skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please read the Linux documentation on memory barriers instead of this:
http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.35/Documentation/memory-barri...

The Ridiculous Fish guy is clearly very smart and writes lots of interesting stuff, but this is obviously not his area of expertise, and you can't afford to learn from someone who has any confusion on the topic.

In his conclusion he makes what I would consider a highly misleading comparison between locks and memory barriers. He calls locks "tanks" ("powerful, slow, safe, expensive, and prone to getting you stuck"). About memory barriers he says: "Memory barriers are a faster, non-blocking, deadlock free alternative to locks. They take more thought, and aren’t always applicable, but your code’ll be faster and scale better."

But memory barriers aren't an alternative to locks at all. Locks let multiple threads write to shared memory. Memory barriers by themselves aren't very useful; most lock-free algorithms need atomic operations like compare-and-swap, which are comparable in cost to locks (indeed, locks are implemented in terms of atomic operations).
I don't think the article goes so far as to blame the rich categorically, per se.

It does suggest that the crisis is "elite-caused" in one sense or another: do you really think this is an unreasonable thesis?
Holy shit, you nailed it. Now I'm thinking of Metamagical Themas as an early 80's new wave album.

(And GEB is all about barouque symphonies and Don Knuth)
Such nonsense. Bill Gates' Microsoft would've put hundreds of developers on IronRuby and ensured it was the fastest and the most feature rich implementation there is. Just like they did with C++, Java and JavaScript.

BTW Windows is completely useless for any serious Ruby development/hosting. There are a ton of bugs in networking, threading, GC.
You can substitute tests for design - once you already know what the design is. It doesn't work quite so well when you have no clue what the overall picture is going to look like.

Of course, this is like saying that you could've predicted the future with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
Great video by Google Tech Talks here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyPrL0cmJRs&feature=chann...

Mentat Wiki has a ton of interesting articles/tips: http://www.ludism.org/mentat

And the Memoriad Competition Software is awesome and challenging; it's great practice every day: http://www.memoriad.com/memoriadsoftware.asp
The goal of the patent system is make the information public so all of mankind can benefit from it and the knowledge doesn't die with the inventor

If you have a mechanism other than patents that makes it economically possible for private organizations to engage in capital-intensive R&D and make the information public, let's hear it.
IMDB says "no": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/

Battle!
"If the Excel team's compiler and widgets were so much better, why wasn't the rest of MS re-using theirs instead?"

It's quite possible they were specifically optimized for Excel. Particularly with compilers and widget libraries, you can get much better performance and ease-of-use if you know the precise usage patterns.
You can't patent an idea - only an implementation.
>There are many better places to work than Microsoft. The place seemed truly pathological to me.

Have you worked there? I was there last summer and I'm actually not convinced there are many better places to work.
If you're referring to Haskell and the likes, sadly they're not nearly as prevalent.
Dynamic languages win in the worse-is-better department. They're easy to implement and easy to learn. You can get a beginner up to speed in a language like Ruby or Python very quickly. This creates a grassroots effect that builds libraries and community around the language because many of those beginners gradually become experts. Dynamic languages are also generally more expressive.

There are definitely some downsides too though, and static languages have gotten a lot better in the last ten years. After many years of working almost exclusively in dynamic langs I'm enjoying having the help of the compiler again in the Scala hacking I've been doing.
Our first reseller agreement was started at a stop light. Guy had medical imaging stickers on his car, so I struck up a brief conversation and followed up.

This is an often-overlooked component of traction. 80% of our early successes have been from chance encounters, either via web, or physical. Just making oneself available for chance encounters (e.g. coding at a cafe) can greatly increase your chances of traction, IMO.
Can you send them a password protected .zip file as a workaround?
Maybe not Google...
Comparing Recurly, Spreedly, and Chargify
Sure, it's helpful, but understanding the implementation of a particular machine isn't science, it's engineering.
NuCaptcha: Captcha with flash.
Probably not. The zipfile's contents can still be listed if the file has a password, just not extracted.
Clickable: http://nasr.ath.cx
That is most definitely Java's fault for lacking good abstractions. Try Haskell or C#- much higher content:code.
True, but to say the book is just Godels theorem is underselling it. At its most clinical it is a survey of various sciences, at its essence it is an intuitive theory. The importance of Godels theorem is that an intuitive notion can be proven true in a mathematical framework, as opposed to the piles of bullshit pseudoscience new-age stuff saying Heisenburgs uncertainty principle makes everything subjective.
For the record, this is the same Boehm of boehm-gc the garbage collector.
http://nasr.ath.cx
Then my remark on the article is that it's ironic how ahistorical Greenwald can manage to make an article that's premised on a fundamentally historical comparison (the declines of empires, our "empire" being the most recent).

What might Greenwald have thought about the Vietnam war, in which many multiples as many Americans died; a war in which our government overtly deceived the country into entering, in which we conceded southeast Asia to Communism? Not two decades later Communism collapsed, leaving the US as an unchecked dominating world power.

What might he have thought about the Great Depression? Just a decade later, the US tooled up a woefully underarmed military and won a two-front world war.

Surely Greenwald would have decried the '50s red scare as the end of the Constitution and the rise of ideological mob rule.

History is filled with ups and downs, and compared to previous dips in our history, it seems almost comical to suggest that 2010 is the beginning of the end times.
"Increasingly?"

While new technology has certainly magnified the effects of this dynamic and enhanced its global character, as well as lowered its cost, and granted new conventions, mannerisms and particulars to our experience of it, this does not strike me as a particularly novel thesis, in the grand scheme of things.

Businesspeople - invariably, of the "people person" variety (a seeming requirement for the transaction of commerce) - have always known personal connections and seemingly random events to be the fabric of marketing and selling, and have been doing it for as long as labour specialisation has been around, it seems to me. Who doesn't know that meeting people and swapping information increases the statistical incidence of striking some kind of deal with someone, somewhere?

Sure, it's been explicitly codified in management lore in recent times with given buzzwords like "networking" and "mixers," to be sure. This is part of the ongoing tendency by bureaucratic management thought to take the timeless commonsensical narratives of the small proprietor/artisan/craftsman/merchant and extract from them some abstract unifying thread, some principle, some Powerpoint-worthy pithy platitudes to which the audience instinctively relates and shells out for at $300/hr because of the psychological positive psychological feedback it provides, that sense of empathic affirmation. It's that warm feeling that what one has always known to be true is now also Officially Certified as true by an awe-inspiring, credibly gigantic intra-industrial actor, and perhaps has even had a proper noun-phrase bestowed upon it, or, assured a permanent place in some kind of canon through elevation to the status of a bona fide methodology!

This is how the management consulting arms of the Big 4 make their money, among others -- by packaging up this kind of vapid crapola. Has anyone yet been invited to the new webinar, "Focus on Dextrous Fingers: The Central Touchstone to Success in 21st Century Piano-Playing?"

It seems self-evident that one maximises visibility and draws on a sense of personal partisanship as well as accumulates valuable information in the course of hanging out with members of one's target market as well as one's peers/partners/complements. I would say this is a truism almost worthy of anthropological generalisation in connection with the history of trade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_budget

190 social protection
105 health
---
295 total health & social
38 defence
===
519 total

population 62,041,708

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

678 social security
676 medicare & medicaid
---
1354 total health & social
782 defense
====
3518 total

population 309,921,000
No they don't. At least those versions which come from Microsoft and not from your favorite torrent tracker/IT department. All Windows relesead after 2003 contain the .NET framework Common Language Runtime, but compilers are part of the SDK.
object.responds_to?(:method_name) is just a run-time variation on generics constraints. C# could use a bit more work on its syntax there, but something like go's inline interface definitions would make it just as nice as Ruby.
Classic, "Yahoo: goodb(Y)e"
Can anyone give an idea of how large, compared to other DDOS attacks, 50 GBPS is?
Where exactly did I imply that? I was merely pointing out the motivations of the patent system. The system is not necessary for companies to be economically viable as they've been doing that with trade secrets long before patents were around. The patent system was meant to unlock those trade secrets for the benefit of the public, it was never about the inventor's best interests.
Too bad we can't just permanently sacrifice China.
Static typing can have the benefits of implicit interfaces without the danger of runtime errors- look at Go's structural typing.
Minecraft: 331132 registered users, of which 50793 (15.33%) have bought the game
I'm just curious, is anyone looking at the board for a pattern? Shouldn't they have caught on this behavior sooner and taken action to rectify it before this big pile of public mess?
Multiuser Sketchpad in HTML5 (Go nuts)
C and C++'s type systems aren't nearly as useful as they could be. Haskell's type system, for instance, makes nullable types non-default, and forces you to catch any nulls while still being easy to read- the Maybe monad.

This kind of thing - a complete absence of NullPointerExceptions and segfaults - is what's great about static type checking.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, I was thinking about more abstract things like web development and technologies. I just happen to use Ruby for Dishes, but it's Dishes and projects like it that I'm looking to talk with people about.
There's an anti-DDOS service out there, Progent or something. Part of their solution adds all of APNIC's ip addresses into your router's bogon list when you're under attack. It turns out for most DDOS's if you turn off china, the attack just ends.
50gbps is pretty massive. Clearly somebody did something horrifically insulting to China like mention that they could maybe possible consider treating Tibet a little bit more humanely and stop turning it into one big whorehouse.. make a statement like that, and all of china ddos's you.
While the article makes a point that I'm inclined to agree with after two years of running my own business, I stopped reading when they mentioned that World of Warcraft is a game of "swords and hobgoblins." World of Warcraft does not have hobgoblins. Ok, well actually, they're being added in Cataclysm, but I doubt the author knew that.

Then again, maybe my downfall was too much World of Warcraft.
First collaborative masterpiece - i giant penis.
But statically typed languages have duck typing too. Except it's called type inference. And F# has it.
If we want, we can :)
I agree. I've been many times in situations where (smart) people said "this is ok, this situation is very simple to manage with threads", then discovered some deadlocks after a week. It is like juggling chainsaws [1]. I try very hard to avoid multithreading - most of the high-performance code I write is single threaded by default. I know MT programming enough to avoid many problems, but also know it well enough to see it's a very costly trap, if it can be avoided at all...

[1] http://www.thecodist.com/article/writing-multithreaded-code-...
Don't get me wrong, recorded lectures are great. I love the SICP lectures and I'm really happy the web as given me the opportunity to see them. However if I was given the choice I'd far prefer to have had the chance to be there live and discuss the material with the lecturers, and if the lecturers at my university had said "I'm not going to given any lectures, since I recorded them a few years ago" I'd feel very ripped off. At the end of the, as good as recorded lectures are, they'll never replace "the best" teaching experiences.
Don’t bank on KMart’s $150 Augen tablet getting Android Market access
I do both C# and Ruby on a regular basis, and well even with all the sugar, for most of the job, C# is nowhere as concise as Ruby.

I started using C# in 2001 and Ruby in 2004, and even after several years, I find I'm a lot more productive using Ruby.

This is my main reason - I can tackle projects with 2x or 3x less people on the team (which means I can also tackle alone projects vs. building a team of 2 or 3).

As well, I find dynamic languages more "fluid" to use.
The inevitability of that act of vandalism/creativity on any new virgin space is unavoidable.

(I drew a house. sigh)
I only use dynamic languages for reasons other than their dynamism. Lua is good because it's extremely small and easy to embed, ActionScript because it's the language of the Flash platform, etc.

Static typing can be just as concise as dynamic typing, and sometimes more. For example, Haskell's Maybe monad combined with do-notation lets you write code that has null checks where required without uglifying the code.

The benefits of static type checking haven't really been fully realized in popular languages. Type inference is almost mainstream, but you can go a lot farther with non-nullable types, structural typing, dependent typing, etc.
I like that: "practice makes permanent". Also "perfect practice makes perfect" although lousy practice is pretty good for developing "perfect practice." And turning practice into "your practice" in the yogic sense is good for the brain too. Routine doesn't have to be routine.
Chrome 5.0.375.125 on Mac Snow Leopard: Some kind of layout error. The right part doesn't float properly or something. I'm not sure what causes this.
If you're a new programmer, remember that most programmers aren't trying to figure this out. They're already substantially invested in the language they chose years ago, with a large base of knowledge and already written code.

Static vs. dynamic typing is nearly orthogonal to my programming language choice. Much more important to me are functional features. And all other things being equal, I'd rather have the flexibility of the dynamic languages than the performance and compiler-checking of static ones.

Haskell has some killer features that make me want to use it more. Static types are not on the list.

Maybe it's because all of my projects are small and I don't have to program defensively, but I've never been bitten by a type error that took anywhere near as long to fix than I would have spent using a static type system.

I'm sure in some circumstances there are dynamic language projects that are plagued by type errors, but in my case static typing is a solution looking for a problem.
Ideally the code produced by an organization with coding standards should be more accessible than good written to different standards. Whether that happens, of course, is another question.
From 2001-2003 I led development on Arbor Peakflow DoS, which (when I left, at least) was far and away the most popular tool tier-1 ISPs used to manage these kinds of attacks, and my the experience I can relate is:

* These attacks happen with shocking frequency (the major incentive ISPs have to mitigate them is not angry customers, but rather the drag it creates on their third-tier engineering staff to hunt down DDoS sources and craft ACLs for them)

* There is actually not a whole hell of a lot you can do about them, even if you light up a whole tier 1 core network with mitigation tools. At the end of the day, a well-crafted DDoS attack looks pretty much identical to normal traffic; if you can black-hole China to defeat an attack, it wasn't very cluefully done.
I'll save you the time of getting an MBA..
Pennies on the dollar after the audience had already left. I'd call that dying.
I'm (internally) trying to be equitable to all sides in this whole poll/epoll deba(te|cle) but really it does seem that many, many people aren't actually reading the articles they purport to be commenting on. It's frustrating and disappointing.
I think you're thinking of Prolexic, and my recommendation is that you take any of their claims with a heaping helping of salt. Things may have changed in the 5 years since I've totally forgotten everything I knew about DoS mitigation, but it wasn't the case then that you could simply black hole China to evade them.

A more common mechanism used by real networks to mitigate these attacks in production is to pinpoint the target of the attack and offramp its traffic in the ISP core to a "regional scrubbing center" where advanced filtering tools (for instance, packet filters that can handle ACLs with high tens of thousands of terms) can try to sort through the crap.
Compiling in a language with static typing is a lot faster than running (not to mention writing!) unit tests to achieve 100% path coverage in a language without static typing.

It's also fast enough that I stopped caring years ago. Don't get me wrong, Eclipse is agonizing when it locks up while "helping" me, but it's not due to compiling (it happens just as often when I haven't made any changes).
Does Internet really rewire your brain
> Source control (which, big surprise, MS handles via many in-house tools)

Why is it a surprise? They sell developer tools. They sell infrastructure.

Actually it was kind of shitty on their part for not using Visual SourceSafe.
if becoming successful doesn't qualify you to design processes to make other people successful, what does?
Sort of a creepy idea. But no more so than Facebook or twitter I guess. I long for the days when people, myself included, hid their real contact info and used a pseudonym.

edit: Also, the pencil's pixilation is distracting and I think you should get rid of the alpha effect that goes away when hovering over the logo. (Safari 5.0.1)
Good stuff!
But just for fun:
1. Sitting on your ass programming for long periods of time develops brain power too.
2. We've held on tightly to our lizard brains too.
3. Faulty wiring can be creative if it's faulty in the right way.
4. We do pay attention to annoying boring things.
5-6. Imagine to remember
7. Sometimes it takes an all-nighter to get your brain over the hump.
8. True, although not always a bad way.
9. Or isolate to concentrate and build myelin.
10. Only if you're a visual learner.
11. Viva la difference
12. We are also inveterate couch potatoes.
I don't think it even depends on specific techniques as those mentioned. If you're lacking direction, it's possible to succeed merely by constantly throwing things out there and seeing what sticks.

I kept a personal blog for years (something I've only just got back into after a few years out) and people asked why I bothered. I had little better to do with my spare time. Worked out, though, I got a book deal from it and for 2 years made $3000+ per month on Adsense from a few posts where I reviewed different route finder services. Totally randomly, totally beneficial. Some people criticized my tweeting years ago - now it's really paying off.

The worst thing you can do, IMHO, is nothing. Unless you have something you should be focusing on, keep throwing things out there, keep trying things out, and something should, eventually, stick and give some pay back.
Man, for a slight second, you really put the fear of god in me. Thank goodness your link was bogus, I can't live without my pr0n!
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like having type information available at runtime is orthogonal to static type checking.
Playboy TV - Online Subscription
You can keep type information at runtime and still be statically typed, a la the CLR.
Interesting. I do a bastardized form of shiatsu. Pressing on my eyebrows etc with thumb and forefinger in a pattern. That wakes me up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiatsu
I spent the last few days figuring out how to go about
doing something that could be "superpoll" [..]

There is not yet any reason to assume Mongrel2 will improve from superpoll. For instance, if ATR > 0.6 only happens in low volume situations, epoll suffices. When ATR < 0.6, you need epoll for better performance. In both regimes, epoll is then either an acceptable or the best solution.

There is no experimental evidence to suppose Mongrel2 servers will operate in the ATR > 0.6 regime, without epoll being able to handle the volume anyway. Other implementers of webservers aren't stupid or shortsighted either and it seems likely that superpoll has occurred to a few of them, but that they found it wouldn't improve matters. As long as you don't know the ATR in practice, it seems premature to start on abstractions and doing the experiments in this blogpost?
I dont believe Duck typing and type inference are really the same thing.For duck typing the type is unimportant, it only cares about the operation, types matter for type inference. The behavior of structural typing in languages such as Scala are is closer to Duck typing IMHO.
Have you thought about adding a mode in which anonymous users can just start using the service (but their edits are lost when they forget the URL), like Etherpad used to have?

When I read that I had to subscribe just to try it out (just to see if it does anything I can't also have with a personal wiki or rememberthemilk) and that it would be $5/mo anyway, I lost interest.
Except that at least on facebook or twitter you know when someone is following you, and have the option to block them.
None of the comments I upvoted were in any of those categories -- at least not IMHO, and therein lies the problem, it usually comes down to a matter of opinion.

As long as PG doesn't separately state upvotes and downvotes, a better answer might be to reply to comments you don't love with "RTO" (restates the obvious) or "ANTD" (adds nothing to discussion).
On the other hand I don't think you should have any expectation of privacy in "public places" on the internet. That's just foolish.
Hopefully more concise statically-typed languages will have the benefits of being easy to learn and build up their own grassroots communities.
I made this. you play this. we are enemies