skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 10x speed difference is impressive, but they do list some caveats in the benchmark:

* AsmXml does not copy attributes and text unless necessary (when it includes entity or char references), so, if you need a zero terminated string, you must copy the value first.

* On the other hand, it does more work since it also decodes attributes (O(1) access time), saving a lot of time to the caller of the library.

I'd be interested to know whether it would still be that much faster than a C library that had the same tradeoffs e.g. no copying of attributes/text unless necessary.

I also wonder if it's worth it for existing C libraries to incorporate hand-optimised asm from this library (only when targeting x86 of course) if it provides much more benefit than the above tradeoffs.
Chinese foreign policy is not always following rational paths in regard to Western standards. And this constellation is exactly why I wonder if they make their threat true or not.
I enjoyed reading it too. For the wisdom teeth extraction, when not going to sleep, a trick I used was trying to recall the details of the more positive points of stories I'd read to keep the mind busy and happy. It helped me, at least. :)
So we'll do it again next year. It works for every other topic.

If the problem with a point-in-time conversation of this kind is that it goes stale, the problem with wiki-style "persistent conversations" is that they also go stale, only piecemeal, like Swiss cheese. You visit the wiki and have no idea which bits are new, and which are old, and whether or not two things that happen to be next to each other were written in the same year or with any reference to each other.

If the wiki were periodically edited, in toto, by someone who cared, this problem could be avoided. But most are not.

People are happy to have the same conversations again, only different. Conversing on HN is not drudgery to be automated away. We like rituals. We like the classics. And new people like going through the classic exercises that their predecessors did.
Applelinks Discussion Forum | Firestoun
You're committing a fallacy in assuming that they have no choice. Even if there are a million novices with Photoshop and two professional designers, they'll still get a better deal than having chosen one professional designer. They'll pay the same money and get two professional designs they can choose from, instead of just one.
I just started reading "Web Design for Developers" published by PragProg ( http://pragprog.com/titles/bhgwad/web-design-for-developers ) and would recommend it.
M in my first year, and since you know how Indian Universities work, I wont be able to leave my city. I am based in Maharashtra, Aurangabad. It is very close to pune. But as of now i am freelancing in my city a bit (mostly web development). As i said, currently i need some help with deciding whether to get deep into development or go with the admin/planning n management of infrastructure stuff (cause i love that). And since most Dev jobs in India are monkey jobs.
>keeping track of important bookmarks and sharing with colleagues

Nice idea! Definitely superior to sharing links by IM/email. Thank you! :)
To fix Google Group's unnecessary use of monospaced fonts so you can read this:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Is there any doubt that they were trolling with this new logo? It looked like a placeholder from the first moment I saw it, and I know nothing about design (see historious).
To Quote Douglas Adams On Deadlines
Since 1990 3,179 people were killed and about 8,000 were inured in 20 terror attacks on US soil [1]. Three major terror attacks [2] were the WTC bombing (6 dead, 1042 injured), the Oklahoma City bombing (168 dead, 680+ injured) and of course the 9/11 terror attacks (2977 dead, 6000+ injured).

10 attempts failed or were foiled [3].

That’s all in all about 160 deaths per year. In 2007 accidental discharge of firearms killed 613 people in the US. Accidental drowning killed 3,443 people. Accidental poisoning killed 29,846 people [4].

Law enforcement should of course try to prevent terror attacks but given those numbers I don’t see why US citizens should give up much of their liberties in return.

[1] I used the list of terrorist incidents on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents) as a source which means that those numbers are not necessarily exact but close enough for the purpose of this comment.

[2] Responsible for more than 99 percent of the dead and more than 97 percent of the wounded.

[3] That number seems very low. Has anybody better numbers or can anybody confirm that number?

[4] All numbers: Jiaquan Xu et al. (2010): Deaths: Final Data for 2007. In: National Vital Statistics Reports, Table 10. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (PDF: http://www.cdc.gov/NCHS/data/nvsr/nvsr58/nvsr58_19.pdf)
Of course it is relative, I'm just saying if for example $2 a day is good where you live and your competing for $1 or something.
This is interesting. How do people feel about this forced following?
Tips for interview 
Tips for Interview will help you to prepare for the job interview to get the job of your dream but Ist step in getting a job is to successfully apply for it. Once considered you will get an interview call.
Who are you talking about? Zuckerberg was born to what many would consider rich parents, went to an Ivy school. This isn't a rags-to-riches story it's a story of someone given literally every opportunity to succeed and doing so. But not without crossing some moral boundaries.
I don't agree - availability is a totally meaningless property if you are allowed to occasionally return "no, I won't process your request". Such a response communicates nothing about the state of the atomic object you are writing to or reading from, so you can always return it and trivially satisfy 'availability' if we define it this way.

Availability of the individual node, or of the service as a whole? So long as the nodes always answer quickly, can't I just ask a few different ones until I get a successful response (or conclude that the entire system is down)?
And he didn't even go into mentioning that these people that want fast, good & cheap are experts sneakscope ops, it's totally right to pull out or severly limit the deliverables.
see also the artvertiser, by julian oliver, damian stewart and more:

http://selectparks.net/~julian/theartvertiser/

which is an art project (along similar lines as unlogo) which replaces advertisements with art.

nice to see both unlogo and artvetiser be open source, it will be interesting to see the different directions people can take these ideas.
Not multimillionaire - multibillionaire, with a B.

http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg

That said, I can't see anybody in this thread being jealous or criticizing Zuckerberg. People are merely stating that his accomplishments do not automatically make him a "genius hacker" just because his very successful business happens to have to do with "computers".
Using good (asm) to do evil (xml). Not cool :(
Irrational or not, my opinion is that the world would be 1000% better if we could somehow create an economy that rewarded young people for doing research into antibiotics half as well as it rewards them for creating social-networking widgets.

I agree. It's also a shame that a professional basketball player makes around 100 times more than a professional school teacher. That's just how it is.
I work in medical/pharma, an area that some consider "Socially Beneficial". The reality isn't much different than the consumer web. For instance, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on making small improvements to diabetes monitoring tools. We are talking about chasing minor improvements e.g. reducing test times by 1s. All those resources could be spent researching a cure.

Pharma's actions are dictated by the same financial reporting as tech so even if smart people moved from consumer web to pharma, its not as if we'd end up with a better world. Maybe just one with thinker, more lustrous lashes...http://www.latisse.com/

I guess my take on the "bigger point" is that the market seems to work. We are much better off in almost every area of our lives now compared to 50 years ago. Walmarts goal of keeping their shelves stocked for the "bovine masses" has led to a revolution in logistics. People who invented cellular phones as yuppie status symbols have saved millions of lives through better communication. And a couple guys who made devices to get free calls on pay phones ignited a computing revolution that has reshaped the world in the most grand fashion since Gutenberg.

My larger point is that toys have a way of becoming seriously useful and that socially engineering people to go into "valuable" fields could lead to a glut of mismanaged resources that don't necessarily yield benefits.
Awesome. Would be good to know if HN can provide a sustained user base in itself, now you've had a little exposure.
Good to know it's not just me, then :-)

I was all enthused when John Lam did a demo of scripting Visual Studio with IronRuby (I don't think it was his work, he was just demoing it), so I sent him an email asking after the source, but it turned out not to be something they were going to release. Which was a shame. He did make it look awfully slick.
and this is why the picture is wrong.
This is a big deal, if Google improve Android Store as well then new Android - AIR apps can be a new era for Android.
Modern compilers can generate very good ASM (much better than most programmers can write by hand). I think parser with similar architecture in C should be as fast as written in pure ASM.
Yea but like you said, since half of them are just for redundancy, they were in effect only running 2 database servers. I must say I find it stunning that a service with that much traffic, especially one with an infrastructure that requires the entire database to be in-memory, would be operating with just 2 database servers running on EC2.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but I can't imagine the foresight was any worse than 20/30.
Plenty of films with that rating. Just a few off the top of my head:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/citizen_kane/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/godfather/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chinatown/

(Note: I haven't seen The Social Network and I don't mean to imply that it is comparable to the iconic movies I have listed above. That said, the more reviews I see trickling in, the more it seems like it.)
only in the way MS Office crosses paths with Apple's iWork - that is one utterly runs the other one down

Which runs which down? For my requirements, Keynote > PowerPoint, Excel > Numbers, Pages ~= Word.
It's there, the UI just obscures it. It's actually an accordion and when you click "The Nobel Peace Prize 2010" tab you can see more like the "Press Release".

Regarding the typo: it happens all the time to all kinds of sites.
Probably the reason people are against "giving this guy his due credit" is because he seems to have screwed over and betrayed several people to get what he wants. If you don't do that then you wont run into the "problems" [1] he's having.

[1] I say "problems" because it's irrelevant. I'm sure he's crying his way to the bank because of all the hate he gets.
My cable provider just updated their software so that I can find on-demand shows by using T9 style prediction (i.e. press 1 three times to make C). It's a million times better than paging through long alphabetical or chronological lists and that's despite the software being relatively clunky.

I'm not wanting to write the sequel to war and peace, I'm just trying to navigate a ridiculous amount of content. I need text entry.
I've always lived by this - http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/clients-or-grinders-... - which says much the same thing.
Revealing quote from the bottom of the benchmarks page:

> I've performed other tests on different machines and observed that, on a Pentium 4, the difference between AsmXml and Expat is smaller (next generation processors seem to be more profitable to C programs). I also did tests with my Arch Linux but I couldn't build xerces-c so I don't publish results, but Expat was faster, may be because of 686 optimizations.

Says it all, really.
I understand one person gets paid. This doesn't make the system any better.

The problem is, so many people are still put in a situation where they end up with no payment.

I'd still like to know where the remaining participants will gain exposure.
Now you've done it! Hacker News probably just got blocked out of The Great Firewall of China[tm).

All Norwegian sites will probably blocked out too.

BTW. I live in Norway.
PugXML (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/pugxml.aspx) uses similar approach but very portable.
"* On the other hand, it does more work since it also decodes attributes (O(1) access time), saving a lot of time to the caller of the library"

This part I didn't understand. Does he mean transforming the document's encoding into the platform's native encoding? How can the access time of a list of attributes be in constant time? I mean, there needs to be some form of lookup from the name of the attribute to its value. And how do the two relate to each other?
[http://live.uuapplicaties.dwsuu01.dc01.je-itc.com/uuvacature...]

€ 2800 per month is definitely not a bad salary. You're right, I can't speak for the US, but here you can live a comfortable life with that (and if you keep rising through the ranks, you'll have a nice retirement when you're done). And I should probably mention that getting your PhD is a paid job here as well (at least the first four years, in which you're expected to obtain your PhD). Anyone who thinks that is economic martyrdom isn't going to solve poverty, no matter how the system works. You just don't get to be a businessman and a hero at the same time.
(1) At least in the US, banks are only one way of getting a merchant account. There are decent number of companies that offer merchant accounts. It is a pretty competitive business and there are plenty of companies and affiliates vying to get you under their belt because they get a fraction of a % of sales you do for life. Google around. Banks may not be the best option. In U.S you can definitely get a merchant account for new businesses with little history. I was able to get one at 15 under my brother's name--who was barely 18 and had no prior biz record.

(2) Yes, merchant account can help you avoid 3rd party pages and gives you complete control of the flow of the order process.

(3) Yes it is a bad, bad idea and mostly not officially acceptable to store cc info on your server.
I've gone a couple of times to Social Innovation camps, here in the UK (http://www.sicamp.org/). For those who don't know, it's a get-together where hackers gather with social problem experts, such as youth offending teams (YOTs) and people who work for charities, etc.

It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems.

The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator.

I don't know how to solve this.
I found it a little sarcastic; even snarky.
Why You don't Like Changes to Your Design
The RapidXml library is pretty similar to AsmXml, except that it's written in C++. Browsing around the "Links" section on the AsmXml website, I came across a site that performs speed comparisons between the various parsers out there. RapidXml does appear to come pretty close to AsmXml in terms of speed.

Source: http://xmlbench.sourceforge.net/results/benchmark200910/inde...
Yes, an independent committee whose "five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and roughly represent the political makeup of that body”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Nobel_Committee
Get involved with open source projects. Get noticed in the community. When you're out of college, you could use the network you build in the communities to land you a job.

Red Hat does have an office in Pune, you know that -- right?
1. Rosenfeld Media has a ranking tool for UX books
http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/zeitgeist/ and top lists provided by respected industry professionals.

2. Whitney Hess, a respected UX professional with great PR skills, has a recommended list at http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/Best-Recommended-Books-...

As a person who once switched to UX design for a while, I can say that they are definitely great books, though I can't understand everyone' obsession with Steve Krug (he has EXTREMELY basic books).

Also, Whitney has two popular blog posts of So You Wanna Be a UX Designer series:
http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/06/30/so-you-wanna-be-a-use... and http://whitneyhess.com/blog/2009/11/23/so-you-wanna-be-a-use... .
They will provide you basics, but also overwhelm with the huge volume of recommended sources.

3. konigi.com (ther blog and wiki) is a top source of information about ALL old and new UX tools, some UX basics and new UX trends. They also sell some very handy tools for UX designers http://konigi.com/tools/overview
If there really is some global terrorist network I think it's safe to say at this point that they're so hopelessly incompetent as to not be worth worrying about.

There's one other issue that stops them: the suicide-bombing-kind of terrorists who are actually capable of pulling off an attack can only do it once.

I mean, really, it's not a strategy for long-term success is it?
Whoops, I meant "mongo" shard!
Microsoft and Adobe: The blind leading the blind to victory
TaskPoint http://www.taskpoint.com issue tracking, project management and team collaboration
Exactly! The Register made the same connection:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/07/akamai_secrets_sting...
As far as I remember expat is event based parser (it emits events when next attribute, tag etc ready) but it seems that this parser creates some sort of DOM. DOM based parsers usually much slower.
Don't be so disheartened already man! You are passionate and proactive, use that to your benefit.

Most jobs may be bad, but you are good enough to avoid most jobs and go for the few good ones. Just hop on the bus to Pune, meet some people and get started. Maybe, you can start working remotely? Or commute once a week?

Don't decide between dev and admin purely based on opinion and speculation. It's probably best to try both out and see which you like more.

Edit: Don't just rely on asking HN. Rely more on asking local people around you. Beware the danger of using HN as an excuse for not taking real action.
People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world.

This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism. After years in this business I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It's good society has Yahoos and Facebooks in which to employ all these self styled geniuses, because otherwise they'd be fucking up someone else's pharmaceutical research. If only I would have made Facebook I wouldn't have to sit at the crappy desk next to the fume hood.
>Also viable approachs to give the power of monkey patching without the drawbacks are just being thought today.

No, they're actively being used: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383977.aspx
They are missing the most important thing: AsmXml builds a specialized structure for a specific kind of XML. Regular parsers like Xerces-C build a generic, mutable DOM tree. That is obviously _way_ more work, with different lists for attributes and children, different node types etc.

Looking at the schemata they support, it doesn't look like they support all possible XML structures.

A better comparison might have been one of the XML binding tools vs AsmXml, that's much closer in functionality.

I'd also be careful wrt the XML-ness of this tool. Does it properly handle all Unicode obscurities? Does it handle all DTD obscurities? Is it robust against documents not matching the schema, malformed documents, or even malicious documents?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1602664
This is one of those (rare) pieces of technology where I think "How in the world they did that", where I (due to multiple, complex areas of science involved) cannot even imagine how it can be done and this article answers lots of my questions.

Favorite quote: "Incubation is a business of stupidity. If we don’t feel stupid, we’re not pushing ourselves hard enough."
Johnny Knoxville visits Detroit
Interesting article but the title is a little misleading.

Before I clicked, I thought they were talking about doing work for cigarette or oil companies. I worked at a company that was pitching services to a cigarette company, and --nobody-- involved felt good about doing the pitch.

But back to the point, one of the speakers at the Business of Software series once said "When someone tells you the work you do is easy, they probably have no idea what they're talking about". Being in services, I think there's at least one person at every client who thinks that everything I do is overpriced and easy.

You can't blame clients for wanting to get the 'most for the least' from their vendors. Interesting that they know they're not capable of doing it themselves to hire a vendor. Yet after that decision, they don't seem to know enough to not disrespect the work you do.
What kind of bullshit banks in the uk wont give a business a merchant account?

Anyway, chargify can recommend you some gateway/merchant account providers.
I recently launched a niche startup selling addon content for Photoshop. It's a purely digital-goods business: people pay money and in return they get an email with a download link.

I looked at a bunch of solutions (shopify, 2checkout, paypal, authorize.net, e-junkie, and others). Ultimately, I went with a company called FastSpring. It's a third party shopping cart solution, but they let you use your own xhtml/css template. They do include some text in the footer to let you know who's providing the service, but it's not really intrusive.

If you want to see how it looks, here's a page from my site. Click the add-to-cart button: http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/sale

Overall, I really like their service. They pay out twice a month, directly into my bank account. I'm in Canada, and most places just won't do this, so it was a nice surprise when it just worked.

Edit: I should mention, they handle international sales smoothly, too. I've had sales from all over the EU. They detect the country, do currency conversion, charge the correct VAT, etc.
.. while correct, the question is "what is that reason?"
Don't think only about lawsuits but also patent extortion. If their IP lawyers send a threatening letter and the receiver just complies and pays, we usually never get to hear about it.

A lawsuit is like having to beat up somebody to make an example out of him. It only happens when people refuse to pay for protection.
The day "Adobe Air" installed itself on my pc without permission was the day I turned away from Adobe.
Good site about how things are made From watches to jet turbines
..and more useful as well.
Well... On the other hand, killing CF and JRun to doom them to IIS and .NET is not exactly helpful...