skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yea, you could never accuse Microsoft and the PC vendors of sloppy work like that.

Oh yeah, they are the collective kings of fucking things up miserably. But Apple has the image that everything they do is perfect; I'm just pointing out that they're not.

Going back to the original article, it appears Apple somehow has a fanbase that will ignore bugs just because they're Apple bugs. Isn't that interesting?
And interestingly, Apple isn't selling synchronization. They are selling products that use it, but only mention in passing the synchronization. Synchronization isn't a product, it is something you need for certain products.
1816: the year without a Summer
If you had to reduce it to a sentence, it would be: this is something that gratifies my intellectual curiosity.
Yep. I agree with you. The sun produces enough energy for the entire world if we can only figure out how to harness it.
The article has one point wrong. The statement "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists." is not equivalent to "If this sentence is false, then Santa Claus doesn't exist." It is equivalent to "If Santa Claus doesn't exist, then this sentence is false".

To break it down into standard boolean algebra, the statement "if A then B" is logically equivalent to saying "not A or B". !A|B = B|!A = "If not B then not A".

Now back to the paradox, using boolean terms. The statement can be rephrased as !A|B: "This sentence is false or Santa Claus exists." Since we know that Santa doesn't exist, the sentence must be false: !(!A|B). That is equivalent to A&!B: "This sentence is true and Santa Claus doesn't exist." Here is where we have the paradox. We just said that the sentence must be false, but that then implies that the sentence is true.

The main mind-bender here is to realize that the negation of "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists." is "This sentence is true and Santa Claus doesn't exist." We are not able to get rid of the statement "this sentence is true" no matter which way we toggle it.
Michael Arrington loves taking things out of context.

I hate it when non-programmers write about programming! It's a giant festival of stupid.
I'm not so sure about this. Working long hours for a small period doesn't seem to me like it would change your progress by an order of magnitude. If you build something great, does it really matter whether it takes a few extra days?
Fascinating! I wonder if this has predictive value, too -- if, for example, a board member who was on the board of a poorly-performing company predicts poor performance in the future.

Unfortunately, boards are pretty toothless. Lately, it looks like a single hedge fund with 5% of the stock and no board seats can cause more change within the firm than board insiders can -- on the other hand, the changes that happen internally may just be more subtle (e.g. if the audit committee gradually relaxes standards, it doesn't show up in the headlines until there's a disaster, and then it's hard to trace it to who is actually responsible).
It shouldn't be an all-or-nothing situation. There are obviously parts of Twitter that would work best as non-Rails. Ruby is too slow for certain things, and so you determine which of those certain things are in your application and you build them in C or Java.

For Twitter, I think some parts of the API need to be in C. But the whole service? I doubt it.
I seriously doubt they are actually going to rewrite Twitter in another language. That's a pretty dumb statement and prediction, and Michael Arrington just lost another notch of respect from me (he lost the previous one for his vicious attacks on that Blaine dude who archtected Twitter).

Sounds to me like Mr Arrington has an axe to grind and is putting that ahead of objective journalism.

Daniel
I agree, it's not unreasonable. Just high.
Is it just me, or does Arrington look like Vladimir Putin?
http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2007/poy/vvp_landing...

If the whole web 2.0 thing doesn't work out, he might be able to make it as a mob boss or dictator.
Blatant linkjacking: the quoted text outweighs the author's own commentary by a large margin. Suggest he get a job with infoq.com.
If true, this is a pretty big blow to the viability of RoR as a large-scale platform, at least as it is right now.

I've always thought RoR's tight coupling with traditional SQL would be a serious scaling issue. RDBMSs in the traditional sense just dont scale easily. Google figured this out a while ago (hence BigTable). And RoR reads and writes soo much that you are left with a burden on the DB that might have been better mitigated by doing more of the processing client side and persisting with a simplified cloud-based service rather than a single, central RDBMS.

Not to stir up a hornets nest, but I really think this is a limitation of RoR that should be addressed in the future. Abstract out the SQL so other methods of persistence are possible.

EDIT: I am not trolling RoR. I am simply proposing that it might be better to be able to use it with something other than traditional SQL for persistence of data, so that traditional RDBMS can be replaced with a simplified cloud-based service such as SimpleDB.

I speculate this might be possible now using Ruby -> JRuby -> JPA -> SimpleJPA (or any other MySQL/SimpleDB wrapper) -> SimpleDB. I dont want to even get into how much work that would be though. It needs to be easier I think.

Startup idea maybe?
Einstein did say compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world.
hey, can you email me?
In the shadow of the recent takeover attempt of Yahoo it is interesting to see that Yahoo and Google are connected on board level.
For what it's worth, I contributed to the article and I call myself a programmer.
Or take the route The Economist takes and instead of catering to the mass market at mass market prices, go upscale and charge a subscription fee. I guess not many players could do this however, as the upscale market is obviously going to be smaller... but I willingly pay $100+ a year to get it, since it's quite a bit better than any other newspaper out there.

I guess it's like the ad-supported website model vs. the pay website model. Neither way is necessarily better, but profitability doesn't always depend on more readers, although it helps.
Oh definitely! I train all the time, I try to do 4 nights a week. I'm better at it in the offseason than I am during the season, because my body gets beat up and it's hard to convince myself to train when I'm sore.

It's just that ultimate is so stressful to my body that it overwhelms the rest of what I do.

I'm glad to talk your ear off about training methods, crossfit and tabatas, but this is probably not the right place for it. DIY gyms are kind of hacker though.
Im glad u r sayin sumthin bout this. 4 real.

k thnx bi
Too true :) Pleased you enjoyed it
"I hate it when non-programmers write about programming!"

It doesn't matter what he says. All that matters is that you notice.

After 30 minutes, you are the #1 response to the #2 thread.

So people click through.

Cha-ching.
"Sleep deprivation is not a sufficient condition for winning, but empirically it seems to be a necessary one."

It doesn't seem to be a necessary one either, given the existence of counterexamples. Eg. Pierre Omidyar started E-bay while keeping his day job and adamantly refused to work more than 8 hours/day on it even after going full-time. One of the reasons he stepped back from a management position was that he didn't culturally fit in with E-bay after hiring a few work-through-the-night cowboy coders.
Reply to the edit: I'm reading through the paper now, and the magnetic properties appear to be irrelevant. The "flux" being discussed is related to the flow of current.

I'll post something more detailed when I finish the paper.
It looks like it:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...,

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...,

And another company has a related patent based on the usage of a memristor:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
Totally amused he threw Zed Shaw in there. From what I remember, Zed trashed several members of the rails core team, not the framework itself or even the entire community.

Surely they are just rewriting the slower core areas of the API in something faster/more distributed. There is no reason they'd have to rewrite the entire thing from scratch.
as a biz major i was offered $100k after 1 year out of college in a pm role by a major ocmpany.
true, but as the comment was reffering to schools, all the schools I've been, from grade school through University, only had Apple's computer products, so I believe he inferred the computer market.
Why not? It'd probably take a week or so to rewrite in a different language, similar to Reddit when they rewrote in python :/

Has ror become a cult or something? It's just a language, and if it doesn't fit well with the application, best to move on and try something else.
"I don't know many people with whom I can talk about my work"

I have the exact same feeling - nobody really seems to care, and I often get blank stares and "why don't you just relax and enjoy life" comments.

Which is why I come here.
seemingly, Starbucks only competes on "better coffee," which is , of course, subjective. This is why I believe Starbucks is like Apple in that regard, as it seems to be more about the culture and inferred status of the product, than the actual value of the product itself.
The article has one point wrong.

See the [edit] link?
Actually those seem to be related to a very different device which was in development in the same group -- an array of nanowires with single molecules at the intersections forming logical elements. Very cool, but very hard to fabricate, and not a memristor.

Updated: Actually only the second one has molecules at the intersections, the other two seem to be more general.
Rails is probably not their problem. The way twitter works is the problem. (In other words, they need a better backend, not a better frontend.)
People still consider PHP and Java for rewrites? Usually that's what you rewrite out of, not in to.
Rails, and the alternatives mentioned don't really make sense for a messaging application. You wouldn't write the back end for Gchat or AIM in Rails (or PHP, or Django), either. Rails would be fine as the web front end that talked to another messaging system. I've interviewed with the twitter guys and been to their talks and they definitely are NOT doing the right thing. However, "the right thing" is not easy and there are few people around and available who can do it.

edit: their best bet is to try to find someone who is burned out from working on wall street applications.
BlackBerry Flip Phone
How to Prepare for the Coming Changes in the Internet
He looks a bit better fed than Putin though
Cooler Climate Will Prevail in Europe and North America Next Decade: Is Global Warming Over?
Twitter always struck me as a little lower on the complexity scale and a little higher on the throughput scale than where RoR's sweet spot lies.

Since their requirements seem like they're pretty static now, I would think writing a backend in C wouldn't be out of the question.
The scaling problems have little to do with rails. They admitted their problems were at the database level eons ago. I imagine "the switch" has more to do with the new chief architect switching to his favorite horse. Two whipping boys for the price of one: the old platform, and the old architect.

The new rewrite will give the new architect time to vest, until it fails, like big rewrites usually do. If you're not sure how to fix things, the big rewrite is a perfect solution, really.
I think a career in CS is already sufficiently attractive, for monetary and other considerations, that those who have a great potential and a passion for it already choose to pursue it.

So if we increase salaries a lot and this results in more people going into CS, I think it's pretty safe to say most of those additional recruits will be more in it for the money and less because that's what they should pursue, thus reducing the overall quality.

If programmer salaries went to 200k overnight, do you think the quality of undergrads would go up or down?
"The business and developers need to work together to create a set of requirements that doesn't map the processes as they are, but maps the processes as they should be."

And therein lies the problem.

In the current ERP industry, you have 100 vendors, 10,000 programmers, 20,000 salesmen, and 6 people who know how to define requirements "as they should be". So you do what any sleight of hand expert does: you change the agenda.

"Do you really want to risk your audit if you don't buy software from my brother-in-law?"
MySpace lets app developers buy ads to reach users
Eh, I must have been confused by the "pictures" posted of the memristor, because the patents describe the image that was getting shown in the articles. I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination, so I'd be inclined to take your word over mine.

Edit

I think this might be the correct one:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=mWcGAAAAEBAJ
Do you and Arrington have some kind of confidential knowledge about Twitter's implementation that allows you to conclude that its problems are directly attributable to Rails itself and not how it was implemented, or something that has nothing to do with the programming language at all (the hosting facility they use, their operating system, ...)? Or are you just trolling?
I don't think the design patterns book set the field back. Basically, there will always be people that want to use their memorization skills (learning the design patterns) to do something creative (programming). If there weren't design patterns, something else would have filled that void. (I don't understand why people that aren't good at programming want to program, though. I wish people would realize, "I have no clue" and then change careers. They're making the creative folks look incompetent by association. </offtopic> :)
I can't now, since my statement would then be false. :)

Seriously though, I thought about it, but then I realized that I would probably have to replace the entire paragraph, since it seems to be a key step in the original author's explanation.

Maybe I will replace it anyway, since it can't be a very good explanation if it relies on faulty logic.

-

Update: Did it. Now I'm contradicting myself. Gotta' love these logic games.
I know rails itself is sound, my comments are directed more towards rails/DB integration. The database always seems to be the real bottleneck..
This is a great idea! We'll be adding our startup on there soon enough too :)
Self-referencing statements
I was under the impression rails was the backend and was tightly coupled to a db. Is that not the case? :/
By 'better backend', what do you mean?
Currently trying that myself, it's actually quite pleasant so far. I just put my desk up on cinder blocks to raise it to elbow level. If I like it I'll find a less ghetto solution.
Just curious, what would you write the backend for AIM in? I don't have any experience developing messaging-type apps.
>Rails would be fine as the web front end that talked to another messaging system.

Which is exactly what they're doing:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/starling/
Dynamic abbreviations ("dabbrev-expand" and "dabbrev-completion") solve the problem quite nicely 90% of the time. If you keep the documentation open in another buffer, then it works 99% of the time, as long as you have a clue on what you're doing.

People seem a little bit too concerned about getting a java-style 100% correct solution when a 90% solution is nearly as good.
It would obviously go up or stay the same, following your logic. Even if the proportion of good programmers out of CS programs decreases there is no reason the real total number would go down.

[edit]
If anything, the new influx of interested students would maybe counter a little the need for CS departments to dumb down the curriculum in order to stay above whatever arbitrary number.
Maybe it would result in less JavaSchools. ;)
[/edit]
well thats good then. you'll certainly learn a lot from this experience whether the company is boom or bust.

good luck!
Teaching Entrepreneurship In The Classroom
Since Ruby gives you such great flexibility, it wouldn't be that hard to hack things around a bit to redirect data requests to some other source.

I don't see that as the problem.
I assume the difficulty is storing the data and then retrieving the right data when generating a page. Yeah, you can use a SQL database, but that doesn't seem to be working very well. So they probably need to write some custom storage backend that is actually designed for the load that is put on it. Relational databases are general solutions. General solutions are good for general problems, but not necessarily specific problems.

Anyway, if the problem happens to be that the Rails frontend is too slow, speeding that up isn't going to buy them anything long-term. Eventually the database is going to bog them down even if the web GUI is hand-optimized assembly.

JMHO, obviously I have no idea what the twitter codebase looks like or what specific problems they are having. I also don't use Ruby or Rails, but I doubt that's their problem.
Yeah I think your question is a fair one.

But I don't think it's ridiculous to assume that the stability and operational functionality of a website is primarily dependent on the web framework the website uses. The data center is probably the second to blame, but I don't think that Twitter's problems are related to continual issues with their hosting (though i'm sure some are). I doubt the blame lies on Debian, or whatever their using.
An Open-Source version of Microsoft Surface Created
Passes to Stirr's DealHacks startup mixer on May 14th
I asked the team to put aside a few tickets for the NewsYC crew.
The following codes are active:

'dhnewsystarving': (8 free tkts). Only take these if your team is really short on cash.

'dhnewsydiscount': (18 discount tkts) for active startups. ($10/ea)

When the codes are gone, regular tickets are only $20 for members of founding teams until they run out (we're capping the event at 180 people).

http://stirr.net/2008/04/30/dealhacks-startup-mixer-may-14th/

Disclaimer: I'm one of the STIRR co-founders (founded by two startup guys and one fella from a startup friendly thinktank in early 2006).
Now I come to look at the image, you're right in that the new memristor architecture seems to a similar crossbar-style geometry similar to some of their previous inventions.

It's possible that the first or the third one you posted might be general enough to encompass the memristor system as implemented, but I don't think either of them is specifically related to the new let's-diffuse-ions-across-a-thin-semiconductor-film memristor idea.
Here we have someone who decided to substitute several weeks of study of statistics with a 48 hour cram session powered by caffene pills and subsequently fail to properly analyze a problem on a test later reflect that he could have solved it properly had he simply taken a more careful and thoughtful approach go on to tell us that Design Patterns are bad because people like him will immediately try to use them in solutions before understanding the problem.
The rails DB integration lets you use the database directly whenever it suits you. At that point it's more a matter of arranging your data so that it lets you work around the key pain points. Since you can access the data directly when needed in rails, how will a new framework help if your problem is in the database?
Twitter has components in several languages (even erlang for xmpp)

They say most of their traffic is API requests, and I would expect that they would want to optimize that porition of their system. Rails is composed of many components, many of which you don't need for a REST service that talks json/xml. Blaine and other twitters have talked about their experimentments: other app servers (Thin), queueing systems (before building starling), ...
For every hour of programming the local cable network gets to replace the network programmed ad with a particular number of their own ads. This is how you get localized TV ads in your basic cable. Presumably Google is reselling these spots. In fact from a TechCrunch article it appears they are only doing it for the DISH network currently. The Major cable operators are developing their own unified platform for doing this across multiple cable operators. (its called the Canoe Project - as in all the operators paddling in the same direction). I doubt Google will have much luck breaking into the terrestial cable market like this.

Google could work with some agencies in also purchasing spots on a national level and reselling those but they would lose any targeting capabilities.
You cannot get a studio for $650 in any part of san francisco, much less a nice part. Just go to craig's list and do a search for apartments less than $650. ZERO results show up.
It's hard to see how they can guarantee that you won't be diluted.

There's a lot of variability in these kinds of negotiations. If you really think the company is going places, negotiate for as much as you can and say "yes" before it puts a strain on your relationship.

FWIW, if the other cofounders are close to having customers and a functional service, I think their offer is in the ballpark and you could easily justify taking it.
The idea is neat! Do you think you would eventually extend it and create a listing with relevant startup jobs?
I like papers, and used to work for one, but smearing ink on pieces of paper seems like a strange way to deliver information in the electronic age.
Actually, that is ridiculous to assume.
The question is, do they have the skillset in-house for that sort of undertaking?
I did a consulting gig some time ago where I had to redo the back-end business processes of a large online bookstore (handling, shipping, credit card approvals, feedback, internal communications etc. etc.) and not until now do I realise that what these guys should have gotten under normal circumstances was a full-blown ERP system.

What I did, however, was simply to go around the different staff and ask them what they did, how they did it, and how they thought it could be done better. Then I made HTML mock-ups and asked them to click around and tell me what they thought. Since these were the people that would actually use the system everyday they obviously had lots of complaints and ideas for doing it better. So we had a few iterations, and ended up with a HTML mock-up that everybody thought would be the best way to do things. The mock-up with comments then served as the specifications, and was easy to implement.

They paid me 10% of what they would for an ERP system, and it cut their internal costs by more than 60%.

It's all about process.
Erlang is a fine option. So is C.
Yeah for people having never heard of Erlang.

When I wonder why Facebook doesn't have problem scaling their chat? Oh, erlang + flat files.

I can't wait for Twitter to move to Java or PHP so people finally STFU about Rails.

Twitter moving away from rails doens't make rails look bad, it makes everyone at Twitter look like the biggest jackasses in history.

"We can't get this wrench to hit this nail hard enough, so lets buy another brand of wrench instead of a hammer and see if that works."
A tale of two similar niche ad networks from the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras
Stop. There's nothing wrong with PHP, and it's proven to scale.