for using it, that's just an implementation of an authentication/authorization scheme.
Ask HN: What is the best open-source/free live chat software
We're looking to replace an outdated version of http://www.craftysyntax.com/ The desktop client is very buggy. I don't have much confidence that the updated version will be much better.

I'm looking for suggestions. I'd also consider paid/hosted solutions...but the ones I've seen are way too expensive ($500+/month)
Application logic is not free.

The article mentions that using NodeJS as a simple HTTP proxy with no application logic can sustain only 2100 reqs/s before a 2.5GHz Xeon is maxed out. NodeJS uses CPU more efficiently than other HTTP stacks, but its I/O engine is not infinitely scalable.
The author shouldn't be changing his H2's to H1's. Just because you are switching from divs to article tags doesn't mean you change the < h* > tags.
Quite Delicious Button
And I up-modded yours 6 days later :)
32GB microSD cards (the largest currently available) at ~0.5g each have a much higher data density.
I know what Markdown is and yet this turned me off:
"Ability to format posts with Markdown"

If that's a differentiating factor from CL then you have ways to go. Sorry to be negative - I just don't think any CL user would care. This is a feature worthy of a footnote.
2 month isn't that long.

Trudge through it & a month from now tell them you plan on quitting once the project is done (1 month notice is more than enough).