skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's totally reasonable to not want to go (back) to a process-driven organization -- that's why a lot of founders end up leaving, even before a 4 year vesting period is done, to go do other things.

Personally, I think you can optimize in hiring and picking your market to minimize the need for formal "process" or overhead as things grow. One amazing engineer requires much less process than a 10 person team. A consumer-focused product requires hiring a lot fewer salespeople than an enterprise/professional services company. Outsourcing non-core parts of your business, or choosing to live in high-margin smaller segments (e.g. licensing IP vs. owning a chip fab) can go a long way, too.

A $10b company is still probably going to need to have a certain number of employees, and thus a certain level of process, but I think it can vary by a couple orders of magnitude on each.
Off Topic:
The ZX Specturm (also an 8 Bit machine like the Atart 2600) is still very popular and the community has made some great mods, e.g. the divIDE (an extension to hook up IDE devices).
Also the community still does games and tools for it.
Lately someone made an ethernet hack, and you can even twitter from the specccy. Amazing stuff.
BR
To the question on hand: I'm from Texas and I have no idea what you are talking about when you say footfalls (insert joke about Texans here)

I would consider your target audience. Most likely they are brick and mortars SMBs who's core competency doesn't involve things like: Tweets, Likes, Deals, Check-ins

I would instead ask something like:

As a successful business owner, you know that customer referrals and word of mouth marketing are the bread and butter of business. How do you make it easier for your enthusiasts in the age of Twitter let their friends know how awesome your business is?

Eyesandfeet facilitates word of mouth marketing for new Y Generation.
Big in Japan: Millions ‘Mumble’ on Twitter
http://960.gs might be helpful to you.
Bill to Combat Computer Science Crisis Introduced
If I'm reading it correctly, that risk-free return rate is only available to resident Indians. In addition, even if international investors would be able to access it they'd be adding currency risk to the equation.
I only get that when submitting comments to threads after a period of time has passed between starting the comment and submitting. The answer for me is simply to reload the page.

Thus it would seem that instead of a simple link to the news home it should bump me back to a reload of the previous page?
I gather that UA info is surprisingly close to unique - mix in installed fonts and I think you're there.
US Congressman calls for Wikileaks whistleblower to be executed
What a pretty little house!

Mine was actually built in 1885 according to the insurance company records of the day (back then, the insurance companies had an actual map of every house in a major town of Indiana, just in case somebody signed up for their insurance - and now it's all on microfiche at the library). The 1905 picture was the earliest I've found so far; it would have been interesting to see one from anything before 1901, when the front porch was built.

I love the house; it's built to last and even has a brick outhouse (which was in fact built like a brick outhouse). The neighborhood, not so much. Richmond's fortunes have fallen since the 1800's.
Isn't the general point more along the lines of not earning much on savings now quite possibily implies a need to do some work at some stage in future (even if its really easy lucrative engagements), and therefore staying in touch with the industry is probably a good idea unless you hit really big.

Personally I'd like to see influence and credibility more as an end than a means to speaking engagements and high-billing consulting though...
Spacewalk to fix Broken Cooling Pump on the ISS
Lamb Chop
Riding High On Optimism
Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age
Great to see that feature... I only played with CouchDB in 0.7-days before shows and lists, and found it too everything-is-public for my needs.

Let's suppose I want to build a centralized messaging application where users send each other private messages (and let's say per-user couches aren't available). Users may only see messages directed to them. Messages are contained in documents, one document per message (sounds like a reasonable granularity).

For the JavaScript front-end, I'd like to ask the server for a list of messages for the current user, and later on, for the contents of one particular message.

The list of messages for one user sounds like a simple map-reduce view. In order to only show messages targeted to the current user, my guess is that I should add a list function to the same design document to remove other users' items from the view result. To fetch a message by ID, I'd install a show function which either returns the original message as JSON text or an invalid access message, depending on the current user. Is that how you'd use shows and lists?
>You know your stuff really well, so well that it's a matter of intuition.

So experts are people that don't think about what they're doing?
I want what all men want, I just want more. -Achilles
Thanks for the detailed explanation. Sounds like I was at least on the right track.

But if you ask me, the real solution is to have the kernel team fix their epoll implementation performance issues instead of forcing people to work around it with hybrid approaches.

That does indeed sound like a better conclusion.

Other than the stupid single-syscall-per-fd requirement, there's nothing in epoll's interface that would force it to perform worse than poll when the active/total ratio is high.

I don't see a reason why the syscall-per-fd couldn't easily be replaced/augmented with a single mass add/remove syscall which takes an array. The worse performance seems similarly baffling; it almost sounds as if they had some kind of inefficient data structure holding the file descriptor pool; considering poll() uses a flat array and epoll uses set operations I assume it's pretty tricky to make it perform well, even with a hash table. Maybe set operations aren't the best way to handle this data structure; but only some profiling in the kernel code can tell us that.

Obviously it'll take until 2.6.37 at least for any changes to enter the mainstream kernel, and until then a hybrid approach sounds sensible for those unwilling to patch. But still, fixing the root problem seems like a worthwhile cause.
Uses XSS and Google Street View Data to Determine Physical Location
wiredmikey sends along a brief (and quite poorly written) report from Security Week on Samy Kamkar's talk at Black Hat last week. In the video, which is amusing, he demonstrates how to obtain location information (within 30 feet, in the example he shows) of a user who does no more than visit a malicious website. The technique involves sniffing out the local router, breaking into it to obtain its MAC accress, and sending that to Google to extract the router's location from Google's Street View database.
Very interesting to be able to pull that much historic information up from the records. I've traced some of the older occupants of the house that I live in (one guy in his late 80's!) and invited them over, it was quite the experience to hear them tell their stories. World War II started for the Netherlands about 500 meters from where my house is (it's right on the German border, the Northernmost crossing).

If those old walls could tell stories...
http://www.codegrunt.co.uk/terse.html

A programming language where syntax and semantics are manipulable at run-time as well as compile-time and where you can define grammars in-line and use them immediately. I also intend to integrate the concepts of pattern calculus - http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3695 - to permit extreme levels of flexibility in the language.

It's a huge project and I'm right at the start of it. But no matter how hard I try I can't get away from the desire to work on language design and compiler development. It's just my thing, and the wonderful thing about hacking is you can just do it :-)
Bing Adds Open Street Map
I was going to say "when someone you consider to be an expert in the field comes to you for a solution [in that same field]".
http://www.getmetricmail.com

In one sentence: Get your Google Analytics data straight to your inbox.

Build as part of my dissertation. Build on Google App Engine.
Your kid just ate 26 packs of sugar.
Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening - the Yugoslav arms industry was nonexistent, and while they most definitely would have kept on killing one another with rocks, I think they would have been less efficient.

I agree with your larger point, though. The breakup of Yugoslavia was unfortunate - and inevitable - but it's kind of the exception that proves the rule. 1914, after all, was the last time a war was started in Yugoslavia, and it took down the rest of Europe and spread beyond the continent. This time, it was relatively self-contained, and the pieces of Yugoslavia are joining the Union, one by one. (After all, Yugoslavia was always a political fiction - Tito needed a platform big enough to fend off the Soviet Union, and by God if Slovenia didn't like it they could go suck an egg.)

Belgium may be next - and nobody's going to get killed over it. I just can't stress enough what incredible progress that really is.
Attack of the Math Brats
Thanks for the explanation, I didn't think of the part about the socket being free for writing vs. whether there was data available.

Zed's 'superpoll' is precisely what you suggest.

Facepalm. Thanks, I mysteriously missed that part of the article.
From my current install of Ubuntu:

The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. *Unfortunately, the
info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it
impossible to include any text from that document in this man page*. Most of the text in this document
was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all
features of the program.
Certainly, but that doesn't change the point that saying it's about "cutting down on a few bucks" is overly downplaying the potential benefit.
I was talking more about mainframes than Excel. I also posted that before the thread was full of comments that changed my view on mainframes.

As for Excel, I've read about a lot of situations where it's used for things it's not a good fit for, especially situations where a simple database and frontend might be more appropriate.
Wow! That's more like 'ancient' ;)

The other buildings are in daily use though, which is why I used them instead of old Roman buildings and such.
I'd also love to know.

It seems stealth is out of fashion, but that being said, there are a few of them out there doing stealth.

I guess since we don't know about them, it probably means they're being really successful in their strategy :)</lamejoke>
I didn't implement the machine learning algorithms for myself, because there are some really good packages out there and I know I don't have the smarts to better them.

Keep in mind that I didn't really have any success:

There seem to be two main ML packages, Weka and Orange. I personally preferred Orange, it has a nice graph-based UI for linking various components together; when you've figured that out it can script in Python. Also Orange makes it easy to test your data set against various different learning systems, and compare the performance. Standard testing procedures like n-fold cross-validation are built-in and really simple to use.

Also you need data. I'm pretty sure more is always better. I actually started with greyhounds* and skimmed mine (in Python use BeautifulSoup) from a website. I tried to come up with various statistics about the recent performance of the dogs. Unfortunately nothing I tried made the ML algorithms predict better than a random choice. A friend who's into gambling suggested greyhound racing was quite random by nature, so I've switched to horses recently. I'm still building that dataset, now trying out MongoDB just for fun.

I think the trouble is that you can have as much raw data as you like, but generating the predictive statistics requires a lot of knowledge of the problem domain. I'm not actually into gambling at all so I don't know if the track conditions are important, how much breeding or the age of the animal really matters etc... This made it hard to pick likely stats (and rebuilding datasets and retraining learners can take some time).

For horses there's a lot more information in forums and racing guides etc, so I'd start with horses. Just make sure you've tested your predictions with pretend bets before you commit any real money :)

Good luck!

*I began with greyhounds because of a dissertation posted on reddit where the authors suggested they'd had some success with a neural network and gave quite a lot of detail. That piqued my curiosity, and my initial version just re-implemented their work.

EDITED: For clarity
>That's the alternative.

There are vastly more alternatives than that. I'm really surprised to see this post from you. You could leave income tax alone and just add in a big sales tax on non-hybrid cars, for example.
http://search.cpan.org/~michael/Class-Declarative-0.06/lib/C...

A declarative framework for Perl that lets you set up complex data structures and code in an easy-to-read format.

A complete working example GUI program, using a not-yet-published set of semantic classes:

use Class::Declarative qw(Wx::Declarative);

dialog (xsize=250, ysize=110) "Wx::Declarative dialog sample"
field celsius (size=100, x=20, y=20) "0"
button celsius (x=130, y=20) "Celsius" { $^fahrenheit = ($^celsius / 100.0) * 180 + 32; }
field fahrenheit (size=100, x=20, y=50) "32"
button fahrenheit (x=130, y=50) "Fahrenheit" { $^celsius = (($^fahrenheit - 32) / 180.0) * 100; }
I like the old John Wanamaker quote: "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half"
True, but there is a big difference - the 1040EZ is certainly easier to fill out, but the current convoluted tax laws mean that you could be leaving a substantial amount of money with the government unnecessarily. When I was first starting out I used the 1040EZ because I was scared of the complex forms - and later when I started itemizing I realized I had been overcharged easily a $1000 a year in taxes that I didn't need to owe had I simply filed my taxes differently (albeit using rather more complex forms).

It would be a very different story if the form suggested above was _the_ form, with zero loopholes available to people with expensive tax attorneys.
RIM reaches deal on Blackberry security
Kings Of Flow - "Rumba Callejera" On RUMBA 100.3 - ORGULLO LATINO - ORLANDO, FL
Multiple Music Genres Concentrated in one Single Act.
I'm still not sure I understand the difference between data- and control-driven parallelism, primarily because I don't have a concrete example of the latter.
Also, he distinguishes between threads and tasks, but I'm not really sure what the difference is... are the latter simply not preemptable?
Some people don't like to read docs with info(1) for whatever reason. Having the full manual in the manpage instead of giving them a stub would be preferable.
> And at the end of it, you'll have a property worth much, much more than what you paid for it.

Unless there was a property bubble. Ireland recently had a massive property crash. Properties that were sold for €200million are now worth €20mil or less. Lots of people are stuck owning empty hotels and business centres with no tenants.
Silly. I would expect the pay services to still have an advantage because most people are probably going to expect a free government service to not highlight all the potential tax breaks for you.

But given Intuit has taken this tact, perhaps they don't work as hard as they should be to justify their cost...
Biggest Solar flare ever recorded - Carrington flare
My Django hosting service. I looked at Heroku and thought, "I want that for Python." Yesterday, I got most of the http request path finished. There is some node.js work left, and I still need to do some more work on Varnish. I'm hoping to get to the Postgresql stuff next week, then on to the website and API...
> Very true, except for the statement that other countries' involvement stopped worse from happening

That's my impression from reading up on Srebrenica and a bunch of other places, it is very well possible that that is just an 'after the fact' impression, and since it happened the way it did we'll never know what would have happened had there been no intervention.

I know people on two sides in that story (Serbian and Croatian), and there is enough confusion even now that it's probably best they didn't meet. One thing this war did for me though was to open my eyes once and for all to the amount of propaganda in supposedly unbiased media.
It's not a catastrophe. It's just more work. Which was my point.
Sounds like premature optimization to me. Is this really the bottleneck? Is the extra complexity and logic really going to be a net win?
NashvilleTV presents - Kings OF Flow - Poe ma
>as of April 2010, so pre iPhone 4 launch

That's pre-almost every Android handset worth owning overseas, around the time that the Desire was starting to make an appearance.

The iPhone 4 was a big launch. Yet in that same time period a lot of very, very credible Android handsets have launched. The Samsung Galaxy S will be one of the most interesting of all.
You have to click around to see it, because the default rendering only includes GNU C++, not GNU C.
Looks like he's already written a large bulk of his server's code, so maybe this optimization isn't really premature :)

You're probably right that when you actually use Mongrel2 as your app server your app-specific code higher up will be a larger bottleneck, but that's code that you have to deal with and this is code that he has to deal with so optimizing the hell out of it doesn't sound like a bad idea.
I seldom post, but I browse threads slowly, and I get the error page whenever I've waited too long to click the "more" link at the bottom of the page.

It seems that each time I click the "new" link it resets a cookie (or posts a hidden form field, I haven't checked which) that identifies the time of that click. Then when this time expires I get the error upon my next click of the "more" link.

I cannot just reload the page in this situation because the page being displayed is the error page, so I have to manually strip off the characters that appear in the URL after "http://news.ycombinator.com/ ... and when I do this I get the same new page as if I had clicked the "new" link. This is why I suggested providing a clickable "new" link on the error page.
Thankyou for the detailed reply.

Yeah I hated using weka at uni. I'll look into Orange.

"I don't know if the track conditions are important, how much breeding or the age of the animal really matters etc."

Yeah, feature selection is a tough one. I'd thought that the system would pick up on good indicators by itself, but it might well be that that has to be a manual decision.

"Just make sure you've tested your predictions with pretend bets before you commit any real money"

haha, yeah absolutely. My plan was to train/test until the accuracy seemed good enough (using monte carlo) and then run the system on live data with pretend money for a few months to see what the actual performance is like, before actually investing real cash.

Do you have a link to the greyhound topic? I searched on google but couldn't find it.
I highly doubt that in production it will make any difference at all. In the end it is not the poll/epoll overhead that determines your overall throughput. If you call poll/epoll more frequently than you should then it starts to add up but in reality one call per several thousand file system operations doing real IO is not going to make a big difference.

Of course all the little bits help and I'm happy to see someone pay attention to detail like this but normally speaking you should get to the point where you're shifting data in real life situations and you can hook up a profiler to make the decision. You have less to blog about like that but the difference between poll and epoll is not large enough that you would spend more time going from the one to the other than was spent analysing this and writing the post.

Optimisations like this are best left to when you have things working, first make it work, then make it fast.
It may just have been once packages were installed. I started using Unix ten-ish years ago with RedHat, and even as a beginner I saw that using RPMs quickly became a mess of inconsistent paths and circular dependencies. It was sloppy. Not even "bleeding-edge testing release" sloppy, just sloppy.

The situation has probably improved, but I moved on to Debian, then OpenBSD. I'm still happy with OpenBSD, but my next choice would probably be FreeBSD, Debian, or Arch (in that order).
Indeed. There are investments here in South America that pay off so much better than what is described in the article.

The trouble is, you have to really fear the kleptocracies in charge, and even in the more sensible countries (like Chile, Costa Rica or my own, Uruguay) you have to be on your feet.

As usual, higher returns means higher risk (real or perceived - I suspect the risk difference between here in Uruguay and the US is more perceived than real).

By the way, if you want an investment that is mostly risk free, I'd look at finite commodities: steel, oil, uranium, copper, etc... (my uncle actually buys physical steel plate as a hedge - it can be used as input to his business but it's also a savings account).
Yes that would work. You could go a bit further, though:

Set your view to emit keys this way:

[user,message_id]

you can query the view using:

msgview?startkey=[user]&endkey=[user,{}]

which will give you all the messages for the given user, or

msgview?startkey=[user,message_id]&limit=1

for a specific message.

Then your list doesn't have to go through all the messages for all the users -- just the ones that the view returned -- and only check that their user info is correct (i.e. nobody's calling the list using an inapropriate view).

With this scheme you could have the same list + view return a specific message as well.

Oh, and definitely go check CouchDB 1.0 -- it's changed quite a bit since 0.7. You can get a hosted version to play with at http://www.couch.io/get.
Regrets of the Dying
> The effect of Sun licensing dtrace, ZFS and others as GPL-compatible would make Linux more competitive with Sun's Solaris.

Yes

> That's clearly undesirable

Why? Sun's been bleeding customers towards Red Hat and (to a far greater extent) Novell since the early 2000s. Holding onto the Solaris/SPARC combo in the hope the high end customers would the be last to leave (which they were, but sooner than Sun expected) killed the company.
Working on some facebook integration for my social calendar site: http://www.scenepeek.com
> When I'm coding, I don't have a desktop, nor any wish for one.

How do you read docs without a web browser?
Read Verizon lie to it's customers faces. 10x BS! Droid can't handle tethering?!
"I'm inclined to think that someone who thinks about something full-time is statistically more likely to guess correctly about it than someone who doesn't."

If the system they're thinking about is a system defined by other people also thinking about it, and they're all trying to outsmart each other, and the system itself is too large and complex for any one mind to grasp, maybe not. And in fact, I've heard (no citation) that you'll as well on average throwing darts at stocks as hiring a stockbroker, and you'll save the fees. Which is why I'm inclined to invest in an index fund and forget about it.
Twitter actually uses Scala, I believe.