skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently serving up billions of images per day from memory images that are more than 100 times the available physical memory (and there's plenty of that).

Small objects can be batched in to a single page at the application level, the VM will then move these in and out of the resident pool as one unit.

The operating system uses elevator sorting and knows enough about the disk that it will attempt to sequentially invalidate pages.

The assumption is not that the working set will fit (mostly) in to RAM, the assumption is that a page fault is a relatively rare occurrence and that other threads will not be stalled by the IO done for one. It is the changes to the working set that determine page faults, not the size of the total set.

On my boxes I solved one issue with this (and the maximum number of systemwide sockets) by running a varnish instance for every physical CPU in the machines.
While this is a bit tongue-in-cheek comment, it is true that one of the main problems I had with my Android phone (it was a G1, the first Android phone) was the appallingly short battery life. Even when it was brand new it wasn't uncommon at all to have its battery depleted by midday. After only a year and a half, its battery became completely useless, it dies seconds after disconnecting from the charger.

In contrast, I only have to put my iPhone 4 on the charger every second day at the moment.
"I think the OP's sister has taken a really unusual route."

Maybe that's true, but for positions like the one she's in, the educational background tends towards the humanities, not towards STEM degrees.

Also, I always assumed that English PhDs take forever because people do it part-time, which is usually not an option with STEM degrees (although is often an option in CS).
Awesome. Tweaks Java, Agile League of Agile Methodology Experts (LAME), Wikileaks, Oracle on one short non-steve-yegge-length post.
My dad was a partner at LetsGet.net, specializing in online ordering for restaurants. They were acquired last week, and are based entirely on VB.net.

He and the founder were both in their 40s at the start, and had a decade of Microsoft-based consulting under their belts. I'm not surprised to see very few people in a similar demographic on HN.
I don't see anywhere that you're refuting the idea that burglars won't use lockpicks, instead of messier but much simpler-to-learn entry methods.

I'm a decent hand with a lockpick myself, but when I had to get into my house with-the-keys-(and-my-picks)-locked-inside in a hurry last year, I put a rock through the window least expensive to replace. Took less than a minute, and no practice time at all.

Locks keep honest people honest; barring the set of people willing to open an unlocked door, but not put a rock through a window. In a normal home, the best you can hope for from someone willing to use the rock is intrusion detection.
...run through a Perl script that removes all 'final' keywords except those required for hacking around the 15-year-old Java language's "fucking embarrassing lack of closures."

This guy feels my pain! :)
I'd be happy to offer a .edu discount. Email my personal address and we can discuss it further.

I like all kinds of beer, but let's go with dark for now. ;-)
I think he was doing a bit of exploration
in terms of strategy for how he would proceed with his life.

One of the questions that he was trying to answer, I would estimate, is whether it is advantageous to "dump oneself down"

Jay-z talks about it in his song moment of clarity.
"I dumb down for my audience
And double my dollars"

So, I don't think it's about being smart rather than trying something new and seeing first hand the result. And of course, writing about the experience so we can all learn from it[that's if it is in fact true].
Interestingly I was away on vacation with some friends of friends this weekend and of the 11 of us, 5 had android based phones and no one had an iphone. Demographic was, a mix of males and females, mid 20's, where me being the only one with a technical background.

I was blown away.
“Facebook Questions is exactly like Quora.”
The Email Mafia (PayPal's Got Nothing on Email)
god help us all.
Definitely. I'm a 10 minute walk from Davis and Porter Square, and there are plenty of places for $2,000 / month, w/ 4 bedrooms. Diesel Cafe, in Davis, has plenty of startup people hanging out there on a regular basis. And Viximo and some other startups have office space around here.

You're right on the red line, so it's easy to get out to any of the more active (but more expensive) areas like Harvard Square or Kendall Square (where MIT is + the Cambridge Innovation Center and the upcoming Venture Cafe).

Check out the LJ community: http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square

Central Square has TechStars and several startup offices (e.g. oneforty). Central also has betahouse, the best coworking spot in Cambridge / Boston. And you can find places in Central Square that are similarly cheap. But Central Square is probably a bit less safe.
Because money isn't my primary aim in life.
Hey, you can't imprison 1% of your population without cutting a few corners.
Flagged. You need to understand the principles on which this site was built.
SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Public Disclosure
counter anecdote, My ~2 week old htc hero hasn't been charged in 34 hours and has 60% battery left. This is with wifi on and mild data-heavy app usage.
When I was young I would have seen your job posting as a dead end position. My thoughts would have been: What possible fun could you see on writing code for PHD's all day long?

My suggestion is that you stop advertising for "brilliant software engineers" and instead look for solid people that actually fit your team.

For what is worth, what did caught my attention fresh out of school where lots of smart peers, unlimited budgets, foozball, ping pong and the rush of beating the competition with our smarts. (Of course a couple of years later the bubble pop'd, stock options fizzled and reality kicked in)
Run a simple script, and you get >100 million million legit personal emails and addresses.
Why Scala’s Option and Haskell’s Maybe types won’t save you from null
"Style resets" – I wish it was that simple. Sure you can get the same look by using lot of images (versus pure-css styling) etc., but then you loose all the benefits of vector-based graphics and/or fluid/elastic layouts.

Good designer informs the client that focusing on "pixel perfectness" is old-way thinking (from print media) and nowdays a graceful degradation is considered more important. The client may better accept that not every little shadow-effect shows in IE, when they are told the true price of the required extra work.
We're using the full stack and it's been a lot of fun, actually. Visual Studio is still the shit, and the release cycles on the tech we are using have been more than sufficient (.Net, C#, Silverlight, Prism). I find it amusing that it's a little rebellious in the YC community to use MS tech. So, as has been mentioned, MS startups are out there, and they exist per the skills of the group and the needs of the customer base. Just like anything else...
I can't develop for the Android since my company isn't registered in one of the few[1] countries Google supports. But we have do a developer account for iPhone as Apple does support a whole lot more countries.

Also, the general request isn't as much for Android apps. If anything, after the iPad and iPhone 4 I'm looking at an increase in iOS project proposals.

So maybe developers are migrating but I'm not seeing this in the apps the clients do nor in the phones people use (iPhones are everywhere). If anything, Android might be right now a 2nd platform after iOS: some customers do to want Android ports which could mean the iOS developers might learn some Android SDK to be able to do the port, but nobody is migrating away from iOS.

1. http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
Hmm... I thought the scourge of 1975 programming was ignoring the vast and growing gap between the speed of the processor and the speed of RAM.

2010 programming has to deal with the fact that chasing a (non-cached) pointer can consume hundreds of processor cycles. So much for trees...
Another book I just finished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Perfect_Day by the author of Rosemary's Baby.
POSIX != UNIX.
Title question + answers + right hand nav != exactly like.

The profile of the answers will produce the difference. I get the impression that FB-answers will be more like a comment on a facebook story while Quora is more authoritative like a wikipedia page.

FB comments are fast, easy, and shallow.
Wikipedia is relatively contemplative and certainly greater depth.

Wikipedia is also much more persistence. The past doesn't seem to exist on Facebook, but for question search, it might in this case.
Exploring the complexity of driving directions using the Google Maps API
I think runTIME may be making a subtly different argument.

Let's say I have a 1,000 acre ranch and I build a nuclear reactor on it. I go to extreme lengths to make sure it's safe and secure. As far as my neighbors are concerned my operating a nuclear reactor has no impact on them. However, now I have the potential, should I choose, to make nuclear weapons, radiological "dirty" bombs, or otherwise contaminate the general vicinity (for potentially very large values of vicinity) with radioactive byproducts. It is for this reason that the operation of nuclear reactors is highly regulated.

One could imagine how this argument might apply to personal drug use. Drug use itself may not instantly impact anyone else but suppose that, as in personally operating a nuclear reactor, it enabled individuals to have a far greater negative impact on society than other normal human behaviors might.

I don't buy it and I'm not sure if that's the argument that runTIME was making, but it's an interesting argument I think.
Google Talking To Game Devs About Creating Facebook Competitor
I'm thinking just the opposite: why cannot we make phone calls with a 3G-enabled iPad?
I'm surprised there are not more digitally controlled locks on the market - something that has an embedded microcontroller that releases a solenoid if the right code is entered.

What's a locksmith hacker to do with such a lock? There's no keyhole to use a diamond pick and so its basically a metal brick. I don't see too many ways to open it without destroying it physically.

Maybe I'm missing the big picture, but a traditional keyed lock seems about as high-tech as an ancient model-T car. It's completely out of place given the latest technology available today.
It's interesting to see how important compiler-enforced access specifiers were to C++ and Java. It seems they are going out of fashion. In the Python world they were always considered a bit silly.
It appears that his primary assumption, NPE prevention, on Options is based on blogs rather than actual good quality code.

If you look at how Options are used in Scala core lib, you wouldn't make such claims and you will definitely not use it only for null checks.
Not all start-ups are "web 2.0" companies. You likely are completely unaware of any of the start-ups in a field like health care where Windows is king.
Personally I would prefer a script that made all variables private and removed setters, but I suppose that would be more useful than funny.
New Droid App Allows Users To Track Geomagnetic Storms
I wrote this post in response to all of the recent HN discussions on email newsletters. Trying to shed more light on the profitable email industry that never gets talked about.
I see and know many using Android phones. Yet I dont see them buying apps. Im in the states.

I want to see data that shows how many developers are making a living off of Android apps vs. iPhone app developers.

It might be too early but I feel Android and iPhone users hold different sentiments towards buying apps. The latter group being more accustomed to buying then the other. This is based off my experience with the handfuls of people I know who have Android phones (very against buying stupid apps as they say or what's Google Checkout).
Not everyone has an identical college or post-college experience.
Fully agree, but he did write UNIX.
Your applicants filter themselves quite a bit. The cofounders of the healthcare software company that I work for would never have come to you for instance.
> No matter what the quality of your VM, if you're going to have several IO hits versus only the one where the VM (even a crappy one) pages the data in or out just once you will always be faster in a scenario like phk describes.

You can keep your own cache explicitly in user-space, and get multiple hits with a single load into RAM.

> but on a production server that you count on serving up a few billion files every day you can't afford the luxury of random scripts firing off CRON and other niceties like that.

In a data center where you have tens of thousands of heterogenous jobs competing for thousands of machines, you can't afford the luxury of giving out exclusive access to a machine. You have to have good enough isolation that multiple jobs can run on the same machine without impacting each other negatively. As CPUs get more cores this will become even more important.
In Many CPRs, Skip Mouth-to-Mouth
With BizSpark or WebsiteSpark, you have three years. Then, a Windows Web Server 2008 R2 license only costs $469. If a business can't manage to scrape $469 together after three years, they probably have larger problems.
Do you have any doubt that a year ago the numbers for Android were much less?
Adobe acquires Day Software; with that comes the guy who helped invent HTTP
First, don't make a decision based on what other people are doing. Don't make a technical decision based on the job market either: that's an argument commonly used for Blub. If you have a cool and interesting project, people will not mind learning a different language to join you, even if they're mostly hobbyists who would never touch MS Software on their own.

There are some caveats, however: you should have a solid reason why you're using this product ("it's what I know how to program" or "it's easy to hire for" is not; "we have a large codebase and we can't just stop feature development and do a re-write" is), it has to the an acceptable tool for the job (e.g., you're not doing machine learning in PHP) and you have to be flexible enough to use other tools when they're right for the job (e.g., Facebook writing services in C++ when needed vs. forcing everyone to work exclusively in PHP). If you fit these criteria, you'll be able to hire hackers (although I personally wouldn't join a company that required me to run Windows on the desktop, which is very likely to be the case if your product is on .NET).

Now as for why I don't use MS tools:

F# is pretty amazing and C# is fairly bearable compared to other languages in Blub Central (of course it's still a Blub). If Mono were more usable for the server side, I'd be writing projects in those two languages. I'd very seriously consider Gtk# or Cocoa# + Mono for writing a desktop application (as opposed to using C++ + Qt or Java/Scala + Swing/SWT). Nonetheless, Mono is just not (yet) usable for a server.

I'd flatly refuse to use Windows for either a server or a development machine as it's simply an environment designed for the masses and not for hackers. I am many times more productive with Perl/Python UNIX shell + Terminal than I am with a GUI and Powershell (which is a lot better than the Microsoft tools I grew up with).

If Microsoft actually targeted hackers and developers as opposed to IT departments of non-technical firms I'd consider their products. Problem is that they're not a charity, but a corporation with a legal obligation to generate profit for their shareholders. Their current strategy works well for them and I don't see that changing. When I see a company using a proprietary stack, I first assume that the company is mostly "business guys" and wants warm bodies. I'll have to convinced otherwise, which is possibly; I am not close minded: you can't just judge people by the architectural decisions they made without knowing why the made them.

I am glad to see Microsoft support F# and Scala on .NET, but I am not sure how far this will go. I'll stick with an open source/Linux stack for all my hobbyist programming and I can't imagine building a start-up on anything else.
The Emperor’s New Antenna
I feel like if your entire product can be put out of business/duplicated overnight, there's little value in what you're doing.

I'm sure Quora will be fine; they've been around a little and have a community.
Interesting list of companies, another company I've seen is VitalJuice (city based, healthy lifestyle newsletter)
I have in my possession a ZenPad. It arrived 2 days ago. I ordered it like 8 months ago.

Figured it'd be a great android hacking device. (don't hack on your work phone kids).

It is a piece of garbage. Touch screen is barely working, and completely non functional. Battery takes longer to charge than it lasts. And the bloody thing is dog slow in spite of having a pretty beefy cpu.

The thing is stuck at Android 1.5. My first attempts at rooting it worked ( not a surprise there ), but getting a rom loader to work has been thwarted by the inability of the machine to reboot on command. Not to mention most of the roms produced are for very different devices.

Enso is rebranding SmIT gear ( with cheap stickers no less ), why are they fouling this up so badly?

Sorry to say, but they lie about the capabilities of the products all the time, make up excuses more often than they blog about anything else.

Not worth the investment. But hey, I like giving the little guys a chance. But if all you are doing is rebranding cheap chinese gear... you are destined to fail.
$150 Android Tablet from Kmart
The whole point of this article - and it is a very good point - is that keeping your cache in user-space is not the right way to approach the problem. And you can get multiple hits anyway if you make sure that data that will expire together will end up in the same page.

Your other description does not match the use case of a production web server running varnish instances as the front-end.
Social network websites are similar. Github has followers and will probably add related projects or individuals that work on similar projects.

The difference for me is facebook is a mess, it's too big, the design has gotten very sloppy and aesthetically it's corporate looking, designed by committee vomit. I don't get how people spend prolonged periods of time there. At least it's one less distraction for me.
Bradley and Bethany
Five things you dont want to do with your jailbroken iPhone
Are you the type that doesn’t like being restricted or told what to, what to like, how to like it?, heck who are you kidding you’re an apple fan comes with the territory.
I was shocked by my answers.
You can run a MVC and MSSQL site on DiscountASP for $20/mo ($10/mo if you don't use MSSQL).
I was active in the wearable hardware community several years ago, and all the hardware I had collected made the blog rounds when I put it up for sale. I realized that hardware is pretty much a solved problem, and has been for years. You can't do what you want, because the software doesn't exist outside of individual researchers' equipment.

There are HUDs of various resolutions that can put SVGA, XGA and higher into unobtrusive glasses (or perhaps into safety glasses, given your accident). There's plenty of hardware of every possible form factor to provide processing power and you can run x86 and Windows, or ARM and Linux and use whatever desktop software you're used to.

The issue is that all of our desktop (and even iPhone) hardware and software both is designed to be the focus of our attention. Even walking, you'll end up like people who are texting while driving. You can't do both at the same time, neither safely nor productively.

I got rid of all of my hardware because I came to believe the only way to safely and productively do something like that is without traditional interaction at all. You want a system like Steve Mann's, where data is projected onto the environment: http://www.flickr.com/photos/caseorganic/4521834460/

Longer form information needs to be able to be read to you, and you need to be able to slow down, speed up and repeat that information through the noise of the real world as the real world distracts you: http://hirevito.com/oldportfolio/smartdevice/

You want to be able to respond and act with simple gestures as to not draw attention to yourself, and to dictate longer form information out loud (so long as you don't mind being that rude guy yelling into his Bluetooth headset).

You need all new software to support these paradigms, because your UI is rendered not onto windows and boxes in an opaque, bright display taking up your field of vision, but onto the side of a building, and then another one, and then another one, advancing down the street as you continue to walk, a line or two at any given time.

The hardware to process all of this is out there; the iPhone 3GS can handle augmented reality just fine. But every task you want to accomplish needs new software.

You would probably be better off taking a cab home.
Physicists hail progress in search for Higgs particle
3d TV: Too Little To Survive, Too Much To Die
and? :)
Well - it's Andrew's thing... I just helped out as I could. Just ran out of time :)
IPad masterpieces (fingerpainting not for children anymore)
Mortgage Recommender Home-Account Acquired By Bills.com
That's not entirely accurate. MVC releases major releases once per year - Rails releases quite often... just not full point releases. In fact they pushed 2.3.4 and within a week pushed 2.3.5 as there was a bug found :).

Yes, you can use any DB - good point.
> What are the features that make pure software companies so attractive?

Being a pure software company, there are lots of opportunities to jump around to different workgroups doing different things, as well as software development is seen as an asset (not a cost). In a non-software company, the IT group is usually seen as a cost center rather than as a profit center.

I've worked at places where software is not the primary business. And in those places, we wrote software to make the company work better.

A lot of programmers want to get into the finance sector, but don't know how to do so.
not necessarily true. I'm working on a health care startup, and we're running a LAMP stack.

granted, we're a web 2.0 health care company, so we're more of a hybrid.
The 0% capital gains tax for startups was actually part of Obama's platform. It was in the standard tax plan / business handouts. So if this makes it through Congress, I would expect the White House to welcome it.

At the time, I thought this was a rather nice idea, because a startup involves doing a decade plus worth of work in a few years, which tends to run up the marginal tax rate when you finally cash out.
Yep the Pilot Group I believe also invested in VitalJuice
I did not post this link -- I posted a different link yesterday. Since then there's been some news:

Augen Gentouch tablet not in stock
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/07/28/augen-gentouch-...

Augen Gentouch tablet gets hands on videos
http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/07/28/augen-gentouch-...

It has buttons for Android and for $150 doesn't look that bad.
WeHaveStandards.com: Program Yourself [to kill your addictions]
Yes. If it turns out that people on PCP or some other hard drug are more dangerous/quicker to violence, is there a limit of how much personal freedom we should grant if there is an increased risk of possible damage to society.
The Flipboard Effect: Why Killing The Media Industry Is The Only Way To Save It
I dunno. Crystal meth tweakers seem to do a lot of anti-social shit they probably wouldn't do if they weren't high on meth.