skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the wrong answer in so many ways. Starting with, if you're in a dynamic language and you're so performance sensitive that you can't take the hit of a loop comparison, you're doing it wrong.

But...Pretending you actually need to unroll your loops, you might ask, why did Duff choose "8" as the magic number? Was it, perhaps, looking at the code his compiler kicked out for the loop and choosing the number that optimized for byte copying on his architecture, given some constraint about common buffer sizes? Yes. Lacking an "architecture" target for Javascript, it probably doesn't make much sense to use Duff's constant just because he did.

And...if your function body is relatively slow, you probably don't need to unroll anything in the first place. Duff had a beautiful one-liner in there that in some situations is basically one clock cycle's worth of work. Javascript has no such construct that couldn't be batched in the first place (8 ++'s => one += 8). And if you make a function call, you've made your inner loop slow.

Moral of the story: Don't do this.
Being a Ruby / Rails guy - the job market for that talent is hot. Good Rubyists easily get jobs in the six digits.

That aside, this debate is like emacs vs vi. Get good at one, because in terms of productivity and getting things done it makes no difference.
Ask YC: talking to Navy docs about FOSS & healthcare IT in ~ 3 wks. Please comment on outline.
I plan either two 30 minute sessions after morning report (so 0800 to 0830 two days), or 30 minutes one day, and a 1 hour lunch the next. What to add? What to remove? Semi-intentionally put more than necessary in timeline because I didn't really know what to <i>exclude</i>, so whack away at it, please!
There are a million cashback sites out there though. You can get cashback, or commission on anything you buy online already.
Just seems a bit desparate to me.
If I tip in a restaurant, it's because I want to be remembered.

So you never tip at a restaurant to which you're not going to return? (Suppose you're dining at a restaurant while traveling.) Besides, the chance that you're going to be "remembered" for leaving 15% (or 20%) at a typical restaurant is minuscule. The same goes for leaving $1 in the tipjar at a coffee shop.

I think you completely misunderstand the purpose of tipping. People tip because: (1) it is a social convention; they feel they are expected to, and the wages of people in service industries are structured to assume tipping occurs (2) they want to show appreciation for having a service performed. The first is not (yet) a factor for online tipjars, but the latter is still applicable.
Ya, it comes across like that. David Anderson is super-smart though. He's brought a lot of original thought to _how_ to do software development for large development teams. His ideas scale down. I've used a lot of his ideas for groups in the 10-20 ppl range. His thoughts on using kanban systems have really worked well.

He is a controversial person in the Agile community.
There's nothing stopping them from providing one incorrect response and everything else correct.

Also, they get to know which domain names are requested and how often.
No it depends on the language implementation, and in the PHP documentation you can read that at every execution the seed is automatically changed. So while in C you may need srand(time(NULL)) in order to get a different set of pseudo random numbers for every program execution in PHP you need srand(CONSTANT) in order to get always the same set.

Conclusion: PHP is buggy on windows if it does not change the seed at every execution like it is stated in the specification (documentation actually that == specification for PHP).
FFT and Chi-square tests, simple bits/bytes distributions are all more interesting tests probably but actually a good generator will pass all this tests while being predictable. The only way to check if a PRNG is of cryptographically use is to analyze the way and sources used to generate the output.
Yes, there are a million cashback sites because it is profitable. Now MS has the biggest one and they can upset a market also. It won't save their company, but can anyone actually state why this is a bad business decision for Microsoft?
I'd say stick with PHP for this project, and try doing the next one in Python or Ruby.

If you feel like you need a framework, slowly build it up one piece at a time as you need it. Don't re-write your whole app before you're making money. You can spend a lot of time doing that, and there are so many other things that can potentially go wrong, you don't need to add "it took us too long to get it working" to the list.
I look forward to "Software Factories" and the "pull based near/on-shore outsourcing model" to lead the next wave of failed consulting projects, continuing to leave the market open for those of us who still practice "craft-based development" and actually build full, polished applications that work.
Looks really good... how many days total do you have to speak?
I'm with Vaskel, plus I'd chime in that if you switch now you totally are never going to get it done. You should eventually switch to a php framework, but only after you've finished what you've got now and have proven your idea viable and workable.

Your experiencing a fairly common mid-project crisis. It's almost exactly like a mid-life crisis. You're at the point that you can see the end coming and are wondering if you haven't totally fucked yourself up to this point. You see all the things you could have done better or differently. The key at that point is to try to refocus on the finish line and get yourselves there. Take notes on your mistakes, but always move forward.

Plus you've already sunk a year into it, why set yourself back?

Remember a shitty solution to a problem is better than no solution at all.
My fault, Steve has indeed explicitly said he could not use Python for that project.

But I somehow feel I'm not far from the truth, knowing his history of gentle Python bashing. After all, he chose not to make 'Django on Rhino'.
Well on a related note, when you become really comfortable with ruby, it's incredibly fast to write scripts and one-liners to do really complex stuff. Especially with the ruby shell as help.
The Meetro guys gave me a place to stay when I went to Startup School in 2005. I'm sorry to see them shut down. I think it was about the time they were trying to talk to Myspace, as I remember the topic coming up. Partnering with somebody like Myspace might have given them a userbase, but I think Myspace tried launching its own IM service, which never went anywhere.

The biggest problem I saw then is that nobody wants another IM network, and Meetro seemed bent on using their own protocol. Support was added for the major protocols eventually, but I don't think it was ever a big enough focus. I think making the protocol a Jabber extension and encouraging other people to implement it might have increased adoption, but wouldn't have helped the company.
http://www.pligg.com/ might be what you're looking for - sort of an open source Digg.
I was in almost the same situation as you, and I decided, for the very reasonable reasons explained in the other responses, to stay with PHP.

In summary:

- I know PHP, don't know Rails

- I could be a victim of the "grass is greener" effect

- I'm already too far into the project to make such a drastic change

- I made the decision to use PHP in the first place - I'd look like an idiot for making such a big mistake (even to just myself and my business partner)
And so on.

All very good reasons, and I still think my decision was highly defensible, and I stand by it.

However, it was a mistake - the deadly kind. There's no telling what could have happened if I'd switched to Rails at the time (I had a strong hunch that Rails was way better). But here's what happened:

- Turns out we weren't so far into the project after all (a typical mistake) - it was another 8 months before we released

- I've since learned Rails, and reckon I could probably have redone the whole site in less time than that with Rails (probably 3-5 months with better functionality as a result)

- PHP and the framework I used (custom) were not adequate for our long-term aims. The viscosity ( http://www.inter-sections.net/2007/12/01/comparing-pieces-of... ) of the whole thing increased to the point where after we finally went live, making further changes was too expensive/difficult/error-prone to be worth our while

Basically, this decision killed this product that I spent about a year working on.

I still stand by it, but I've learned from my mistake. I even wrote an article about it (though I didn't mention this specific product, the argument applies): http://www.inter-sections.net/2008/01/22/fundamental-mistake...

What would I have done differently? How about take a 2 week break and give Rails a really good try to see how well I liked it and if it was just an impression. I would then probably have made the decision to switch, and I believe it would have been the right one. I suggest you do the same with your product. Building a product that's painful to evolve is a deadlier mistake than wasting a bit of work. Also, it's not all wasted - you've still learnt about the business domain.

Anyway, good luck!

Daniel
Airlines’ Cuts Making Cities No-Fly Zones
Cheap programmers are expensive. I'd rather have 1 great rails programmer than 10 cheap rails programmers. The single great programmer will be more productive than all 10 of the cheap ones, and far easier to communicate with and manage.
Hide login/logout messages in Campfire
> why did Duff choose "8" as the magic number?

My rule of thumb when unrolling loops in assembly was to only unroll up to and including the bit length of the machine. So, on eight bit hardware, I would only unroll loops of eight iterations or less.
Psychohistory can work in a society very different from ours (and certainly not the one Azimov described). In our society randomness plays too big of a role. Some of the current sources of uncertainty (like technological progress, or the personal freedom we have) may disappear in 1000 years, but this is purely a speculation.
I bet there are a ton of startups out there that use Campfire religiously like I do. This little Safari/Fluid.app Userscript hides the annoying "X has entered/left the room" notifications that often take up more space than real conversation.
From the man himself (http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html):

"Transformations like this can only be justified by measuring the resulting code. Be careful when you use this thing that you don't unwind the loop so much that you overflow your machine's instruction cache. Don't try to be smarter than an over-clever C compiler that recognizes loops that implement block move or block clear and compiles them into machine idioms."
Yeah, I noticed. I'm tempted to try compiling from source, but chances are I'll end up in a worse hell.

Or maybe I'll setup a new debian slice to toy around with.
Well for me, it cheapens the product. It's like they feel they need to give people stuff to get them to use their product.

IMHO they should concentrate on making a better product that people want to use without being paid to use it.
Agreed - I only ever take 1/2 100mg pills - so 50mg in total - and not every day. Those are fine to give me a wakeful buzz through the day when I take them.

Even when I was working on my side business in the mornings and evenings, I still only got through about 1.5 of those pills a day, so that's a total of 150mg. Bear in mind in those days I was sleeping about 4 hours a night, plus a 1-hour nap sometime in the day. That lasted 6 months, and near the end I really needed the Modafinil to be productive in that time, otherwise I'd just curl up and fall asleep with my head on the keyboard :-)

Daniel
Exactly _what_ is scary about not knowing?

That if the ocean currents suddenly change, hundreds of millions of people could die.

none of the variables involved is out of the "normal" range for the last 3000 years

That's a lie. Probably justifiable by a really bad definition of "normal". Would you say we are at a "normal" range of CO2, historically?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Certainly it cheapens the product. They already lost their chance to win the Search Marketplace... Arrington talked about Yahoo doing a "scorched earth" tactic on the market. MS is doing the same thing by attempting to take away users while simultaneously cheapening the market.

At this point, is there anything Microsoft could do to beat Google at search? The only thing left is for someone to offer a completely free API.
transactions and db joins are easy with activerecord/rails, you do not have to know sql to get it to work.

background tasks are easy, you can use activerecord outside of rails in your data warehouse scripts.

image upload with thumbnails is trivial with attachment_fu plugin for rails.
This does actually have potential to lead to a new class of anti-anxiety medication. It's also funny to put the rituals of the ancient Christians into context.

btw I thought this was a big news item on thinkgene recently, scientists got a working Alzheimer's vaccine in mice. http://www.thinkgene.com/vaccine-triggers-immune-response-pr...
So a security-conscious traveler should avoid first class? I find it quite ironic that one pays for a less safe but more comfortable seat
I've noticed less and less of my friends using facebook - people aren't listing parties/events on it anymore, groups are annoying

Ditto, but that might be just because we're getting older. Maybe first-years/high schoolers still love it as much as we did back then?

Hard to judge without concrete numbers, and only fb has those :-P
Perl was the first programming language I really loved to work in, but I wouldn't consider writing something new in it today. I feel 80% more productive in ruby, and the code I write in ruby is much more readable.

One reason to choose Rails is that there are many excellent libraries. Want to have tags on your models? Just install acts_as_taggable_on_steroids... Though there's something to be said about the rails plugin & gem landscape being in very rapid development. (acts_as_taggable doesn't do proper caching so you have to dig around to find the better version etc.etc.) On the whole I think that there are really kick ass plugins for rails available.
Purely Functional Random-Access Lists
If you are going to use django, then you have the option of hosting at google app engine - apart from the bad side of becoming googles b*tch, it could potentially really save a lot of time and money for you managing a server setup.
Uh... everyone in this debate has an 'agenda', not least of whom, the organization in question.
I'm pretty sure they'd rather you not live there. (Not to say you wouldn't make a fine roommate, I just get the feeling they'd like you to leave occasionally so that others may co-work.)
I may be an oddity, but it'd have to be walking distance--like in downtown Mountain View--for me, though being close to Caltrain would also work. I don't have a car, so it's pretty much guaranteed I would never go to the office if it weren't close.

But I'd probably enjoy having an office to go to a couple of days a week. I get a bit weird after a week of not really interacting with real people.
You'd want to look at the stats another way too, though: per air mile traveled, how much more likely are you to die sitting in first class. The answer is probably "not that much", so it makes sense to enjoy the comfort.
Honest reviews needed
I need honest reviews about the my startup http://rivals4ever.com. I would be glad if you can provide your valuable inputs to make my site better and more exciting for users. Thanks.
Careful with communal coffee machines. If not cleaned daily, coffee machines begin to reek. I mean, it's a truly disgusting smell. And communal stuff tends to get not much in the way of TLC...tragedy of the commons and all being what it is. Maybe if you put "Edit" and "Discussion" buttons above it, folks will take care of it...
I don't like that you have a number in the middle of your domain name as it will make it more difficult for people to tell others about the site.
layout is messed in FF2+Ubuntu
You really haven't read much Steve Yegge have you? He has his gripes (some of which have been recanted, mind), but he explicitly states he likes Python.

I'd say you're far from the truth.
> "not that much"

true. but, the issue here could be life&death!

...just another justification for living frugal and paying for cheap airline tickets.
90.20.8041 4:00 16.13apple T.H.B
we do have other domain which is http://rivalsforever.com. it just does the redirect. should i promote the domain without number ?
We can hack around the scribd censorship. Everybody who aubmits a .pdf knows it will be converted into the useless scribd format. So, the original submitter needs to immediately post a comment that is the original .pdf link.

If HN scribd damage occurs on that link, then we will find other ways to route around that damage, for example, by using tinyurl.

Down with scribd!!!
Main differences:

Django doesn't have good support for testing. Rails does.

Django doesn't allow clean separation between business logic and presentation logic, forcing both into its "views". Rails does.

Django doesn't have migration and deployment system. Rails does.

Rails is stable 2.0. With Django you have to use SVN+QuerySetRefactor+NewFormsAdmin+YourOwnHacks branch to get anything done. It's not documented anywhere (and not using svn+qsr+nfa+yoh is highly discouraged by django devs).

For me Python vs Ruby was really a tiny issue compared to these four. I like Ruby marginally more but Python was never painful to me, Django is.
Seems ok, although nothing I'd be interested in. It looks well done, although the front page is a tad slow to load.
I'd promote the site without the number.
I'd also implement clean urls for categories.

Not to shabby so far.
You are in a state of sin :-) Don't talk about random sequences, talk about random generators. There's an unambiguous definition of "true random number generator" in terms of probabilities, joint probabilities etc., but there's no way to determine if a given string of numbers is random, and in fact no definition of a "random string of numbers" other than "the output of a random number generator".
I especially like how the Partovi twins from 94 are 'recent graduates'.
I find it unfair to invoke Steve Yegge too often, since he's just a guy with an opinion. I have read a fair amount of his rants, of varying quality. His language comparative analysis is interesting because it is informed, argumented and ...well, funny. Read this passage, for example:

>Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.

He just points out at some major architectural flaws in Python (like the scoping issues leading to selfSelfself and unreadable code, and then the whitespace...) and argues that Ruby has superseded both Perl and Python in many ways. That does not mean he does not LIKE Python. His is just an engineer's analysis, not an emotional judgement.

offtopic:

I -- on the other hand -- am emotionally scarred by Python having tried to take it into my system over a couple of years and having failed to love it. Then Ruby came along... ;)
If the difference is .0000001 % vs .0000002 %, then it doesn't really matter, does it? You're probably more likely to increase your statistical lifespan by taking a bus to the airport instead of driving, or eating a bit less fatty foods, or something else.
I don't think I am one of your targeted users, since I don't care too much about any of these rivalries and hence don't find it particularly useful, so take this feedback with a large grain of salt.

It takes a while to load from Bangalore, India. ~300 ms of latency. I guess you are hosted out of the US and most of your end-users would be from the US, in which case it doesn't matter.

You could probably clean up the UI a bit, take a look at newscred (http://www.newscred.com/article/list), those guys have a nice clean UI.

What kind of users are you targeting? Why would one want to use your site? What value would your site add to the browsing experience?
What's strange about it? Facebook, twitter, ...., don't solve any tangible problem: they are generic social networks that are more subject to fashion than intrinsic value, because people to communicate and get in touch need very little: ability to send message, profiles with photos, and so on.

This is why I never understood the facebook buzz around tech people, for example here in YC news: it does not care. I don't want to state that only things like a search engine or a bug tracking system can care. Flickr cares a lot, changed the way people put photos online, is a social community in some way but driven by a common interest: it as a side effect it's a database of images.

The same like delicious, social bookmarking cares: it is a place where you can really find interesting resources, and it is useful for individuals. It is also one of the best applications for tags that is a very important semantic concept.

Instead generic social networks will came and go away one after the other, like Pubs do: they are mostly about fashion.
What is the selfSelfself issue?
hi prakash, thanks for your review. the site is hosted on media temple which is in US. i guess site is little slow to load because of lots of images on homepage. we need to optimize that.

target audience is any user in the world who is passionate about their idol. people can fight for their idol and discuss strengths, weaknesses, share images/videos with like minded people. its a great platform to meet like minded people and unlike minded people!!
Yes you are right. Need to promote URL without the number and we are in process of impmenting clean URLs for categories. Thanks.
Yes you are right, front page is slow to load. Need to work on that. Thanks, anything else we should work on ??
Clearly something isn't working. Look at that sentence.
Bruce Schneier calls for more comprehensive data privacy law
>Python's author, Guido Van Rossum, also made some boneheaded technical blunders early on — none quite as extravagant as Larry's blunders, but a few were real doozies nonetheless. For instance, Python originally had no lexical scoping. But it didn't have dynamic scoping either, and dynamic scoping may have its share of problems, but it at least sort of works. Python had NOTHING except for global and local (function) scope, so even though it had a "real" OO system, classes couldn't even access their own damned instance variables. You have to pass a "self" parameter to EVERY instance method and then get to your instance data by accessing it through self. So everything in Python is self, selfself, selfselfself, selfSELFselfSELF__SELF__, and it drives you frigging nuts, even if you don't mind the whitespace thing.

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel
with Ruby, you only have one choice.

I disagree vehemently. I myself have started using Ramaze, and like it better than Rails. In any case, it's more important to me to know Ruby well than a particular framework.
I think so. It's a whole lot easier to tell someone to check out "rivals forever dot com" than "rivals forever, that's the number four, dot com", plus the ensuing clarification.
Ask YC: To The Young, How Supportive Are Your Parents?
For the younger crowded on Hacker News, how supportive are your parents to a startup? It seems most stress the importance of some work experience first. Any experiences? What problems have some of you guys faced?
It isn't unanimous.
It is like kittenwar.com, but with more information about more disparate topics.

you could re-engineer your site to be about pros and cons, and have topical news items/products. i see that you have some of that right now with weaknesses/weapons.

structured topical news item analysis would be something i might spend time on, depending how good the community was.

how do you plan on making money?