skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have mostly big objects (relative to hardware page size) and the encoding in memory and when stored on disk are pretty similar, this is indeed a good idea (to trust the virtual memory I mean).

Otherwise... no way, if you have data structures everything is fragmented around (and you want to use a lot object sharing, caching, ... for performance, without to mention hash tables that are very cool at filling at least 1 byte of tons of pages even with 2% of data inside).

Also data structures can often be serialized on disk using 1/10 of the space.

Using the VM is cool, but not so generally applicable. The proxy stuff is perfect. Also on-disk DB is perfect using the VM the other way around, to get a memory-cache for free, if you don't need strict consistency (see MongoDB).
In an ideal world perhaps. In the real world, sometimes you just have to suck it up to avoid an even more desperate situation. I think it's clear that's what he did.
Oh, and as far as "why" they support age vs merit (in other words, "last in first out", youngest teachers go first in a layoff), it's because that's how all the union contracts are structured, and that's wrong, but NEA is a product of the unions.

Not defending, just explaining. I'd love to throw the NEA under the bus - the problem is, nobody else stands up for teachers.
I have a font problem on your website,chrome 5.0.375.99
Glad to see Microsoft getting on board with browser development and giving Mozilla, Google and Apple some competition.

I love Microsoft technology and when they put their minds to it, they do get it right I feel.
I've used "The Shark Fin" in basically every GA concert crowd I've ever been to, didn't know it had a name .. very effective indeed.

I can't tell if this article is entirely serious as it promotes a method of walking that makes you seem very cold to the people surrounding you, but at the same time - this is all very efficient.
Orwell was specifically warning about the dangers of a communist totalitarian state. He was one of the few left-leaning writers that spoke out against Stalinism. North Korea has become, in every sense, a '1984' state. China and the former Soviet Union seem to be in transition from '1984' to 'Brave New World'.
It enables freedom in choices but doesn't become the reason I make choices.

Well isn't that nice for you? Too bad it's not true for everyone.
You and I both know that would be a truly facepalm.gif choice for HN.
Thanks a lot for that tip.

Some else just pointed me to the same site. They have a 500MB/day limit for the free version but that'll be more than enough for me at the moment.
In the sense that Eclipse is bloated, yes; but there is quite possibly no portable way to fix this.

And Oracle really should have tested stuff, even if Eclipse did do something stupid.
It's annoying how the author equates "being good" and "voting for leftist policies".

"Women have a long way to go. Some of them even still vote Republican. The horror!"
"Life is too short to walk around reluctantly doing crap work"
-Bruce Sterling
An Honest Conversation About Your Technology Use
That's a blunt pronouncement. It sounds very much like software improvements played a role:

"We asked ourselves, ‘What does it mean to build a balanced system where we are not wasting any system resources in carrying out high end computation?’” said Vahdat. “If you are idling your processors or not using all your RAM, you’re burning energy and losing efficiency.”

From personal experience, the hardest part of dealing with super-high-end hardware is utilizing the capacity that it gives you. You don't just throw a larger computer at a program written in Blub for a smaller system, and gain instant world-record performance. If nothing else, you usually have to re-architect your code to match the assumptions of the new hardware.

Also, the I/O numbers you're assuming are probably very high: you never get 100% utilization of a network interface -- 70% is more realistic. And for a problem like this, you're bounded not by the product of the bandwidth of the pairwise interconnects (i.e. (10Gbps * 52) / 8 == 65GB/s), but the bandwidth of any single interconnect, because you can get to a point where you're transferring most of the data across a few connections. Also, latency matters a lot, because a small connection latency can easily throttle your overall bandwidth when you're moving lots of small chunks of data.

Realistically, these guys probably had something more like 7Gbps / 8 = ~.88 GB/s bandwidth between nodes, not counting latency. That means that it would take ~1163s to transfer 1TB between any two nodes -- which means that that naive solution (distributed merge sort where the intermediates are transferred between nodes) is already ruled out. So, like I said, we're back to software improvements, if only to utilize the hardware available.
And life can be even shorter if you don't.
I've always considered serving as a conscript in the Air Force to be a huge asset. Specifically because you have no need for further hazings .. :-)
It's pretty good. Maybe because I'm also a kernel developer, but these suggestions seem obvious to me. That is, instead of Varnish being novel and well-optimized, it appears that Varnish is pretty conventionally optimized and Squid is just a god-awful piece of development.

As he says, this is a 2006 architecture. VM, cache line-size d working set, MRU scheduling -- this is stuff that's been around for a while. If he were writing this article about a 2010 architecture it would look a bit different. For example, trying to minimize memory access is a laudable goal but in the normal data sets the cache is usually overwhelmed pretty quickly. A 2010 architecture would feature NUMA optimization, although his practice of allocating thread data on the thread stack actually helps this a fair bit (inadvertent?). If Varnish uses threading at a significant level, this kind of optimization is only going to get more significant over time. The modern CPU architecture product cycle goes through a kind of give and take -- it alternates between having just enough fast memory and not enough. Right now, we are just about smack dab in the middle of "just enough," but the next Intel release is projected to move to "not enough." Threaded programs in NUMA start to matter a whole lot more on 16, 32, 64 cores.

P.S. We actually just ignore 32-bit architectures. Even modern commodity CPUs don't have them and anyone running a server architecture with only 4 GB of RAM has bigger problems than the proxy software.

Edit: Just saw antirez's post: very good. The VM architecture is good for general case, but it really wasn't designed for specialty applications. There are many operations that a VM can make if it knows a fair bit about the working set and the memory pattern, but that's not possible in a generic OS VM (prefetching and streaming are big ones).
does anyone have any good failure stories?
It is important to keep in mind that ... the older a paper is, the more "chances" it gets to be cited. On average, papers published 20 yrs ago would've been cited more than papers published 10 yrs ago. It is more fair if you compare publication citations in 10 years.

I.e. compare

citation between 1990 and 2000 for paper A published in 1990

vs

citation between 2000 and 2010 for paper published in 2000
We're really excited about this one. Most publishing platforms completely ignore the sheer pain of dealing with images -- even simple things like resizing, rotating and cropping.

We've actually taken it a step further and built in a really powerful image manipulation/compositing platform. It's really cool -- try adding text and setting the color to a gradient or pattern, for example, or adding an image and setting a "fade". Or, go to "Effects" and set the Polaroid effect. Really cool stuff.
Flowshark makes it easy to design intuitive user flows for your software product, allowing you and your collaborators to optimize the user experience, identify potential trouble spots and know what to design for. Could be re-written as two or three sentences.

What kind of export formats are you thinking of ?
Google's Deep Web crawl
It should be possible to partner with someone to do the actual printing and mailing. Ugly PDFs might sell for zero. But gorgeous PDFs will not. Also PDFs by people who actually understand what the customers want might be worth much more.
This is HTML5/CSS3 Sports Illustrated segment from Google I/O this year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j7mM_JBNw

Worth watching, if you're interested in this and haven't seen it.
$10 seems reasonable for paperback bound
Man security
The font doesn't anti-alias in WinXP (Firefox) - hard to read especially at smaller sizes.
One thing I'd like to see on your homepage is some text highlighting the differences between your system and other, similar applications that have come into the market in the past year or two.
Well, by your own admission, 30-50% of knowledge should be held in common. In early grades, the number is probably more like 90%. By high school, sure, there's plenty of room for diversified knowledge of literature and history, but there's also a core of math, logic, and reading that everyone should know. Why not test this stuff? Standardized tests are objective.

Now, the current system focuses on meeting minimums, and most standardized tests quickly hit a ceiling. I'd much prefer to see tests that attempt to gage the entire breadth and depth of student learning. Practically, that's going to require different questions asked of different students, or you'll end up with a 10,000 question exam. But I still consider it standardized testing. The SAT and AP exams are great - we should do more of that earlier.
PDF and HTML.
There's anecdotes, there's opinions, and then there is data. I spent a couple of hours this morning creating a WuFoo survey about "how addictive is technology?"

I would appreciate it if you guys could take the time to complete and spread the word. I will share whatever I learn back on HN, of course :) I think if we can get enough folks participating, it should make for very interesting reading.
there is definitely a need for this. I hate sharing word documents. How complicated will the flows be? Seems like in the screenshot it's just sequential. Will there be more like Visio later on where you can create loops and decision points?
In summary, hard work is hard.

I know HN is targeted towards the startup crowd, but do we constantly have to vote up these self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating posts about how it takes some kind of special breed of human to work hard for a year or two?
Again, I'm not saying that 100% of teacher evaluation should be based on tests. If you want to evaluate teachers based on the moral character they are building in students, fine - that's not what I'm advocating standardized tests for. They're for measuring "book learning" and they're pretty good at it.
RIP Neil Postman. His keen intellect and warm humanity are missed.
More likely it looks like bias favoring cross-disciplinary research. Different fields have different typical citations rates. Biological sciences tend to have orders of magnitude higher impact factors than other fields [1].

So, for example, if you CS paper touches some bio topic, it will gather a lot more citations, also it will have much higher chance to appear in high impact factor general science publications like Nature/Science.

For the companies, there can be bias from higher availability of freely accessible full-text articles. I remember there was some analysis in Nature of how online availability increases citations [2]. Companies are more likely to put their papers online and also have better "SEO", so more people are going to see and cite their papers.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6837/full/411521a...
It's an art project but there are upside-down trees at MASS MoCA

http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=29
The Temptation of Starcraft II
not very impressive
I don't know if I'd say they made unrealistic assumptions. Geocentrism failed to make accurate predictions and required a whole slew of tricks to reconcile the problems. Heliocentrism was "unrealistic" because the church disagreed with it, not because it disagreed with observations.

It also took approximately 300 years for common opinion to shift from a Ptolemic universe to Heliocentrism. We're on a much shorter time scale for the Big Bang theory, and it's very well acknowledged the theory has problems.
Nice design - shouldn't be too surprising for a design-oriented site. But it's a pleasing and simple use of Blueprint CSS.

Just one question: I don't understand why Wufoo Form Builder was needed for the signup flow. Why not just add a form of your own? Or am I misunderstanding why Wufoo was mentioned at the end of the signup process?
This is exactly why I love competition. Now if only there was a possibility for a truly windows alternative. As in runs all windows apps.

Competition = forces everyone to innovate, even Microsoft. I still have a prediction that in 3 years Microsoft will rise again.
We've seen problems with compensation linked to short-term company performance. Test scores and most metrics like you're proposing have similar problems. Nobody cares about test scores; we care about long-term success of students into adulthood, and it seems that we have no idea how to predict that.
It is a utopian novel, in one interpretation. That interpretation views it as about how utopia isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be.
Preventing conspiracies like this is exactly why teachers should be evaluated by standardized tests designed by an independent agency.
Sorry about that...we experimented with Typekit.
I'm not familiar with the problem space. Perhaps you could explain some of the pain points on the web site.
I had an officemate back in the mid 90s who was on this schedule for several years (he was a researcher able to set his own schedule for office time) and it worked quite well for him. He seemed to enjoy it and talked at length about how it was closer to the natural circadian cycle for people (which is a claim I don't know about.)

He did great work during that period; obviously this is just another anecdote but there you go.
I mean Safari Reader looks better. Tweaking Readability on an iPad is going to be somewhat of an undertaking (though possible, I suspect).
I don't get the mentality of sending out thousands of resumes. I sent out one to get my current job because I wanted to work there.
No one ever mentions We
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
Looks interesting, but you should have handed out beta invitation codes to the first 50 of us...
Well, yes, but possibly it's still better than our present society, which is the key question.
Are hard to read font colors a new trend or something?

#666666 for body text makes my eyes bleed
Rendering Sling content as PDF + XFDF
Can you point us to a few of them? We'd love to see how others have approached the problem. Thanks.
Mechanical Turk, Low Wages, and the Market for Lemons
Hey aminuit
The post isn't especially self-congratulating. Actually it's almost the contrary... Hard work is hard, whether you're a pin pusher, an agile railer or biz guy trying to make it.
The idea behind the post is especially this: we are ordinary man facing ordinary (hard) challenges, and it's meant as a reminder for aspiring entrepreneurs who only see the bright techcrunch-like side of the coin.
Thoughts?
Simple solution: create a set of standardized tests, on Math, History, etc, and require students only to pass a subset of them.
Stare at boobs for longer life - Study
Pink Three-free WordPress Themes
A pink and white theme. This is a truly unique and feminine web design. A 3 columns Wordpress template. The design could be utilized fr a number of purposes including modeling agencies, beauty salons, hair salons, perfume websites, independent model blogs, blogs about make-up or cosmetics.
Of course, the Beast of Auschwitz was female (http://militaryhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/irma_grese_b...)
I have an immediate use for this - thanks.
Yeah. Learn how to get a satisfying job instead of taking bad advice from an incompetent career counselor.

Maybe doing 3hrs worth of data entry this the most economic value this guy can provide. In that case, he better learn to settle.

The answer is right there in the article. “I learned all I needed to know in high school, ya know,” he argued. “I wanted to make money." The way to get a job is to convince your boss you can make him money. This is why businesses hire. Instead of trying to impress potential employers with yours smarts, or relate to them like a frat boy, impress them with your understanding of the value you provide and how you add to their bottom line. Then you'll get hired.

Nick A. Corcodilos talks about this in Reinventing the Interview:

http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Headhunter-Reinventing-Interview-W...

(Great book, but probably not worth buying. If memory serves, it is a little repetitive, but it is short and you can read it in a bookstore in one sitting.) Or go read back articles from Ask the Headhunter.
There is one interesting argument for not using the OS virtual memory system. By using VM you have just turned disk errors into RAM errors. Many programs can potentially handle disk corruption, almost none can cope with bad RAM.
The 'dumbing yourself down' skill comes very handy when talking to most girls at bars/clubs.
No problem. We'll be sending out an email to you shortly.
Mmmm crap technically he didn't reference this article (explicitly), I should have checked.
Windows Phone 7 turns heads, but gadget hounds on the fence
No videos, a single screenshot, beta invite only. Is this another minimum viable product experiment?
Thanks for the feedback, and I share your frustration around sharing Word documents over email. Between Word docs and Visios getting flung back and forth around a team, people tend to quickly get out of sync.

Our mission is to make the flows as visually simple as possible, but robust enough to support if/then, validation, loops and decision points. We won't have everything we want in version 1, but enough for most web apps.
The elitism in this comic has rubbed me the wrong way every time I've read it, as has the historical tone deafness. You have to basically assume the premise to Idiocracy for it to be valid.
Orwell predicted the 20th Century, Huxley predicts the 21st
Wing Chun is derived from a branch of Feeding Crane -- Wing Chun was, I believe, one of the Feeding Crane designer's descendents -- though it may be rather that she was a trainee rather than actual family.

That at least is based on the geneology that Liu Chang I (Grand Master of the Feeding Crane school) showed us when he was here teaching a seminar on Feeding Crane.

Bruce Lee was on his chart also -- on the Wing Chun branch.

There's some uncertainty in that, of course. Only the Okinawan karate history is actually harder to find than the traditional Chinese :)

(The modern, flashy wire-fu stuff doesn't count, it's not traditional, or even particularly old.)
No, that's consuming value.
Admittedly, at this point you could probably consider that 32b machines are legacy and unsupported (FWIW there was a Steam stats thing posted a few months back indicating that more than half of their Windows 7 users were on 64b... I can only expect that those ratios are much higher for unices)
Why are you voting this guy down? It's a quote from Idiocracy.
Thanks for the compliment. We used Wufoo so that we could spend our time continuing to work on the product.
Haskell on a Horse: a new web framework based on arrows and continuations
I know infinitely less about caching and VM than the author of the linked article, but I was surprised by this part:

Varnish also only has a single file on the disk whereas
squid puts one object in its own separate file. The HTTP
objects are not needed as filesystem objects, so there is
no point in wasting time in the filesystem name space
(directories, filenames and all that) for each object, all
we need to have in Varnish is a pointer into virtual
memory and a length, the kernel does the rest.

I've had more than one systems person give me the opposite advice, that yes, using the OS's caching layer to do your disk/RAM balancing is good, but you should write into files that are divided on logical boundaries that correlate with how you use the data. Their argument was that this gives the caching layer more information, e.g. it can consolidate all your tiny objects into one part of the cache to avoid your small objects unnecessarily pinning a ton of VM pages, and can do things like prefetch pages when you start to read a big object, or even choose not to load a very large object into the cache at all if you're reading it sequentially (keeping it from clobbering the cache). When evicting pages it can also take small-versus-big-object and these-pages-go-together issues into account, as opposed to all pages looking alike.

That's all hearsay, though, and I have no idea if it actually improves things in practice on current OSs or with which kinds of workloads.
If you skew your job hunt by appealing to people who are offended by intelligence, then as an intelligent person you're going to end up with the wrong job.
dotcoma's real name is "Winston Smith"
United Pepper strives to be the world's first "fair trade" electronics producer.
''With the average cost of a wedding in the north-of-$25k region, you might find that the difference between $25 and $100 matters very little to the customer''

i agree with this - her wedding is a special event that she will spend as much as she can - she already has a mental budget calculated by a complex process known only to her - some variables include -the cost of the wedding of her best friend -average cost of wedding in her social graph -how much she can afford to spend - then she will spend double of her budget so that she can complain about how guilty she feels for spending soo much for a wedding --but in no way-- her wedding will cost less than -and her planning process will last less than- the wedding of her best friend - she will get the most expensive of everything including invitations - she may buy groceries with coupons to look chic but this is -her- event - she will not look cheap - consider that even when she wants to -look- cheap she does not buy jeans and rip them at home herself -no- she buys -branded- jeans already ripped with style for her -also- it is a mistake to think that she is buying a -product- when she orders invitations - she is buying a -story- presented to her as -marketing- that she can share with her friends - for her to buy cheap invitations that she will spend time to create manually herself - there better be a -cool- story she can share with her frieds why she made this decision to go cheap - this story the founder must supply to her through marketing convincing her that buying cheap invitations does not make her look cheap - this is more difficult than building the site -also- maybe more important - she is -outsourcing- her wedding event - by definition she is the queen and the center of the universe and she will not do anything herself -except- giving orders - there is a lot of pride and competition involved in planning a wedding - she will not condescend to do manual work for her own invitations to save money - i think tracy in this case is thinking like the groom not the bride - but the decision to spend is made by the bride - so i believe this not to be a sound business model
The kernel VM system has a lot more ("global") information, though.
It is true for everyone that money enables freedom in choices.

My point is that it's worth avoiding reaching a point that you need to be rich for some reason like "more = better".
I like the converse: "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"

It's attributed to MIT's Paul Cootner, supposedly as a comeback to a money manager who asked him why, if Cootner was so smart, he wasn't rich?
If you assume that the only Perl 5 programmers would ever have an interest in Perl 6, perhaps.
So you're saying that Oracle should be responsible for the defects in a 3rd party product?
How do you do the formatting like that?