skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Summary: they found bottlenecks in many applications and found that by implementing various code changes to the kernel, about 3000 lines worth, they could greatly improve performance on a 48-core Linux box.

For instance, per-core data structures to speed access to commonly used kernel items.

They also introduce a concept they call "sloppy counters" which is a per-core, reduced lock contention method of handling certain systemwide counters.
Microsoft CEO bonus cut for Kin flop, lack of iPad rival
Seems like it would be "loud" to me. While I think it looks awesome, the fact that they have a room for the phone means that it probably echoes a good deal with that roof.

I'm a bit of a Spolsky-ite when it comes to office space - everyone should have an office - so it isn't my dream layout, but I will say the design is very, very cool.
This is one case that rubygems handles well, but I think your specific example is broken. If libcat requires 1.0.0 <= bar < 2.0.0, foo requires libcat, foo requires 2.0.0 < bar, you've got conflicting requirements - foo requires both bar < 2.0.0 and 2.0.0 < bar. Rubygems will barf at that.

> You have to rename the entire library directory. In my opinion this is an ugly hack around the fact that your package manager doesn't support multiple versions. I think this is solved much more elegantly if the package manager allows you to switch the version on-the-fly... in other words, what RubyGems does.

It may be an ugly hack, but it's fairly traditional at this point.
What a wonderful suggestion! Thank you, I have just read the first chapter and it was an eye opener.
I couldn't imagine living somewhere so far from a massive freshwater lake with beautiful beaches. To each his own!
It is not that complicated, and Paypal will let you print mailing labels directly. All you need to know is the HS Tariff code for your product and get some free plastic envelopes from the post office. I just checked a 8oz tube to Australia via USPS and it was $7.32. If you added a $10 international charge, that would cover any extra work or shipping. I ship products globally every week and it is very easy once you spend 10 minutes learning what needs to be done.

Also, you state that you are only mailing it to the 48 contiguous states. The USPS doesn't charge extra for Hawaii or Alaska (or military bases) so why would you exclude them?
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This is a futile effort by Google and will go no where.

If they somehow managed to chop file sizes by 90% or more, it would have a small chance (it still wouldn't be guaranteed, as in the era of CDNs and caching and large pipes, static images just aren't a big concern). Instead they've marginally chopped file sizes in only certain scenarios, while adding numerous new downsides, while actually reducing the feature set.

Are they insane? I'm surprised they actually announced this.

Like MP3, JPEG is good enough unless the improvement of a replacement format is overwhelming. It doesn't have the political baggage of something like h264, so that argument doesn't apply.

More interesting than this silliness from Google are formats that actually bring new and impressive features. I recall that JPEG2000 could do incremental, stallable loading (or maybe I'm thinking of something else), such that as you scaled an image it wasn't loading an entirely new image, but instead was loading incrementally more data to provide the detail for that level. IP stopped it from taking off, but that was actually interesting. This isn't.
> That would be a case of either foobar's author not following version numbering convention, or a bug which can/should be patched.

Suppose we substitute "1.2.x" with "2.0.x". foobar now is following version numbering convention but the problem didn't change. Now what would you do?

> We value stability over all else, and we cannot provide this combination of packages while supporting a stable system, so we're not going to

This is clearly false. Package both versions and have apps load the version they're compatible with. Now the user can have all apps without compromising stability. RubyGems supports exactly this, DPKG/RPM doesn't support this without filesystem-level renames. Why do you think the latter is superior?
I agree. It's very big and cold looking, super uncomfortable.
Advantages of plastic patio furniture | PatioKeeper
I seem to have caught your attention though. For someone who is not interested in buying my services, you seem rather worked up about my lack of marketing skills.
Maybe this place has office space? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schilthorn
My site (a yelp-like site for another country) has about the same amount of traffic as you do, and I make around US$800 per month just with adsense. Adsense works best when people are looking for something valuable, which is not your case.

Your website is your commercial for your book and your career. If you have a job, the best way to monetize your site is to ask for a raise because you're now influential in the community. If not, be happy a lot of people are looking for your books; maybe its time to write more?
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/their.html
This one.

For the love of all that is holy, if you have to read just one then read that one.
R.I.P., Mock Obituaries
Since you are likley to get a C&D, I would prepare with an alternate domain name and a list of bloggers who are anti-facebook. Calcanis comes to mind. Send out a press release about the C&D, how FB is trying to control users images, and all the privacy/control of content issues. Once the media storm has whipped itself into a frenzy, then announce the new website name and redirect the original.
yes, but also something more delicious ;-)
Have you considered a career as a James Bond antagonist?
My boss has a sense of technical competemce which I do not care to review because he pays me 2.5 boatloads of money. He doesn't want to buy the book? Could not possibly care less. Somebody else might.
You can no longer rely on encryption to protect a BlackBerry
> Rubygems will barf at that.

Only if you activate gems linearly. Bundler solves exactly this: it looks at all dependencies then figures out a combination that works. Bundler will only activate bar 1.x because it sees that foo is compatible with all versions but libcat is only compatible with 1.x.

> It may be an ugly hack, but it's fairly traditional at this point.

I argue against the notion that being traditional here equals being good. There's no good reason why the developer should do this manually instead of having some system do it for him.

RubyGems actually implicitly does this. By installing each gem to its own directory it separates the versions on the filesystem level.
How accurate you are. =) I should say that everyone should read it while they are still in school.
I hear that idea put forth sometimes. When was the last time you downloaded a single compiled binary from someone? I don't think I've ever done that, except maybe for darcs.
I've seen the video and read the blurb, but I still don't "get" it. Can someone gimme a use case where this would instantly make sense, cause if I'm understanding correctly, just basic tagging with my bookmarks achieves the same thing (easy to find, share, categorize per projects, etc.)
I really like the clean industrial style of the new offices.
Just because one OS has security problems doesn't mean the world would be better off without this amazing functionality.

I think JavaScript embedded in websites is one of the most important abilities in the web today. It's critical to the way nearly all modern applications are written and it allows for extremely fast and rapid development of scalable powerful applications.

Awesome, no?
No I'm not worked up at all. Most things on the front page of HN catch my attention. Good luck, btw.
The wall street journal is huge in comparison both in readerbase and content.

Before the charge for pdf version there were a large amount of downloads which bearswithclaws used to appeal to advertisers now he doesn't even release numbers openly on the site so I would assume it went down quite a bit.

Edit: it also gets less traction on hacker news, and comments are far more negative, where before it was praise and discussing the content and quality.
Google Brazil employees:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Fonts have been getting better, but the first thing I do is to load up a new install with fonts imported from OS X and Windows. I find these improve the attractiveness of the desktop greatly.
Tonight: 400 Free Tickets to “Waiting for Superman”
The App Store makes it easy to sell your App. Outside the App Store, you have to rely on your own setup. I'll go as far to say that the majority of apps in the app store could be web apps and work just as well.
Sure. But a third-party cookie does more than track your activities on the site that gave it to you. If you get a DoubleClick cookie, then DoubleClick will be able to track you on every site that runs DoubleClick ads. Ie., they'll be able to tell that the same computer is hitting all these sites. This lets them target ads to you based on your whole history across all DoubleClick-serving sites, and to market your profile to their customers.
* Full-immersion display and prototyping CAVE / bubble

* Various art robots. One would greet me with "Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. Hello, J.A."

* Tennis court

* Machine shop

* Personal SCUBA tank with space-station truss mockup and Russian Orlan space suit / dive suit.

OR

* personal submarine / office

OR

* I could just get back to work, in my office adjoining the laundry room. Time to replace the fluorescent bulb. I can see it flickering. Haven't had to squash any centipedes yet this week.
Ahh, but the time choice is clever.
Ask HN: How do I store cookies?
The landscape of the web is a bit difficult to research sometimes. I thought maybe you guys can help ...

I want to write a small analytics tool that people can install on their websites. The question is, how can I track the user sessions?

My biggest problem is that safari (under its default setting) refuses to write cookies on any other domain besides the one in the location bar, whether for documents requested by an iframe, or any resource requested by javascript. Chrome allows this for image tags, but Safari does not.

It is discussed here, but a lot of the methods suggested do not work anymore:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/408582/setting-cross-domain-cookies-in-safari

It would be very useful for an analytics tool to be able to write COOKIES back to the domain where it's hosted, so it can keep track of sessions. But what is a good way to achieve in this ALL browsers?

I have heard of evercookie. Will this work on all the browsers?

If I can't do this, then I guess I will have to mooch off the site's own cookies, which I think is what most analytics tools do. I guess this is designed to prevent tracking a user across multiple domains.
Then why is my Chrome still on version 3?
Nelson Mandela Best Wishes to Vaidehi & Team For "Hackerz" Magazine Launch
Basically, when you start a company, you choose to start it (to incorporate it) in a particular state. Each state has its own laws about corporations, what they are and aren't allowed to do, etc.

Some states have laws that are really company-friendly, and other states have laws that are really shareholder-friendly. Delaware's laws are, in general, quite company-friendly -- so when you're starting your company, it makes a lot of sense to do so there (because your company will get the most legal protection).

In addition, "basically everyone else does it". Which isn't good motivation for jumping off a bridge, but it is a good motivation here, and here's why: case law.

Lots of companies (and thus lots of Delaware companies) have done crazy things and have had lawsuits over them. So it's better-understood how to interpret portions of Delaware corporate law, because they've been tested before in court. Whereas in some other random state, that's less likely to be the case. As a consequence, I think basically every corporate lawyer in the US is familiar with both their own state's corporate law, as well as Delaware's.

And finally, a disclaimer: I'm not intimately familiar with the corporate law of even just one state, let alone all 50, so take this with a grain of salt -- but this is a sketch of the motivations for incorporating in Delaware that I've heard.
Humanoid Robot Learns Archery
I had a similar situation at my last job, but my heart wasn't totally in it (if you can't tell) - This small company acts and feels a lot like a start-up, even though it's been around for 13 years and was just purchased by a F500 company in NYC.

Not only is my role pretty niche, but as long as I can provide for my family and I keep loving what I do, I really couldn't care if someone else on my team is making six figures. That said, I know even my boss isn't making 75% more than me, and my VP likely isn't, either.

I guess you really have to love your job to fully grasp it.
iPod can stream protected audio content over USB. You just need an auth chip approved by Apple to be able to do that. Most of the cheap devices just use analog audio out and use "Apple Accessory Protocol" (which can be sent over either serial port or USB) to control it.
Fair enough; I understand that there are a variety of cases, and I was responding to what I perceived when I read it as a general statement, rather than a self-assessment of your particular situation.

because the customer understood my simple offering over their complex one

This is a good example of a better product-market fit. My problem is that I have a tendency to do what a lot of hacker-entrepreneurs do: hack. But that's often not what's most needed.
I tried to sign up, but the signup page failed horribly on my Android phone.

Textfields accepted input but didnt show it and the accept terms checkbox was uncheckable.

Call me biased, but I suspect there are more android-phones out there than iPads. Prioritize differently ;)
The best resources for Windows Phone 7 Development
Considering that it's Google, I'm honestly surprised they haven't created a crawler application that can execute the javascript on a given page and re-parse it based on the new layout.

You wouldn't think it would be that hard, either-- take Chrome, remove UI, add crawler. Chrome's already got the functionality in "Inspect Element" to show dynamically-created content.
Having sizable undocumented things like an Image Viewer and games lurking around bothers me a bit as it brings a sense of sloppiness to a great focused device.
I love reading these on my kindle DX. Thanks again Hacker Monthly! :)
Do you have any released commercial products which can be of interest to your audience?

So place your products ads on the site.
I didn't realise that the key to effective time management was an underlying sense of panic.

That’s why the first thing about what you are thinking while he sleeps is to take a break. Don’t do it!

The fact is, with a new-born in particular, it's not about controlling the time, it's about avoiding burn out and rest & stress management is crucial.
Too bad you did not have the funds to continue, I thought it was pretty a useful service.
>The problem of course is there's no "there" there. Any funds collected today by payroll taxes, and not used for today's benefits, are lent to the general fund and spent. There are no funds being saved for next year's benefits, much less the current tax payers.

And in a short 5 years the direction changes because 2015 is when SS outflow is expected to exceed inflow and they have to start using some of the interest income off those bonds. In 2025 the inflows and interest income become insufficient and the SS trust fund has to start selling the bonds and by 2035 the assets are themselves exhausted.

The 2010 OASDI Trustees Report
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/TR/2010/tr2010.pdf
is it possible to determine which factory environment you're in? maybe it just tries the same combination in each and every one environment it gets to?
Ask HN: What do you want from a personal finance web app?
I’ve seen a number of comments from dissatisfied users of personal finance web apps. Some people are unhappy with Mint, some want to use Mint but can’t, and others seem unhappy with the personal finance web apps as a whole.

My question to you: what do you want to be able to do with your personal finance solution that you currently can’t accomplish?
I wish to use Ubuntu because I have slightly older hardware, but if it renders youtube video in slow motion and if I see tons of similar complaints on the internet, than what good is an operating system competing with Microsoft which isn't even working well right out of the box?

Everyone seems to be getting greedy for updated hardware and operating systems. I don't really care to upgrade my hardware every two years. If Ubuntu cannot deliver without fastest processor and video memory, than they might as well just start selling to corporate and be done with the free stuff.
The 37 signals worship here is a tad bit annoying.
I use Chromium installed with apt. All my software on my computer gets updated automatically :)
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl (Scheme-Like Interpreter)
I'm curious what you mean by when you say "track user sessions". Are you talking across multiple sites? Pages on the same domain? Or all sites that are running your analytics?

You explicitly, for good reason, cannot read and write cookies from another domain. What you can do, however, is host a PHP script that displays as an image on a 3rd party server (http://www.configure-all.com/howto_display_image.php), and use that script to write cookies or store information on that server's domain.
You're describing Yahoo's engineering culture. Have you looked into their management culture?
He doesn't seem to make any assumptions to me. He states the known facts about it, that's all.
We are developing an Android client...
It would be brilliant! If MS did this then IE6 would have dissappeared long ago!
The Kindle is an awesome web browser for one reason:

http://xkcd.com/548/ :-)
Amusing, but really not worthy of this forum.
I didn't really appreciate JS when I had to use it for a school project. But, believe it or not, I gained an appreciation for it via CoffeeScript. Replacing the syntax with something more concise showed me that the underlying fundamentals of the language are pretty clean.
If you had to buy the Ladder etc then it ends up not being $100 saved right? Besides, the setup time plus actual window cleaning would take considerably longer than 15 minutes.
And leave the Web as a set of static pages like in the nineties? Web applications are desirable, if only because they're multi-platform. Javascript is what saved us from those slow and not so safe Java applets (and Flash, Silverlight, which would be everywhere without Ajax).

Anyway, malwares would have spread through downloaded executables (e-mail attachments, etc). Is Javascript even helpful to most malwares?
It's okay if your name doesn't do anything to help me understand what your company does, but when that is the case it's important that your website should make the benefits statement clear to me.
Going Droid
Yeah, but it's a case of "shoulda, woulda, coulda." In retrospect, it was an easy decision. But, if it were your startup, would you have tied yourself to a single, almost bankrupt, vendor? I don't think I would have. Though it is better to buy software rather than build in most cases, there didn't seem to be alternatives rather than rolling out their own solution.
For the people who need OLAP analysis, the relevant expense range is seldom that much of a consideration. I'm looking at storage systems right now that costs $800,000. It's considered mid-range and is merely the starter system.

Note that OLAP is, in many regards, NoSQL. It is really the most successful variant of NoSQL.

However I'm very curious what sort of analytics people are doing with NoSQL. I have seen people essentially generating reports to MongoDB, for instance, but I have never seen anything remotely approaching flexible analytics on such a system.
Wow, you've made me want to move! Hah.
I think it will warm up with more people and personalization. Its an attractive office but yes a bit sterile. It still needs to be broken in a bit.

(I like it - but see your point)
For some reason Yahoo has incredibly talented engineers, all working on things that don't make Yahoo any money. When it comes to the paycheck, Yahoo is just a web publisher; not much more tech focused than AOL or IAC.
It's actually very quiet in person. The space reminds me of a university library. Most of the materials, from the carpet, to the felt paneling, to the corkboard in the team rooms, to the dividers between desks, to the tiles on the rear walls, were chosen specifically for their sound-dampening qualities.

The phone booths are a reaction to our former space where we'd get up and go out into the hallway to take phone calls. They exist because we value privacy, not because the office is too loud.
You're assuming that each place on the first page gets equal amounts of traffic. The 4th result does not get the same amount of traffic as the 1st result, it gets much much less.
What you have in the bank is irrelevant, it's how far down the development road that money will take you that counts.

That's a calculation only you can do with your current living costs in addition to estimated cost of equipment, services, software, office space, and probably lots of other things you would never imagine (legal costs, accounting costs, cost of incorporating for example?)

If you're asking the question then I guess you haven't done these calculations yet - but putting them all down on paper (or spreadsheet more appropriately) as well as a realistic development timeline will tell you what you need to know.

Good luck! If you never try you'll never know.
After the Reddit Q&A sessions, is this their attempt to make up for their perceived inability to drop the patronizing PR-speak?

Personally, I think the issue is deeper than the way they're selling it; it's that their values are fundamentally not in line with the communities they're trying to sell IE9 to, and thus, their only recourse is PR--which technically-minded users and developers are quick to pick apart and call bullshit on. RoR, PHP, jQuery, etc. are all open-source free software projects; on the most basic level, selling IE9 to those people is going to be hard, without even mentioning the historical baggage the IE name carries. Hell, most of those people don't even use Windows, and thus literally can't directly benefit from IE; making sure their websites render properly in it can only be seen as a nuisance at best and an outright hindrance at worst.
The name Wesabe had a huge part to do with losing. Patzer is right, with a name like Wesabe you have ZERO chances of capitalizing on word of mouth. Before you buy a domain for your business, find 10 random people and ask them to type out the domain. If they fail or have to stop to even think about how to type out the domain, it's a failure.
A conspiracy of cartographers.
On the name thing I see a lot of misunderstanding about this. A name can be a little silly, sure. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Mint. People use this to justify terrible domain names all the time.

There are a few things the above have in common that Wesabe doesn't:

1. They're real words. (Technically Google isn't, but it's a misspelling of a real word that probably more people than not would make.Very few people, if told about it, would type in googol.com). Look at the Alexa top 100 in the US, it's almost entirely real words.

2. They're easily pronounced. If I tell my friend about Yahoo.com, he's going to be able to type it in or easily Google for it. I assume Wesabe is similar to wasabi, but I'm still not even sure about that.
URL shorteners necessary evil - Technical and usability facts
Who cares... if you don't like it, don't use chrome.