skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps it helps you to look at those interviews from a different perspective. Since you would have to spend some time with the company, you have the right to ask questions too. Turn the interview into a discussion. At least for me this is much more easy to handle.

For example, instead of waiting for a question to test your knowledge about their language of choice, you could ask them whether they use it this or that way and mention your level of experience. If they still ask the question and you do not know the answer, you can at least say 'nope, no clue what you are talking about', without the feeling that they only know what you don't know.

If possible make some educated guesses about their infrastructure and ask questions that reflect that you did your homework.

Already said, but important enough to repeat:
Be honest. If you are nervous, tell them. If you do not know an answer, admit it. If you are not sure if you understood something, ask again.
People really use wedding invitations printed from their home printer? I would think no girl would stand for that =x

I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but wouldn't it be a better play to integrate (somehow) with a printing company? Or offer an export option that they can take to a local printer (as in the correct file format .eps, pantone color numbers, or what not).

Sorry if I am completely ignorant to the wedding invitations scene but I would think every girl deserves nice invitations and the convenience of a one-stop-online-shop.

Hmm maybe crowdsourced invitation designs.. ala threadless.com ?
Are you confusing construction contracts with the actual design? Because they seem to take real pride in the design of their machines. For reference, check all the videos they made of their aluminum manufacturing process for the MacBook Pro. Like almost every PC maker they contract out the manufacture, but the design is still theirs.
Are there any heat map visualizations for this data set yet? I seems like a natural fit since each event has a gps location associated with it.
I am not a specialist on this area. But please mention some interesting competitors to Node.js for your type 2?

Personally I also like the fact that Node is Javascript. I have looked at Scala several times and superficially, it looks extremely ugly. Clojure and Haskell might be interesting, but I worry that the non-modifiable memory could bite me in the end (plus, Clojure might force me to do too much dreaded Java stuff in the end). Erlang is fun because it is so freaky and different, but I am not sure how efficient it would be for writing huge amounts of code. It is also not written for performance, but for stability (according to it's inventor).

Which leaves what great alternatives? I have to admit, no other popular environments come to my mind. Arc, maybe?
Propeller Bluetooth Stack Demo
If the Earth stopped altogether it should fall into the Sun. No maps to draw, then :)
See Patri Friedman's seasteading concept: a multitude of startup countries where political systems compete and innovate.

http://seasteading.org/learn-more/intro
But that doesn't make it inherently better than the alternatives. The sole purpose of Old Spice (and scents in general) is to improve how others see you, and therefor whether your peers perceive Old Spice as being a superior choice decides whether it is.

Focus on "if your peer group thinks it's cool, that actually does make it better than the alternatives" instead of "different from a computer purchase" and it should make sense.

Also, I think that "a computer purchase among geeks" would have been better. Why? We, as geeks, are much, much more likely to ignore the opinions of others and chose a computer on its own merits, instead of as a fashion accessory. Whereas a non-computer geek would be more likely to choose to use a Mac because they're the cool option and many of their friends like/have/want them.

Yes, non-techies do seem quite likely to ask their friends for advice on computers, and take cues from what their friends have and what they've said about them. Word of mouth is powerful.
The original post: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/06/04/segment-goal-funn...
Then let me make some senses for you.

He said his code works on Linux but not Cygwin. Linux is not a hardware architecture. The code generated for Linux Arm is very different from Linux i386. I merely pointed out he's confused about different machine abstractions and his claim of "working on Linux" is not a good basis to expect it would work on Cygwin. Does that make sense for you?

Second, re-read what I wrote. I talked about returning from main(). I wasn't talking about sub-function calls within main(). Returning from main() will take the garbage content from the uninitialized buffer as return address and crash. And if you initialize the buffer with the correct stack frame for the function you want to jump to, you can "return" to it. That's how co-routine work, or buffer overflow attack. Does that make sense for you?

Second (b) a stack is not necessarily implemented as a single pointer. On i386, it's a double-indirect pointer EBP:ESP. He only set up ESP and forgot about EBP. Depending on how the generated code sets up the runtime environment, EBP is not necessary (most likely not) the same as the heap.

Third, whatever, it's your pure speculation. He's jumping wildly to whatever location. It's lucky it crashes rather than silently executes whatever code and format his drive.

The fact remains that what he's doing doesn't work, despite what you insist. No one says he should give up doing thread/coroutine stacks. Just his approach is wrong and non-portable. There are better ways to do coroutine.
thanks! I totally missed that in my effort to reclaim some of my time.
Ask HN: Site for creating personal statistics
Hello,

I remember a very nice website which let you create personal statistics about anything you and putting them into nice graphs etc.

Does anyone know the name of the site? I can't remember it.
I agree with the people who are disparaging Windows Server OSes as still being desktop class. Coming from a VMS/VAX background, I feel much the same towards Linux.
Yeah, I could see using it for my Mac Mini, I just wish you could somehow attach it to the wireless keyboard. Having two separate devices on your lap doesn't really work...
I think traditionally, something like Tomcat used to have perhaps 30 threads? Especially with todays Ajax-driven web sites, it is very easy to exhaust them.

I can only point to a stupid app of mine, which triggered Twitter searches for a list of search results via Ajax (so one page of search results would trigger, say, 10 search reguests to Twitter via Ajax, proxied through the server). Since that app was written for a competition and non-commercial, I hosted it on the free Heroku plan (it was a Rails app). That is how I found out that apparently that Heroku plan has only one process, and Rails doesn't use threads. So not only would the search requests to Twitter only be handled sequentially, while those threads were running, no other visitors would get to use the site (the 10 Ajax requests would already use up up to 10 threads, and I had only one).

Just a stupid example - with event based request handling, it would not have been an issue because the search requests to Twitter would not have blocked everything else.
The first public release of Go made little use of physical concurrency, though that's undoubtedly improved considerably given that the model allows for it. His earlier languages didn't go there, probably because they didn't have nearly as many people working on them, and physical concurrency wasn't the focus of the research. Go is more performant and provides more static assurances than the previous iterations, but it still has global GC. Algorithms and Correctness are still the primary focal points.

I find it funny that you're hung up on local physical concurrency — for me that's the prime signifier of "Scaling in the Small"! If you're going to have to distribute your workload across multiple machines, why not just run multiple copies of your single-cpu process on each machine, and let your network-level work distribution mechanism handle it?

We're not talking about shared memory supercomputing using OpenMP and MPI on special network topologies or NUMA hardware, just commodity machines running HTTP app servers in front of data stores. We aren't curing cancer, and our workload is already embarrassingly parallel (responding to discrete requests).

I've actually disabled some intra-request concurrency (some ImageMagick operations are multithreaded by default) on a system I'm working on now because it makes the workload wildly inconsistent — when independent requests try to take advantage of all the available CPUs, the latencies spike for everybody. It's just more software to have to monitor, and the ideal returns are slim.
I'm curious - you say,

"A do-it-yourself wedding invitation kit costs $45, while professional wedding invitations are hundreds or thousands of dollars."

How much of that "hundreds or thousands" is in the actual printing vs. the design + margin?
I don't think the Servlet 3.0 example counts as an example for thread based request handling to be working. After all, it introduces event based request handling to circumvent the problems of threaded event handling.
Nielsen Norman Group Report: Usability of iPad Apps and Websites
I think paper selection is also half the battle. My wife could spend hours on that alone.
If two people do it, it's no longer anti-social.
Nice summing up of past MS strategy.
agreed, what makes DIY wedding stationery look gross isn't just the comic-sans-like amateur designs; it's also about printing quality. a home printer is totally unacceptable; even Kinko's might not be that great if you're picky. you will need to find a professional print shop, which could cost almost as much as professionally-printed stationery :(
Sounds more like Germany or Japan. Though the stops haven't been voluntarily.
Nice idea. We can never have too much disruptive ideas. Wish you find your cofounder.
2010-07-22 spigot pi in asm
Printing is hundreds to over one thousand for normal sane number of invitations. This is for 150x invitation, reply card, envelope, reply envelope. My wife did a barter deal with a printer (did their holiday card and calendar) to get ours printed, and even then they were simple.

Quality printing doesn't scale down (the cost is making the plate).
Excuse my language, but that's bullshit, and it makes me angry.

Firstly, vitamin D deficiency is not the most common medical condition in the world. I don't know what the most common medical problem is, but of serious diseases Hepatitis B affects around 2 Billion people (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0903696.html).

Secondly, even if you believe vitamin D deficiency is a serious problem then you may be surprised to learn about places such as China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria etc etc, all of which have very very large populations well south of the 33rd parallel. In fact, by far the majority of the worlds population lives south of the 33rd parallel north.

Thirdly, where I live (Australia) one of the major causes of death is cancer, specifically skin cancer. I know at least one person who sends her kids out to play in the sun in summer after hearing this (without sunscreen).

In my view Vitamin D deficiency is a minor problem, easily fixed which affects a small number of people. Blowing it up into a major issue has the potential to cause a much bigger problem (skin cancer) in a similar way to how vaccination scares caused public health risk.
Eventually parachutes need to be used. Now, they should work and save you, but why risk it if you don't have to?
Justin.tv is hiring a Head of Communications
Also providing a dampening effect on this transformation, are the weight of both oceans, which are now bearing down at both poles. Water is quite dense, being about 1/3 the density of the earth's top crust. Also, interestingly, it seems like the density and pressure of the atmosphere would be significantly greater at sealevel, especially at the southern hemisphere sealevel, though obviously not much of a factor in crustal transformation.
Mice can’t be made very fast on OS X but trackpads can (I don’t even have the speed all the way cranked up). I don’t know what it is with Apple and mice but their trackpads are pretty great.
Tracy, the company I work for, http://pagedna.com, might be exactly what you're looking for, and will save you having to develop your own system. Check out the Storefronts section http://pagedna.com/features.php?storefronts and the Storefront demo on the Demos page
As a technical person who spent too much on wedding invitations at the last minute, I do think that integration with a printing company would be the killer feature.

Without the printing I would think of this as more of toy than something that would be truly disruptive. One could charge much larger prices for this service with printing and still be competitive especially when factoring in design selection and ease of use.
And that incredibly low standard is also how the FDA set the "recommended daily allowance." Similar things are true for most other vitamins and minerals, as I recall.

Also, D2 causes overdose effects pretty easily, but you can take big multiples of the "RDA" in D3 (I think 10,000 IU/day for months for vitamin D deficiency has been mentioned) for quite a while without overdosing.
Twisted Python, Eventmachine, libevent, boost::asio, NS/CFRunLoop, to name just a few.
Yeah! That would actually be a better value add if the website integrated preferred paper types/styles/weights with the overall template/theme. Would be nice to have a gallery of previously fulfilled orders to see how the finished product came out. Lot's of choices means a great opportunity for artistic expression ; the website should allow this in a guided manner =) I like that.
I'm leaning toward it being fictional simply for the fact that I've never seen a ROMhack that modified the game's engine to anywhere near this extent. Things that would need to be done to a Pokemon Red ROM to make it into this game:

* Adding a "removed" state for pokemon in battle

* Adding the capability to playing sounds and BGM at modified pitch (or storing pre-modified copies of all sounds)

* Adding an "enemy is too scared to move" detection step in the opponent's battle sequence

* Creating the Curse move itself

* Creating a "tombstone" state for enemy trainers

* Adding a menu that appears after battles are over

* Keeping track of all pokemon species and trainers that have been "killed," in order

* Adding extra scenes beyond the end of the game

* Changing the way the battle engine deals with a battle where you have no Pokemon

* Adding an additional trainer-side sprite for the "old man"

* Adding a branch to the overworld music-loading algorithm that would always load the Lavender town music if you are in the endgame

* Adding a step to the map loader that removes all non-tombstoned NPCs if you are in the endgame

Anyone who could have done this at the time in question would likely be a professional Gameboy developer. It could be done more easily nowadays (especially using a Fire Red GBA rom instead) but back then this was complicated work.
That's actually where I'd like the idea to go — partner with a printing company like Moo.com and allow for invite creation and printing all from one application. Got to start somewhere, though.

I didn't put in all my ideas (since I didn't want to do "this idea, and THIS idea, and THIS idea!") but I think a threadless-like crowdsourcing on invitations would be fantastic, and a great tie-in to a Moo.com like printing ability.

I was surprised how many people use kits — I used to be part of a wedding blog where people loved to build their invites and then show everyone else for critiques. And I would cringe everytime I saw someone using italic Times New Roman because they didn't have access to nicer fonts.
To be more explicit about it being "easily fixed", here's a quote:

Asked for a general recommendation, Dr. Holick suggests going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes.

That's all it takes to fix the "problem"
http://daytum.com/ ?
The complexities of scaling Twitter have been pretty thoroughly discussed elsewhere, both by Twitter staff and informed third parties.

At this point in time, I don't really want to comment any further on what issues they may or may not be having. I haven't worked there in over a couple months, and I'll bet that big parts of the system have changed in that time. I'm no longer informed about what's under the hood at Twitter, and I also don't want to second-guess my former coworkers, who I'm sure are doing their best. Sorry!
Definitely where I'd like to go, and I'll probably update my blog post to indicate this (took it out just to keep the idea concrete, but I think that was a bad idea). My original tagline was "Moo.com for wedding invitations".
...which reminds me of a great, funny, true (albeit exaggerated) story:
http://www.snopes.com/humor/nonsense/kangaroo.asp
I can reach any point on the screen with one swipe. I will need at most two if I want to be really precise.

(It’s something you have to get used to, though. When all I had was a desktop I didn’t think I could ever use anything else but a mouse. After I got my ThinkPad I thought I could never manage without a track point. And right now I like my trackpad on my MBP best and would never rather use a mouse [exception: gaming]. Oh, and then there’s the two finger scrolling. Damn precise, better than any mouse wheel I ever used.)
... and I think your synopsis is spot on as well. If someone could counter this, I'd love to hear it.
Right. Thank you very much.
Interesting case of Mismatched Parentheses
It's not so much that I'm "hung up" on local physical concurrency, just that I don't see any reason to ignore easy gains. You can write maintainable, correct, concurrent programs that scale across cores today if you use technologies other than Node. So why wouldn't you?

Anyway, that's a good reply, and your ImageMagick case study is interesting. It just goes to show how individualized "scaling" really is. Thanks for the taking time.
The biggest thing about Windows (and what I think makes it an unavoidably desktop-class environment) is that there's no kernel-level support for alternate filesystems.

The various Unix-likes have a variety of filesystems with a lot of innovation going on. Windows basically just has NTFS, which while ok for the desktop is only going to serve well for some types of servers.
I worked on a team that developed one of the automated chat bot retention systems. Thanks for quoting "AI", as ours was really crude, but at the same level of other offerings. If memory serves, we cycled through basic pattern matches on normalized words to spit out canned replies and coupon codes to catch people leaving a landing page.

This is another one of those things that you'd figure people would hate and be annoyed by, but actually ends up being really effective. A company like ThinkGeek probably couldn't leverage it, but someone running a CPA weight loss offer definitely could. In a large way.
Engadget review:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/27/apple-magic-trackpad-firs...

"It feels just like using a slightly larger version of a MacBook or MacBook Pro pad. And we mean exactly, right down to the multitouch gestures and whole-pad click."
Tenure and Faculty Self-Selection Reconsidered
i hope you're getting a good bonus for that!
Amazon friends Facebook
You say that the industry has "insane profit margins". Have you considered what % of the revenue goes back into marketing? If you're trying to disrupt a space by pricing, you better make sure you can still afford to market at your lower price. If people are making a lot of money then you can bet that the CPC for your keywords are going to be high. So high perhaps that your CPA could exceed $25? At even just $1 CPC you'll need to convert at 4% or higher to turn anything resembling a profit. And the wedding invitation business is unfortunately not a repeat business. You may get referrals, but you'll never get the same customers coming back to buy again.

Just food for thought. Good luck!
Every technical detail you try to provide makes it seem less likely you've ever implemented any of these things.

People targeting Cygwin aren't writing for ARM. They're by and large trying to port Unix code to Win32. Meanwhile: what on earth is your point? He wants to build a language runtime on top of the native stack. You propose that he should find an arch-neutral way to do that? That's silly. This post is from 2005, before you try to muddy the waters with LLVM.

Second, like I said upthread, it's clear that it his code doesn't work. Switching stacks isn't a 2-liner. He hasn't fully implemented the concept. Nobody is arguing that his code properly restores the system stack, because he didn't implement that. What does that have to do with how malloc() initializes buffers? You don't have to provide a valid return address at the end of a synthesized stack; you can just JMP directly back to where you want to rejoin the original code --- where you switch the stack back.

The x86 stack isn't "double-indirected" through EBP. EBP is where the compiler arranges to store the base of the stack frame. C code works just fine without it; you simply fix up ESP in the function epilogue. All you lose by doing so (besides negligible overhead) is the ability to trivially dump stack traces.

Why don't you tell us how you, in 2005, would have implemented portable native-stack execution of a high level language? (Note that we're using "threaded" in two very different ways, a fact made all the more confusing by some guy on that thread's insistence that he should spawn a thread every time he needs a new stack).

For what it's worth, I'm not super comfortable tit-for-tatting your comment, except that this whole thread is about a bunch of people pooping on someone who asked for help, and many of the principles being espoused on that thread are simply bogus. I think people felt like they could be puffed-up and self-righteous because they had cover from Korn's original post. And right now, I think that about you too.
Apple continues to move the Mac closer to the iPhone and the iPad
The question is not really economy, but whether inflated prices cause us to erroneously believe it is a superior product.

That would be a very interesting trial. I haven't even the faintest clue how you would determine whether the scent was causing the man to smell sexy vs good/pleasant though. Or maybe those are one in the same, I don't know.
Nice project. I'll be putting this script on my sites for sure.

At first glance though, I didn't like that it translated the content of <pre> and <code> tags, so here's my quick fix for that.

TranslateThis({onLoad: function(){
// avoids <pre> and <code> tags
var nt= function(el){el.className+=" notranslate";};
var pres= document.getElementsByTagName('pre');
var codes= document.getElementsByTagName('code');
for(var i=0; i<pres.length; i++) { nt(pres[i]); }
for(var i=0; i<codes.length; i++) { nt(codes[i]); }
}});
I have a feeling that hiring al3x is one of the few reasons that Twitter didn't collapse into a heap of cetacean corpses.

Twitter's original codebase started as a "my first blog" tutorial in Rails — the polar opposite of a messaging platform. That's a hell of a ship to turn around, especially live on the world stage while the userbase and datastore are growing exponentially and you're rapidly approaching the second half of the chessboard.

Facebook both very intentionally limited their growth (new colleges) and avoided their most expensive features (like photos) for as long as possible. Flickr was originally an open-ended MMO/MUD based on user-contributed content called Game NeverEnding, which was far harder to scale than the photo-sharing feature in their chat client that was extracted to base their final business on.