skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I respectfully disagree. The only place they come close is a late 90's huge disk arrays, but random access to SSD arrays are amazing and once you start looking at things like L2 cache bandwidth old mainframes start looking anemic.

Edit: An 1980 IBM 3081 could access up to 32 megabytes of main memory. A 5400-series "Harpertown" can have 24 megabytes of cache. So Modern CPU cache memory vs Mainframe main memory is not an unfair comparison. But that's just overkill the real shocker is 3081 had less bandwidth to it's registers than many modern computers have to it's local network. (It was below 40MHz and consumed 23 kilowatts of power).

PS: Feel free to post some actual numbers.
Using Your iPad With Your Mac / PC – to Help You Focus
your "improved" version illegally modifies 'i' twice in the same statement; its results are undefined.
Well, it's mostly factored into the price; IBM's mainframe division isn't that big a secret.

But like most "blue chips", IBM is probably a reasonably solid income stock. They have an obvious income stream (software licensing) with a locked-in market, in addition to their consulting/services divisions.

Whether or not it's too much to pay for the income (compared to similar companies with license-based revenue models, i.e. Microsoft) is the question for a potential investor. I'm not sure anyone would regard it as a hot speculative play...
There's a lot the government could do (and some things it already does), but unfortunately, everything can be manipulated - and if it can be manipulated, it will be manipulated.

Perhaps the most effective thing would be to only give Title IV funding to programs whose students reach a minimum 'employed in the field' percentage a certain period of time after graduation. Hard to police and implement, but most directly relevant.

Simpler to implement would be a reduction in the overall percentage of revenue an institution can get from Title IV programs, which would force the institutions to either reduce tuition or deliver an education valuable enough to satisfy a private-sector lender.
Congratulations, you win the Most Misleading Headline of the Day prize!
This was invented 48 years ago; would relevant patents have expired by now? What would prevent other companies from also manufacturing this glass?
With good unit testing C is very robust and also much cheaper in hardware footprint.
And you could save an additional character by changing the loop test to a+b form, i.e.:

int i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x+98;)i*=!++x[i++];

The other array references are l-values.
Agreed. But note that it's more like a textbook rather than an inspirational read. Don't expect to "finish" over a few bathroom breaks (unlike rework (which is great also (but more "easy"))).

If you search for Steve Blanks course notes, you can read the first 3 chapters for free. If you buy the book, it comes with handy dandy worksheets (as well as the rest of the book).
Questions about what to read have been asked and answered quite a bit on Reddit. You might find these reading lists worthwhile: http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/programming#Whatprogrammingb...
Also see this blog post: Logical operators in Perl and Ruby http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2007/06/02/logical-operators-in...
I think there's probably a few factors involved:

1. Writing completely solid, fully debugged software is Not Sexy, which is why Linux is getting shinier and shinier but the software still has bugs.

2. You and I have probably been spoiled by working with Unix. Now, I've never used an IBM mainframe, but I have used VMS, which is definitely more businesslike than Unix. Working with VMS feels like going to the DMV. Imagine how it would feel to be living in a mainframe world, right out of IBM's most conservative, straight-laced era--because I'm gonna bet you wouldn't be able to play as fast and loose if you had mainframe-style fault tolerance.
Email Sent
"For example (and there are many), vim folks make their lives quickly easier by using (book)marks and macros; compare the key combos for these in vim to the ones in emacs, and you will see one reason why emacs editing is, by default, slower."

Could you provide a concrete example? I'm not trolling, I never used vi but I use emacs a lot and find emacs macros very useful and powerful.
I'd like to hear more about this if you have a chance. rcavezza [at] gmail [dot] com
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive.

Twitter didn't really know what problem they were solving. They may be a bit of a special case. But they built something they felt was usable and launched it.

If you look at the Twitter launch at SXSW it was all about where people were going and how the band was. It fit very well into that model.

At the time, twitter didn't have search, they didn't even build their own search, somebody else did (summize) and Twitter bought them. They didn't know about trending, they didn't know that business would make up the bulk of their publishers (my suspicion, correct me if I'm wrong). They didn't know that the majority of their revenue would come from selling access to the firehose of real-time data.

So, you have to build for the now, and you have to respond to the future.

Facebook wouldn't be what it is today if they had just built for their 'now' which was initially putting the college facebook online. They did that, and kept iterating for the future.
If you are a company outside of the EU (like the US) make sure you mention that you are VAT exempt so they don't charge you for that.
http://www.thrustvps.com/vps/advancedvps/
I remember one example was that you can go to maps.google.com and click on a phone icon, and it just sends it straight to your phone which opens a map in the same place

That's in Android 2.2...which my phone (HTC Evo 4G) is supposed to be getting today!
Since Tumblr is currying favor among a young crowd, it could prove valuable for traditional companies and media outlets that are trying to build a relationship with that audience.

This terrifies me. I'd consider myself a tumblr veteran, having built a number of themes and using the service loyally for quite some time-I don't think they'd "sell out", but the idea of all these large companies invading the space, just to say they have a presence in social media, and to push up on me and my friends so they can be "close to our generation" bugs me, it almost cheapens the entire experience.
I'll say VERY good things about RescueTime's VC (True Ventures) but, then again they oftentime invest a lot like Angels do.

I don't think VC is dead (for consumer or otherwise). As recently as 3 years ago, Facebook's prospects of revenue were jokeworthy. Now their targeted ads aren't much cheaper than adwords. Twitter's revenue prospects right now are also in the "laughable" category (yeah yeah, they did make money last year on some bizdev deals).

Without VC money, these services would never reach the scale where these revenue ideas could take form.
Aschwin says it's a reasonable request and he knows they've got those and he'll see if he can make them available. I'll reply again when/if the info is available. Any particular way in which I should contact you, if this conversation goes stale?
I have a macbook, mac mini, iPad and formerly used an iPhone. iTunes was the worst part of that.

I agree that iTunes is terrible, but for some reason, he loves it. I can't figure out why. But I think there are more people like him than there are like you or me.
What is sexy today is tomorrow's "ancient" legacy technology. And once you've been in the business for a decade or so, you start seeing the old ideas coming around again, cloaked in some new names, with a lot of newbie fans excited about how sexy it is.
I don't Doctors without a liberal education. Most of them are narrow-thinking enough as it is.
I think you might have it a little bit backwards. You need a fair amount of focus and self-motivation to complete a PhD. If you already are having issues with this, starting a PhD would be like giving a crack addict access to a large, cheap supply of crack.

A lot of it will also depend on your advisor. A more hands-off advisor will certainly mean trouble for you, as the required pressure to keep you focused will not be there. Finally, conference deadlines are the other big motivator for PhD students. If you don't think that would help focus you, then you'll be setting yourself up for failure (and possibly depression).

Also, I'm not sure how feasible it is to do a "part-time" PhD. That might work with a master's where it's almost exactly like bachelor's part 2, but a PhD is more of an all-or-nothing endeavor. The one exception I know of is for people starting/spinning-off companies based on their research. Even there, it's a lot of work, and I personally find it very hard to maintain good forward progress in both at the same time.
When starting off you can combine the two. Many startups do this. Find a person who has started his/her career in sales and eventually moved into Marketing.
Stack overflow for large n.
The way we got our name was pretty silly, and it happened in under a minute, so I'll share the story. My co-founder and I build apps, so we decided we should include the word 'app' in our name. I also tend to love company names with animals in them, so I had the idea to append an animal on the end. My co-founder held up our pet rat, and now we are AppRats.

We were initially concerned that people would be turned off by the word 'rat', as they occasionally are when we mention what type of pet we have. But as it turns out, most people really love the name, and they definitely remember us. Furthermore, being 'rats' completely describes our nature, as we are scrappy, extremely resilient, and making the most of the few resources we have.

The lesson we think applies here is that if you build your brand to reflect yourself, do what you do best, and make your customers happy, things generally work out pretty well.
Thanks for the link looks useful.

<i>"Also, if you're hoping that what you have at the end of a Ph.D. will be ready for end users..."</i>

I have been writing production code for a living for the last 6 years so that doesn't bother me. If other contribute then yes it's likely it wouldn't be production ready. To be honest I don't expect anything that comes out of a phD to be ready for end users without considerable work with a different focus. I think to even get that far will be a great achievement for me.

The commitment on top of a full time job is my biggest concern. I think I would be taking quite a lot of leave to concentrate on research full time.
Yes, or: "Meet Facebook and Twitter’s New Rival: Tumblr".

But, maybe the headline-writer was intentionally vague. People who already know about Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter might be more likely to click if they thought the article was about a new fourth company, competing with all of them.

In the old world, where you'd already bought a magazine or newspaper, the incentives of headline-writers and readers were more aligned. Sure, the headline should be interesting --- but also accurate in a way that saved the customer's time. Only the front-covers as shown on newsstands -- before the purchase decision -- needed spin to steal attention.

Now, every single click is a sort of 'purchase decision', and every headline subject to the perverse incentives of the newsstand, where the reader's time is something to be stolen. Sometimes confusing people gets more traffic than informing them -- so we get intentionally misleading or inflammatory headlines.

Anyone want to collaborate on a web service that re-headlines links to curb attention-grabbing abuse?
Then the better comparison is Fedora - while support contracts exist for OpenSolaris (whose last version was actually supposed to be 2010.03, but which was cancelled), very few people use them and Sun/Oracle will encourage you to use, and train for, Sol 10.
Trade secrets most likely. It would be cloned eventually, but Corning would have a lock on the market while other companies did their R&D.
The video says that when the bus has to turn, it will turn on the red light for the lanes under it that is not turning with it.
probably nothing. But to get to market when your competitor has 48 years on you and has the ability to ramp up production extremely quickly kind of takes the wind out of your sails if you know what I mean.
I have a math B.S. and have had absolutely no problem getting a job... Perhaps if that's you're only skill it might be difficult?
I think it's crazy to assert that VCs are dead because companies like UrbanSpoon and Xobni, both of which required little more than time and some basic infrastructure to start, are not good candidates for VCs.

Companies once backed by VCs - Google, Intel, Cisco, etc. - make up a significant chunk of the American GDP. In all of those cases, it is obvious that they required significant up-front investments in infrastructure to break even. For example, Google required a vast server farm to index the web. Cisco and Intel required resources to manufacture and sell complex physical products.

Consumer-facing products that do trivial things that spread mostly by word-of-mouth - like recommend a restaurant in your area or search your email - are not good candidates for multi-million dollar, early-stage VC funding. They are too easy to bootstrap, and I think the impression many would-be entrepreneurs have that they need to raise oodles in venture cap is a holdover from the dotcom era they missed out on.

In these cases, Y Combinator and the rest are much better options if you do need enough cash in the meantime to, for example, provide enough Ramen to feed your team of 3 college students.
If the iPhone is stuck in the past, then Android devices are stuck in the future. It would be nice if I could transfer all my data from an Android device directly to my computer without having to send it to any third parties. iTunes may certainly be a bloated, unwieldy piece of software, but it offers some powerful functionality missing from the Android platform.

As for A2DP stereo over BlueTooth, the iOS platform now supports that as well, though there may still be some limitations that make it less practical than the Android equivalent (possibly a lack of standardized method for controlling the music playback via BlueTooth - not sure if that's been added yet).
Should net you a well-paid job, presuming that you have the usual ten years experience in it.
Designers always get pissed about competitions. They call it "spec work", for "speculative". They have a lot of specific complaints:

* It requires them to trust the content-holder to honor the contest and not just take the best idea and farm it out to someone cheaper.

* It allows unscrupulous clients to harvest good ideas, for free, from lots of designers and feed them to the contest winner.

* It forces designers to do work they won't get paid for if they don't get selected.

* It prevents designers from getting to know the client and figuring out how best to deliver the project.

* It opens the project up to non-professional designers who are just as likely to have stolen design components as to have built them for the project.

Some of these arguments make sense (I wouldn't hold a contest after seeing how a bunch of them went). But a lot it has more to do with a privileged position designers want to create for their field. In virtually every other field, some form of what a designer would call "spec work" is the norm. Lawyers do consults. Consultants offer advice in the run-up to a large project. Building a proposal might take 1-2 full-time weeks of work, and your hit rate on those might not be better than 50%.
One major advantage of a mainframe vs commodity built clusters with similar capacity is internal bandwidth. With clusters, you are limited by your network speed. A high end ethernet based network is about 10Gbit, and you can reach higher with specialty hardware like Infiniband, but then you're no longer using commodity components. Within a mainframe your interprocess bandwidth is limited only by your bus speed. Problems that things like memcached are meant to solve are no longer a concern.
"...Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla."

My guess is that "tweaking" is covered by new patents, although anyone should be able to produce the original Chemcor now.
The integration point for Google's stuff is the cloud, not physical devices

That may be part of the problem with loyalty to Android. If everything is in the cloud, there is nothing tying me to a Google device. When I got my Android phone, I put in my Google account and got all of my contacts from Gmail and Google Voice, etc., but that is nothing new, as I had the same thing on Windows Mobile, and I could get the same thing on iPhone. When you get an iPhone, on the other hand, you have to create an iTunes account, and all the apps you buy, and all the backups for your phone happen there. It makes it easy to get another iPhone, or iPad, or iPod Touch, but it is harder to switch to Android or another platform.
This was posted to HN before. The comments on that were basically, it's been done before, and wasn't economical/safe. Keep in mind, you still have to spend energy to accelerate the cars, and there are a lot of safety issues introduced by the extra complexity.
At this point, Ballmer's made so many terrible and crazy "predictions" that I find it hard to believe he actually means them -- it's like he feels obligated to slam every potential MS competitor or he's showing weakness.
I wouldn't know what the margin is in this business but I assume you buy a bit over the capacity, specifically to allow new customers to come in.

Perhaps setup fees /kinda/ make sense if you are some high-quality name in the business and people will know they are staying long-term. But if I see a well-known company without setup fees and your company with a setup fee it won't take long to decide.

What you mentioned is far more decent: a bonus for payment in advance but I don't see how they expect to charge me the equivalent of 3 months in advance just to test them out.
This trend was pretty easy to spot. Almost 6 months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129465

The problem is that developers are making a lot more money on iPhone apps. I've heard several developers complaining that their apps don't sell on Android. Will this eventually change?
I think you've just nailed it down: Haskell is for mathematicians, or those mathematically oriented.

Most programmers are not mathematicians (especially self-taught ones) since at the end of the day common programming tasks don't require you to know advanced math (I'm not implying knowledge wouldn't be very beneficial).
The logic for and/or vs. &&/|| is borrowed directly from Perl. It makes sense once you use them for a bit.
It's not really about cost, although that's part of it. I didn't mention it in my original question, but I also need quite a bit more performance than I'm getting with EC2.

It's about getting an order of magnitude more CPU ( Quad ore at 3 Ghz rather than single compute instance on EC2, which is spec'd at a single core 1.0 to 1.2 Ghz Opteron or Xeon from 2007. Ref: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#What_is_an_EC2_Compute_Unit_.... I need the extra CPU for what I'm doing.

But, the killer feature for me is about getting several orders of magnitude better on disk IO by using SSD's. I'm doing a ton of relational queries for my site, and the IO speeds on EC2 are killing me. Linode or Rackspace Cloud might be a bit faster than EC2, but the speed differential between SSD's and rotating disk is huge.

Running my datastore off of SSD's rather than spinning disks allows me to stick with postgres as my db. While sexy and quite fun, I'm very leery of choosing a NoSQL solution. I really don't want to spend the extra development time bolting the relational features I need onto a non-relational database.

So, while it might take me time maintaining the server, it's going to save me a crap load of time.
It totally depends on the use you plan for the DB.

For a DataWarehouse, you probably want to de-normalize the DB if you expect good performance when calculating those cubes.
Creating a Ruby Evaluator Editor With Cocoa
Well, a friend of mine writes software for mainframes. Says, the platform has two advantages: customers are totally locked in and there are enormous possibilities for kickbacks (no market => no fair price => case-by-case pricing => guess what)
Otherwise, the technology is totally inferior, compared to anything.
Emotional Branding - From Consumers to People
I don't Doctors without a liberal education. Most of them are narrow-thinking enough as it is.

Would a liberal education really change a Doctor's mind? Seriously?

Most of them are just hodgepodge of fact for doctors to remember and then forget when they get their degrees.
In the same vein, though sometimes with less detail:

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/perl/news/success_stories.h...

O'Reilly also published some of these in at least two folded/stapled pamphlets that were handed out for free e.g. at conferences. I recall a finance-centered application where the Perl prototype far outperformed the subsequent implementation and ended up taking over the production role.

It looks like maintenance at that URL stopped in about 2004, but in googling "perl success stories" I saw a few more recent articles that might qualify.
Those numbers for future purchases are pretty interesting, particularly if you consider where they lead. If those numbers hold relatively steady, then it suggests that Blackberry is doomed to drop below 10% of the installed base, and that Android won't ever be able keep hold of an installed base even one third the size of the iPhone's.

In reality, a platform declining as steeply as Blackberry will probably accelerate it's decline until their only remaining customers are those who are locked-in, unless they can make their phones much more enticing before they've lost too many customers.
Too much text on the front page. Links that are there are not intuitive (IMO links should always be underlined or atleast a different color). I agree with what the others are saying about the site design. I would also suggest you lose the images on the top of the page. What really threw me off was the passphrase required while logging on.
'When you create your account, you are requested to enter a passphrase. This works in a similar way to a password, except you are not expected to enter the whole word when logging on. Instead, you are to enter specific characters of that single word as requested by the 3 boxes displayed at the login screen.'
Why would you do that to your users?
so ?

there is a 100MB extern drive accessible via FTP, and rsync is your friend

at the very worst, when your server is on a 100MBps link then it's dirt cheap (in time and money) to do the backup on the cloud
You are right. But there are two outcomes I think are likely. The ++ could happen either before or after the * . Under either outcome the loop is finite in theory but not practice.

The possibility that I consider unlikely, of course, is that I've broken some assumption that causes the compiler to optimize cause an entirely undefined third behavior (such as crashing). Then the outcome is undefined. That is the kind of implementation detail that code golf often brushes against. I'm not sure whether a solution that includes that possibility but which happens to work on, say, gcc is considered legal.

But that suggests the following unambiguous form:

int i,x[99];for(x[98]=i=1;x[98];)i*=!++x[++i];