skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, let me get this straight, the conclusion is that European countries are rich and African countries are poor?

I'd hate to say the emperor has no clothes, but this does not seem revolutionary in any sense. In fact, there seems to be more counter-examples than examples when we look to the fact that the Middle East, India, China, and North America does not fit the pattern. The Middle East was technologically advanced in the 1500s, China was cited as a counter-example, and there was not much development in North America. In fact, the movement of people and ideas seems to contradict the authors thesis.

This conclusion also fails on closer examination. Superficially, this might work when comparing Europe as a whole vs. Africa as a whole, but Finland is also noted as a previous technological backwater with high GDP now. I'm skeptical of any predictive power of this model.

On the other hand, the author is relatively eloquent. I like the line: "There's a Thomas Edison born every minute. We just have to help them turn the lights on." Just not particularly insightful.
To Whomever down voted,

I am bringing up a very valid question and I'm not saying that I'm gonna do that, but if I was in PG's seat during the YC interview, that would be my question and I like to hear the founder's response because it is a valid concern and unfortunately a reality too.
I meant, "ran out of cat names except Lion, which we were avoiding for precisely this reason" :)
Sounds like the Internet of Things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
In all fairness to Microsoft, telling people why they should be excited about a smartphone in a crowded market is a lot harder than explaining why you should care about autonomous vehicles.

The elevator pitch for cars that drive themselves is: "These cars drive themselves."
I think it's because Java is just plain and simple a boring language.

Most people would agree that Java is a tad verbose and over-patternized. It doesn't do any "fancy" stuff like functional programming, it doesn't have a lot of "sexy" libraries and the community arround it is pretty much stuck in a fixed big-enterprise mindset ("I don't care that it's easier to do it with tool x or y! We can't maintain anything else but Z!") and a lot of Java developers have only experiences with Java which limits the way they try to solve problems.

The worst example of this was when I had to witness a friend of mine having to code a prototype for a handheld device in Apache Struts because "that's what we know and we can enhance if you're not there". He had to basically implement most UI interactions in Javascript so it was even close to usable.

If you would ask any Ruby/Python/Scala/Erlang/... developer about other languages or new technologies (noSQL databases, node.js, ...), chances are they will at least know something about it because they love their craft. Most "only Java" people I've met so far simply aren't particularly interested in anything that isn't directly related to their work.

p.s. this doesn't mean that there aren't great developers that use Java, I've met some amazing people that are fluent in Java, but for them it was just "another language" that they used, not "the language".
Interesting idea to get some visibility for app developers. Although for the app purchaser I think you may get some reluctance as they first have to pay for the app (using an iTunes account) and then get the refund through a different mechanism (Paypal). This may be a bit of barrier to usage for certain users.

My startup (self-promoting link-whoring: http://www.happybuy.com/) also helps to find price-reduced iOS Apps and tweets the biggest bargain product of the day. It's an easier mechanism for app purchasers to understand but obviously it doesn't address the value equation for the developer like TapZilla does.
The big problem with trying to reinvent the desktop are the billions of computer users around the world who rely on having a familiar experience. Even with Apple's tiny slice of the market we see Internet riots over things like the iTunes icon changing or the OSX menubar becoming transparent. It's hard to see a time in the future when people will have any appetite for radical changes. Maybe it could happen on a platform like Linux where you can easily switch desktop environments but there's not much hope for third party applications embracing change.
Good idea, Ill create a torrent once I get the chance
interpreter startup with tiny script is ok but loading unit tests by rake command is slow.
That is one of the plans I have in mind
Yeah, mobile is great and all (I say that as I type this on my iPad) but there is still much that can be done with larger form factors and more powerful devices. But then I'm the guy who still doesn't understand why no one even tried to come up with ways to use two mice. Imagine using one hand to grab and hold, and the other to manipulate. It's not like we haven't had USB for over a decade, and both Microsoft and Apple make and sell mice. You'd think that doubling e market would be attractive.
Unfortunately no, its purely the prices at the off which I have available. However I am planning on monitoring future races to see how their prices change over time
I may be able to offer some assistance here. I am currently working on a billiard scoring application (for pool leagues) with another developer friend of mine in our spare time. We are developing the app for iOS and Android devices currently and we are hoping to release it early next year. I would be happy to discuss ideas with you about your proposed project. We both generally love pool and building apps :)

Preview of the billiard scoring app for league players we are developing:
https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=11KO5WoWQJewm75cuoY...

Isaac Wooten
isaac@levid.com
http://www.levid.com
Article:

asked you to create a website that had some dynamic content, but they
only had a $10/mo budget for hosting

ME:

Java hosting is actually cheaper for ME.

Yeah, thanks for missing the point and judging me, you obnoxious schmuck.

Here's a newsflash: not everyone is living in the US or in Western Europe and can afford EC2 hosting as a student.

And here's a free tip, since you have some opinions on doing startups: you don't buy useless crap for a startup that survives on a salary or on a small loan, even if you are a spoiled brat ;)
Intersting idea, will add it to the list of potentials
Top Symbian Apps For Smartphones | InfoMov.Com
> Once an open protocol is established and popularized

"popularized" is the most important and hardest part, you can't risk using it in an assumption. The problem domain you are working in is the exemplar of the chicken-and-egg user growth difficulties.

Also if it really was just a protocol: the only thing being developed would be QuickSocial, it would not be called a social network because a protocol is not the place creating the social experience, it would be marketed to developers and bloggers as an improved and easy to add replacement for OpenID, 50% of the work would be on rigorously defining QuickSocial specification, the other 50% on developing plugins for all platforms and languages.
The great thing about bullshit is I don't have to know what I'm talking about at all!
Great job on the product and video - really easy and slick.

What's the use of real-time results for A/B testing? Most likely, it's only going to lead to erroneous conclusions, as discussed in this thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778104.
Photo Si Cantik Kristina Svechinskaya
So the stereotype among engineers is that they dislike going into management. If you're not one of those engineers, how well do you (honestly) think you could step up to the CTO role?

I've been reading about management and engineering management since I was a teenager, and I'd be absolutely delighted if an opportunity like that landed in my lap.
F# and first-class functions, part 3: partial function application
I decided to try out 10.10. I used 10.04 this summer at my internship (worked flawlessly), but had never used it on this machine before. The install took nearly an hour, the first time I tried to boot and several times thereafter things would hang before the boot splash, and when it did start X was performing so poorly that it was nearly unusable (terminal could not keep up with my typing, 2-3 second delay between clicking a menu and setting it, etc.). Apparently this is caused by a kernel bug with i7 processors and/or the X58 chip-set that will be resolved in coming versions, but I have no idea how they didn't catch this in beta.

I'm currently back to using Arch. I was hoping that 10.10 might offer a more "ready out of the box" experience, but I didn't find it.
Apple didn't put arrow keys on the first Mac either. A couple of years later, they did. You know why they waited? Because they wanted to make sure apps that were written to take advantage of the new UI, rather than ported from purely keyboard driven UIs. Why would they put a mouse UI on their first tablet, particularly when Microsoft has demonstrated what a mediocre result that gets you.

I see no reason why, having established touch UI patterns on iOS devices, Apple would have any reason not to start introducing such things on the desktop.

And really, have you been in a pickup lately? They have a lot of car like amenities, like antilock breaks, air conditioners, decent stereos, etc.
Cataclysmic WoW patch brings big changes to Azeroth
I think it's because Java is just plain and simple a boring language.

I agree for the most part. I make my college programming projects fun by finding uses for the Reflections API.

Check out 'invoke'.
http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/r...
nice idea. I tried to setup a new a/b test for a site and it became 'not easy' when I wanted to track an adsense click as a goal.

I wrote a manual a/b test for the same site about 7 years ago, and got adsense click goals working with 40 variations of the page, after about a week of working on it after work at night after my regular job.

There is some jquery code you can add to track javascript events which would probably track adsense clicks, but it's 'not easy', ie: I might as well not pay for it.

Cool idea though! I would pay for it if I could track adsense clicks without having to write code. Also, having an option to select multiple dom elements at once would be nice. In addition, logging into the web site and editing the html to add the code in the <head> tag would be nice too, especially since it's kind of a hassle for me to open eclipse and re-deploy to app engine at 1am when I am tired.

haha, hope this helps.
Software Testing Institute
Apple has something going for iOS relative to android, even without running iaoS apps on macs: people actually install apps on iOS devices, not only that, they'll pay for them.
Micromanagement of GC is possible using Soft/Weak/Phantom references, see http://weblogs.java.net/blog/2006/05/04/understanding-weak-r... .

> Of course, in C(++) you can design much more memory-efficient data structures through pointer arithmetic.

Yeah, you can reinvent the wheel in C++, C or even in ASM.
openGL is not that hard and has bindings in most popular languages. I don't know why you would limit yourself to java to learn OpenGL when there are nicer languages to use. But the languages do the same thing so if you actually ship something you are ahead of most people out there.
Great point. Jumping to pre-mature conclusions is certainly an easy mistake to make.

During the Obama campaign we were frustrated by having to wait 24 - 48 hours to get results for our experiments. We were lucky to be getting a ton of traffic and hence be able to get statistically significant results in just a few days.

Another big benefit of real-time results is helping our customers answer the question "is this working correctly?" Seeing the data come in in real-time helps reassure folks that the tool is working properly and collecting data.
I don't even think this phenomenon is limited to technical communication. Have you ever noticed yourself resorting to cliches when speaking to your friends or loved ones? I have.

Cliches are uttered as if they were abstract nuggets of knowledge/feeling we use with precision and understand.

But when I look at myself they're actually vague scabs covering topics I haven't actually thought about, am scared to think about, or am purposefully trying to avoid.
And yet that's what people seem to like using it for.

I still don't see why machine translated scheme is a good benchmark for fine tuning code. Javascript is a fine language to work in - especially if you are wanting to use it for things other than a browser (then you must really like it!).
I'd say the barrier to entry for other startups would be the awareness and userbase that Tapzilla may manage to develop.

For instance if Tapzilla can say to a developer that they have 20,000 users with an average 20% redemption rate then Tapzilla is going to be a lot more likely to be successful in selling their service to a developer than a new operation with only 50 users.

To be able to do this successfully on a longterm basis Tapzilla will need to be able to get several case studies as evidence that, due to the freebies, a certain App went up the sales charts which then resulted in more visibility and more paid sales. Otherwise it could just be a losing proposition for developers.
It's called an LBO.
> C++ is popular in industry, so ask for C instead. Java is popular, so ask for Scala instead. OO Perl is popular, so ask for Moose instead.

Ah, you missed my favorite languages. :-)

I hate programming in any 3/4GL language - lot of typing and too hard to reuse.
Tips to Search for Unclaimed Money
Describes the process of searching for unclaimed money using Cashunclaimed.com, along with fees and issues one might have with the website.
Or could it just be that mercurial is written in python?
Valid point. Having read all of the feedback, there's plenty of info to create something slightly different for the UK used car market.
Certainly something we are well aware of and trying to improve! We'd love to automatically track ad clicks for you and provide the corresponding reporting to let you know which variation gets you the most clicks.

Please email us at feedback@optimizely.com and let us know if you're interested in this and I'd love to learn more about this use case.
I mentioned this to Spolsky already but depending how you want to count servers (web servers or all front facing servers or all servers in your infrastructure?), we have 10-20 servers servicing 350 million page views per month. That is of course not counting all the ajax requests that we also service, which don't count as page views. So we service 17-35 million page views per server, compared to StackExchange's 12 million page views per server.

We use PHP and Apache, so the gloating about ASP being way more efficient than PHP seems to be unfounded.
I always get this sort of reply to my hiring-related comments.

Basically, I don't get to pick what open positions my department is hiring for. I can't micromanage the projects that aren't my own, but I do get to interview people for those projects. So that's what my experience is based on.

Trust me, if I had my own company, I would not be looking for Java or C++ developers.
Replace [Egyptian-]muslim by whatever (asian, nigerian,
haitian, mexican, brazillian) and you have a generic
immigrant profile.

I completely fail to understand your point.
naturally blew the stack.

You mean the heap, right? The GC isn't going to help you with running out of stack. And the solution is usually to tell java to increase the default max heap limit.
Well I did read the article, so I know that was part of it, I just think how the community feels mattered the most.
Past 2 decades? Yahoo is only 15 years old and was (arguably) the king of the web until '03 or so. The financial slide didn't start until 2 or 3 years ago after a respectable dot-bomb recovery.
LBO = "leveraged buyout"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout
Science existed before the formulation of the scientific method. The accumulation of knowledge has always been fundamental to science going back to Aristotle.
I haven't seen the code but based on the description it's a benchmark that was originally in scheme and ported to javascript.. sounds fine to me.
And "kernel simulation benchmark" may have a usecase too, just because you can't think of it, doesn't mean it isn't there ;)
I can think of tests for scheduling, threading, asynchronous code, I/O when i think of "kernel simulation".

Again, people like to use V8benchmarks, when it's not made for browser comparisons. The fact that it's often used only shows that there is a lack of a real cross browser benchmar suite.
funny, I was bummed python came before java on app engine. and what about gwt? that's java! who would want to write their javascript in javascript anyway ;-)

and yes, I agree that the mindset of learning new things in your free time (and bonus for open sourcing work) is the way for a software engineer to stay gainfully employed. worked for me.
Heh hold your horses, Colin. The tools are only there to show you that you can't live in one and ignore all others here.

And you're right, I spent a lot less time telling you what's great about the company than I did on trying to make it obvious who we're not looking for. That's because we're looking for a very specific breed of person.

In this startup, you will not only be doing engineering, but also answering customer emails and chat messages. You will likely be an important part of strategy discussions, and you may have to write the odd press release. You may even need to go door to door and figure out what our customers want. Not every engineer is interested in that stuff, and I wanted to make sure those people didn't apply.

You will basically a cofounder-level person coming in at a stage where a lot of the risk is removed.

As far as some of the interesting challenges...

Heavy image processing, data processing, and analytics.
Primarily client-side web application with client side data processing.
Very heavy database loads with poor potential cacheability.
Data synchronization across multiple clients.
Near duplicate document detection.
Graph problems which need to be precomputed to varying degrees to make the application very responsive.
Spam detection.
Full credit to you for producing a concept to live, money generating site.

Equally like your tactics via twitter, and buying the domain ( I might borrow that! ) to gain members.

BUT... This is a horrible example of what budding internet entrepreneurs should be aiming for. Truly horrid.
This is fair. In C, you can't ever let yourself forget whether you have a pointer or an integer or a signed value or an unsigned value. The compiler will not protect you from mistakes, and in the kernel, mistakes are called "remote root exploits". (Remember the bug where someone was derefrencing a null pointer, except that 0 is a valid memory address in kernel land? Yeah.)

But don't do this in high-level code. There, you should use types that are as descriptive as possible, as that will greatly improve readability and maintainability.
regards something specific Linus said:

"We should also have some format for printing out "u32/u64" etc, but that's
another issue and has the problem that gcc won't understand them, so
adding new formats is _hard_ from a maintenance standpoint. "

do they not use inttypes.h for that?

http://linux.die.net/man/3/priu32
Thanks for the data point, I'm pondering which direction to go with this: community (pitch & receive some free traffic) or service (pitch until you're pitch-perfect ... ha)
Because most people are not ambidextrous?
That's cool, but the sad part is that this is a common feature with most other languages and not just some added library. Still great that you show what's possible :)

Also: does anybody know why Java core classes don't have examples in the documentation? (compare: http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html )
A Critique of OpenStreetMap
I'm not sure how this is related to Hacker News or of general interest to hacker types.
Just about every sufficiently large company will have a treasury department to act as an "internal bank" - managing the actual cash of a company.

Some of the things they do are quite cool - I thought zero balance sweeping was a particularly neat trick when I heard about it.
I actually find it boring to apply for a job to "design algorithms to target advertising".

Think about it: do you want to do that for the next 10 years of your life? Do you want the next 10 years of your life to revolve around such a thing? Even if you don't mind it: is that what entices you to apply for the job?

I don't care what the work itself is. I care about the environment and the culture.

I'd rather design a spread-sheets application in a hacker-centric culture, than design hard-core search algorithms in a typical management-and-sales-centric culture.
I think the problem is that some people want the abstraction and the strategic plan, some want a quick idea they can make a snap decision about. A seller doesn't know in advance which sort of buyer he's going to meet, but there's a good chance they tried out a 30 second pitch on a bank manager once, only to be asked a bunch of complex questions for which they didn't have an answer.

It's like job hunting, or dating. Every so often there's instant chemistry, but most people fall back on the laundry list.
Apart from the virtualisation features, I don't see many additions to the kernel that are driven by the cloud computing industry though. Most of the changes are drivers and revamped subsystems.
I liked this this reply farther in to the thread: "inlines, when used properly, are _not_ larger than not inlining"

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0206.1/0843.h...

My usual rule is to not inline anything that calls a full fledged function, and to only explicitly inline things that are truly on high performance paths. Basically, trust that the compiler will inline or not inline the rest as appropriate. But this is another interesting metric to consider.
And how do you propose one goes about establishing these decentralized imperial republics?

Whatever the side effects may have turned out to be, the British empire certainly did not set out to "empower ordinary individuals who will create new and unforeseen technologies out of old ones."

Superpowers pitying undeveloped countries and nominating themselves as Imperial rulers as the only solution to their plight sounds rather self-serving, don't you think?
Our startup has a product that does that :). Admittedly, the designers have to work with us to set them up, but once they are set up, we don't have to do anything more.

http://www.usearabella.com/
This is an overly sentimental and nostalgic treatment rather than an objective view of how things get done. It would be more insightful to consider the effort, connections, training and education, and no doubt stubbornness and how they can affect an outcome rather than focussing on some fanciful, spooky notions of a rose-tinted world where travelling to the moon isn't rocket science.
I can't help thinking this is the future. Like it or not, taking real peoples 'likes' and 'dislikes' into the search algorithm will significantly reduce the SEO spam overload problem that is plaguing google. Its been said many times on HN that google is becoming less and less relevant. Its the problem of getting a machine to make recommendations without any human intelligence.

The future of search will take into account input from the masses, and, at the moment, facebook are the people with the best access to this information. Be afraid google.
"reclusive but highly intelligent stereotype", lol now I don't feel so bad. but seriously, I can't get this bing social search to work. I've tried keywords I've seen occur many times in my facebook stream. It doesn't appear to be doing any "social searching".