skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 2x performance difference means 1000ms instead of 500ms to load a
page ... It's also the difference between 30 fps in a game vs. 15 fps - that
is really noticeable.

You don't know what you're talking about ...

In web apps it really depends on where your bottleneck is. A 2x performance difference could mean just a 5% difference in response time.

On the other hand, go ahead and try handling 100.000+ connections on a single server from C/C++, like these dudes right here ... http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19456

Of course it can be done, but you'll need to read a whole book about it, and at the end of the day your app also has to do something useful other than returning "Hello".

And as game development goes, game developers have been using high-level languages for the business logic for years, including Lua, Python, Java and C#.

The responsiveness is also part of what attracts users

True, but I'll bet I can get better responsiveness in Java than you can in C/C++.
> continent-sized penal colony in Australian

Highly inaccurate.

Accurate : 4 or small 5 penal settlements in a vastly empty continent with only a few hundred thousand native inhabitants started the colonies of Australia. The main reasons for convict settlement in Australia were (a) the loss of the USA in the revolutionary war and, as such, the need for new colonial holdings to offset this loss, and (b) the need to establish a permanent settlement on the continent to cement the claim made 18 years earlier by Captain Cook. It's a little known fact that a French expeditionary force also landed in modern-day Sydney the day after the 'first fleet' landed and erected the Union Jack.

Tiny numbers of convicts (164,000) were transported over a 80 year period from 1788. This is against estimates of the England/Wales population of 8.5 million people, and you can see that transportation wasn't really a useful way of reducing the English population - certainly not as such a great expense when execution was just as effective and a whole lot cheaper (and regularly handed out by magistrates)

Also compare the convict numbers to numbers of people arriving for the Gold rush - 370,000 in 1852 alone - and you can see that while Convicts make for a great story, they really aren't a large part of the story.

So the true story of Australia was that it's foundation as a European colony were more to do with establishing new colonies after the loss of the revolutionary war than it was in reducing english population. The shipping of convicts merely met two aims simultaneously : establishing a colony with forced labour and removing the eyesore prison hulks being used as prisons. It didn't meaningfully help in reducing the overpopulation or unemployment in England. That was eventually solved by free immigration in large numbers to both Australia and the USA/Canada.
So lets define it, its a tool.
5 Myths About Philadelphia’s ‘Blogging Tax’
I get the impression that some undergraduates at some colleges do get good coaching and mentorship, and I would like to hear from other HN participants if they know of examples of that.
That's not what positive/negative right means, but OK. I doubt that many people would agree that theft is bad because someone is on your land. Theft is bad because someone is taking something away from you, and you'd otherwise be able to use the thing, and now you have to buy or make a new one. If I dropped my bag on the street and somebody takes it that's still theft, and the reason why it's bad is because I want to have that bag, not because I don't like it when somebody touches my bag.

If you put a crack of my software online I effectively don't own that software anymore, because I can't use it anymore in the way I was (selling it). So perhaps it's more similar to destruction of property. You could say that I shouldn't have expected to be able to sell the software in the first place, but that's not true because copyright law gives me that right. Whether you think that copyright law should be removed/changed or not, while the law is still in place making a crack is effectively the same as destroying my property.
Google News gets gamed by a crappy content farm
Except they don't really have it working. http://pivotallabs.com/talks/107-diaspora (the first 30 min is stories about how they met and what they did in school, you can skip that)
The original Mac had a 64K ROM. It's unbelievable what they packed in there. They used a lot of tricks to do it that are only possible in assembly.
I've used iPhones and my HTC Incredible seems faster and more responsive.
Interview with founder of Cult of Less (German)
Could be LTE and not CDMA2000, since Qualcomm plays there:

http://www.qualcomm.com/products_services/airlinks/lte.html
I liked this list because it includes more books that I haven't read (and a few I hadn't heard of before today) than the last several lists like this posted to HN. The books look solid (I know of some of the authors) and the topics are well chosen.
Technically, you don't have to show and ID when using a credit card and they can't require it. See here: http:http://consumerist.com/2008/07/10-things-you-might-not-know-...
My comment wasn't about Germany, but about countries which don't take influence from other countries in their own decision making. The United States could swallow some pride and seriously research and adopt policies that work in other countries rather than dismissing them immediately because that idea/method came from somewhere else (drug laws come to mind).
i think op is making a good point - there is nothing more to science than computed minus measured equals error

what a scientist does is to make a model which is the computed than she makes measurements and obtains errors - the error or the residuals - is the knowledge

people may call computeds -theory -model -hypothesis -framework and similar words but the process is always the same

for instance ptolemaic theory is a mathematical framework that results in very good residuals which means that ptolemaic model saves the naked eye observations very well

if as the op writes an experiment generates -40 terabytes of raw data per second- you still have to model it and obtain residuals

but the real interesting problem facing contemporary science is that now what is -computed- and what is -measured- are no longer clearly separated
Well RoR has got good libraries for image manipulation, OAuth (note that AppEngine doesn't have OAuth built in), OpenID and Memcache.

Blobstore really only exists to work around the lack of file access in AppEngine.

The pricing is something of an advantage, but don't choose it on that alone. If you know Java (or Python) already then it's worth using, but it's probably not going to give you enough of an advantage to switch platform.
PG about to speak at Facebook, partnership announcement to follow
They are certainly trying to make it as secure as possible. It is open source, they've held at least one contest to try to break the security of it (http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/faq.ht...), it is running inside a sandbox with limited permissions, etc.

While it is always risky to introduce anything new, that is a price we pay for progress. And that is true for anything - at this point, I don't think using it would be too much more risky than using a new javascript engine, for example. Aside from never trying anything new, what else can we hope for?

Also, I will point out that even in the dev channel it is still disabled by default. So there is some time yet for the security to be evaluated, to see if there are any endemic problems.
"Art Is Like Masturbation. Design Is Like Sex."
Personally, when I see yet another blog about startups, I won't subscribe to it unless it is very different from what I'm already getting. So how is it different from the popular blogs in this space?
I hope you know that Facebook is also coded in php... Do you use it?
Yeah, it's federated server software. It's meant to be run by people who provide a hosted environment for users.

In other words, it's software for anyone who wants to run their own facebook-like site. Except that all the sites running it connect to each other.

Once it's out of beta, most users will just go to a sign up page of any number of nodes out there (I think there's like 50 out there already? I'm not sure)
Is HN soon going to act as the product development group of the big guns like google, facebook? Or maybe pg has convinced facebook to port over to arc ?
If their goal is a distributed social network, then going with PHP makes sense since it's the best for normal people that will want to host the project somewhere.
Even small private aircraft have GPS chart plotting terrain avoidance these days
what do you believe is the different between a theory and a thought experiment?
A lot of the biggest sites on the web are coded in PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia, and Digg.
I've been reading that blog for a little while now and strongly recommend it to anyone who cares about e-book formats and how Apple's iBooks renders stuff. Liza goes into crazy detail about which tricks and workarounds work with iBooks, right down to putting in videos and custom fonts.
Pinging the location of your cell phone is a capability used by police without a warrant (in some jurisdictions) that is not available to the general public.
The LudumDare developer that impressed many folks the other day was using Eclipse!
Security has been a focus of NaCl from the outset. It uses a sandbox security model built around a restricted set of "native code". The aim was to make NaCl apps verifiable from a security stand point.

Chris Rohlf from Matasano did a great blog post, The Security Implications Of Google Native Client, that compares the NaCl approach to ActiveX and Java -- and included beautiful diagrams to boot! Unfortunately the images appear to be broken on the Matasano blog [1] but I've found a PDF'd version [2] that contains them in all their glory.

The post came out of the Matasano team's entry in the Native Client Security Contest [3] that Google held early last year. The Matasano team ended up taking second place behind Mark Dowd / Ben Hawkes [4]. All those guys are 'rockstars' in the security industry.

So, Google has thought deeply and tried hard when designing NaCl's security. They a care enough and are switched on enough to run a security contest that was well received by the industry (rare). A number of mega-brains-on-sticks found issues back in May '09 -- hopefully they have all been addressed.

It looks to me that Google has done a good job at learning from past mistakes when implementing NaCl and it should be different. No doubt there will be further security issues found but then again, name a framework that is free from flaws?

[1] http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2009/8/27/the-security-i...

[2] http://beefchunk.com/documentation/security/the_security_imp...

[3] http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/index-...

[4] http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/index....
Does anyone know the status of side/vertical tab bar in Chrome? Last time I looked it was incomplete and did not work in OS X.

I would really like to switch but I miss treestyle tab in Firefox.
See Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Graham speaking at facebook
iTunes could perform liposuction (seriously, `man 1 lipo`) on the app bundle when transferring to the device.
On the other hand, go ahead and try handling 100.000+ connections on a single server from C/C++, like these dudes right here ... http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19456*

This doesn't really help make your point. With libev or libevent, it's very easy to do this in C or C++... or Perl, or Java, or Python, or Ruby. The OS does all the heavy lifting and the OS is native code.
Agree wholeheartedly. Many of the design choices in Scala strike me as simultaneously elegant and pragmatic. It's the pragmatism which has driven me to study it more closely than Haskell.

This article has taken a complex example of typing out of context and extrapolated that to general usage of the language. That's bullshit. Most Scala is quite simple.
I haven't used an iPhone enough to really know for sure. But the premise that "using a VM will make it impossible to have a usable phone" is obviously false.
The problem historically with plug-in PDF readers was that the Adobe one was very slow. That seems to be fixed now - though I can't tell if the software is better or I just use faster hardware.
Glibc is now Free Software
Google Alerts is really old. I went through my emails today and came across some alerts I received way back in 2007 or so.

I think it is a fairly good service, but, I think I stopped using it because it all got to be a bit too much information. I just did not need it.

I suppose real time search is an awesome tool for a researcher though, especially the ability to go back in time and see how the conversation developed, if, that is, such conversations span years.
Am stuck in a location where I cant listen to the feed. Any transcripts for this would be appreciated.
It is possible to write very cryptic scala code. Mine isn't, but neither was my perl.
Use DirectWrite.
You're right; but I think uprooting the persuasion from its source kills it. Steve didn't use that technique because it was persuasive; he used it because that's what he saw. After that calligraph class that connected so deeply, I bet he became aware of curved corners everywhere; and hated that computers rendered everything squarely... so when he saw fast curves, he grabbed it by the neck. When questioned, he probably spluttered "b-b-but look! all around you! can't you see?!" It's not a persuasion technique; but simply sharing the reality he saw.

Uproot it from reality and use it in isolation, and it has no life in it to persuade. Therefore: improve at seeing, not persuading.

(He'd have been more savvy at persuasion techniques if he'd complimented the poor guy first.)
English:
http://bit.ly/bA8aHm
Great to hear that they have a solid team of advisors and that they are putting the user experience first. With open-source I am always a bit concerned that design and experience are secondary. Diaspora has a great story going on right now, I hope the product will continue that with the same spirit and capture people's imaginations.
I think it's an awesome post - really inspiring and narrates perfectly what you guys are doing with the company and the technology.
Why? I know better what type of font smoothing works best on my hardware!
so is billing address for my protection or theirs? because if it's for mine, I would prefer it to be globally optional.
It's also available in book form as Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. It's always better to step away from the computer for a quick, inspirational read!
ActiveX never had a sandbox. They didn't even try to safely run untrusted binaries. "Safe for scripting" merely meant the author claimed the control was designed not to do horrible things to your system even if invoked by a malicious script on a web page.
I mean for my applications, not just for things i want to write for myself.
Capitalism 4.0: Lots of Creation, Not Enough Destruction
This setting gives control to the designer to affect perceived text weight (which for one, allows sites to render more consistently on Windows and OS X). You might not like it, but I have a hard time seeing it as so heinous that it is worth excoriating
"How quickly we forget the ravages of disease"
I majored in English and went to Clark University (http://www.clarku.edu -- a lot of people haven't heard of it), where I think I got a lot of mentorship and connected with my professors. That might be because I took a lot of time to seek them out or because Clark is a small liberal school, but I think the larger issue is that most, though not all, professors will offer mentorship/guidance to the extent the students seek it out.

Now I'm a grad student at the University of Arizona, and I tell my students the same thing most of the time: if they want to go beyond whatever is required in class, they should start by showing up in their professors' office hours, ideally with somewhat smart questions or comments. Most professors will, I think, respond well to this, and will often give recommendations on books to read and/or projects to work on. A few days ago I taught pg's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known," and students glommed onto this paragraph (http://paulgraham.com/hs.html):

A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.

Very true: professors are a good place to find this. If you read whatever books they recommend and go talk to them about those books afterwords, I think that coaching and mentorship kinds of relationships will probably form, even at big state schools. Professors are often interested in you to the extent that you are interested in the subject they are interested in.

Obviously, there are exceptions, but most of the time this principle works reasonably well. But very few people follow it. If you (not the OP -- a general "you") show up in office hours say "mentor me!" you're probably not going to get much. But if you show up and ask questions x, y, and z, then read whatever the prof recommends, then come back, you'll probably have a much better shot.
I really don't understand why the big image on the homepage of AdGrok has a link to itself. Is there a purpose to it or just got left there somehow? :)
Redis gets another Admin GUI
Unfortunately it's a pretty poor recording thus far. Not very good audio and I can't seem to see Mark or PG.
Social From the Ground Up
Hansen: "Our planet is close to climate tipping points"?
Perhaps.

If they're smart, they'll wait until we annihilate ourselves or destroy our planet, and then walk right in. Less resources will be expended on their side.

If they do come, and don't have an ability to morph into beings like ourselves, people will crap all over themselves and the government will probably try to nab them.

Who knows what would happen. If they are out there, and I believe they are, and they do come, I hope they're cool and don't just wipe everyone out and start over. I also don't fancy being a pet.
> Let's see some numbers. Oh, here are some

Those are not numbers for "virtual machines on telephones".

They are numbers for Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM on a quad-core machine.
I also really like Martin's book, but I wish he would have done more to cut down on the complexity of his language. "Being productive" doesn't just mean that you can write in a language, you also have to be able to read someone else's code and understand what it's doing. Scala's complexity and malleability make it hard for me to read compared to, say, F# which has similar goals to Scala. The title of this blog post is flame bait, but I think there is a kernel of truth in what he has to say.
Announced: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/405
Sorry, I came in a bit late. Anybody care to summarize the major points?
I suspect that up voting recommendations for Petzold's book became a Pavlovian reflex on me. That is a very well written book.
Solar Activity affects decay rates and can provide warning of Solar Flares
Or a slightly more direct translation is:

result = if baz > 10
foo
else
bar
end
Humans Drove Cave Bear To Extinction?
Facebook To Begin Giving Y Combinator Startups VIP Treatment
And nothing on software engineering, testing, image & signal processing, numerical methods, ...
Partnership is 1. instant personalization 2. fb credits 3. fb dev access

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/405

(hat-tip: andrewacove)
I too think this will be key. If I can "remote control" Facebook through Diaspora, I will switch in a heartbeat. If I can't experience the same level of interaction as Facebook with the same number of people, I'll still probably switch, but gradually stop using it, I'm sure.
The reason I started the blog was because I started to get sick of the larger more popular startup blogs. They focused too much on the big deals with companies raising millions of dollars in later rounds of financing. They also focused on larger sites like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc and the new features they are adding.

I couldn't find any blogs that focused on the small guys raising seed funding, so I started my own. I want to offer interviews and insights from smaller startups (less than 10 people) and stories of how they went from an idea to building a company.
1000 a day is actually pretty low. Once you find out what your CPA is and your lifetime customer value you simply look at your profit sheet and write a cheque to google for the full amount if you make a profit within say 10 months.

Yes, that's reality. Google takes 100% of profits in exchange for promise of more profits to take 100% of. Yes I want to be in their business rather then mine too.
No?

How about hand-made pixel-based fonts? Or how about some of the sub-pixel fonts out there: http://typophile.com/node/61920
Upgrading to Windows 7 isn't Cheap: Gartner
Encounter is a pretty vague term. Do I think we'll have meaningful conversation with Aliens any time in the next thousand years? Probably not. Hubble can see billions of light years out at this point meaning if something was within a couple hundred light years of us we'd probably know about it.

There could be societies far more advanced than ours since our sun didn't show up for about 10 billion years into the Universe's life. Those societies may be able to travel faster than light. But even if that is true they'd need to find us and I consider that unlikely. Because while traveling faster than light may be possible it doesn't change the facts that (a) the universe is huge and (b) light still only travels at light speed so you can't see things in real time. So even if they could get to us they wouldn't know where to look.

What's interesting to me is we might get to see the beginnings of one of these civilizations. Since we're basically looking billions of years into their past we might see another civilization long before we can do anything about it.
The biggest difference between Python and Ruby is in the mindset of the developers that choose them.

I think of Ruby and Python as two languages standing back-to-back in the same spot, mostly unaware of each other, greeting developers who come from different directions.
> follows link through to the "good article"

Bleh. Why do people like non-subpixel-rendered fonts? There's so much less clarity. If you don't like the increased weight, then lower the weight, not the AA. At least the main article gets the point.
Explaining how subpixel rendering technically works seems like the worst possible argument against something that exists purely for aesthetics. Just because something is more technically complicated does not make it a better option.

There are plenty of situations in which things are far less readable using subpixel rendering. Examples:

WITH subpixel: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Your_Dashboard_-_GitHub-...
WITHOUT subpixel: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Your_Dashboard_-_GitHub-...

Furthermore, so long as the fonts are ~14px+ and sans-serif I think non-subpixel rendering makes the design cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing. Since I started slowly rolling it out to GitHub, I've been getting nothing but compliments. Case in point: http://github.com/training — I've had several people email me to ask me how I got the fonts to look so good on this page. The answer? The majority of the text uses antialiased fonts instead of subpixel.

Do I use this effect everywhere? Of course not. That's what being a good designer/developer being is about — surveying your options and choosing the one you feel is the best fit.

Now, you want to talk about font-rendering? Let's talk about monospaced fonts and Ubuntu for a minute because I've got a few rants down that road. Ubuntu's font-smoothing is nearing a crime against humanity. -webkit-font-smoothing doesn't have jack on it.