skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try making something that depends on an I/O resource that is really slow, that will give you more of a feeling for it quickly.

I did this in one of my projects (Ajax-Gist.com) where I was directly querying a 3rd party API (GitHub) for each request. That meant that each request was client->server roundtrip time plus server->api roundtrip time, which worked out to be around 200ms, or a total throughput of 5 requests per second.

This is obviously unacceptable and a complete waste of resources so I re-wrote the whole thing to be asynchronous. The new application, running in a single thread on the same hardware can now handle around 70 requests per second with 30 concurrent users. That's pretty damn fast for a Rails application...

Now I didn't use Node to solve my problem (though I considered it!) but the principles and the message I took away was the same. I think it's a handy tool to have in your toolkit, but as you've already realized it's simply not necessary for a lot of projects, particularly smaller ones.
dude stop being so old. not everyone is a crusty old programmer that can't be hyped up by anything. there used to be a time when programming was fun and we enjoyed being pumped up about new technologies. chill out MOTHER FUCKER!
So if the sunlit side is under higher pressure, how do the hydrogen atoms return to that side? I must still be missing something.

Also, is there really enough hydrogen ionizing at 400C?
That entropy always increases? How exactly does that apply in the case of focusing photons?
Plus, 0 (yeah zero) of the 50 domesticatable candidate large animals were ever domesticated. As well as very few storable domesticated plants. Read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
One thing I beat on my development staff about is that computers are fast, stupid fast. As in billions of operations per second fast. With rare exception, if I do an operation on something in memory, it shouldn't take any more than 1/2 a second for it to happen. This extends to UI interactions, selecting a few thousand items in a list shouldn't take 4 seconds a disk swap.

There are times though, when they have to go back and revisit something where they just "let the computer handle it" and whatever libraries they happened to be using do the work, and go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff to be performant from scratch. When that happens, there usually is some pretty large speedup, on the order of hundreds of percent.
Wouldn't going so low-level be a bit counter-productive at this point in his learning process? I would think that playing with existing async systems like Node, EventMachine and Twisted would be more productive in the short-term and give him a base on which to build deeper knowledge...
Just FYI, http://ajaxgist.com results in a 404.

What library/technique did you end up using to make your app asynchronous?
I kind of like Longman's data but have never understood his sense of panic. It's as if he's stuck in some kind of time bubble in which the world doesn't suffer from a massive economic depression and a sizable excess of industrial capacity.

We have 10% unemployment in the USA, our jobs growth rate is so anemic that we're projected to take decades, plural decades, to recover to full employment, and productivity keeps going up. Thanks, but I'll wait until -- at the very least -- all my unemployed friends are fully employed in caring for the elderly before I start worrying about a shortage of humans.
Wait, what...?

Are you suggesting that the wealth and GDP of a continent are positively correlated with its area? How bizarre...

I guess somebody forgot to tell Antarctica.
Think again again? The article leads off with an old, wrong prediction caused by extrapolating then-current population trends indefinitely. The rest of the article is based on extrapolations of the current population trends indefinitely...
It's not that it would be counterproductive; it's simply impenetrable. I read libev's awful homepage and perused the epoll manpage, but they don't mean anything to me--I don't have enough context for them to sink in. (Also... and I say this understanding that I am a man filled with ignorance and hubris... how relevant can libev really be, if its canonical source repo is still maintained with cvs?) But, manpages are rarely where one goes to begin learning about something... on the very first section, I am already inundated with things that mean nothing to me: what are "edge-triggered" and "level-triggered?" What does it mean to "watch" a file descriptor?

I know just enough about GNU/Linux I/O to be dangerous, so I can start to build an inkling of understanding based on this information: "watching" a file descriptor is probably how we register event listeners, and "edge vs. level" is most likely a decision about when handlers receive their data. But that's about as far as I can get before I have to start descending into the terms I don't completely understand. When I find something that explains those, it will probably rely on a bunch of other terms that I must descend into, and so forth. By the time I finally recurse all the way back up to my original quest for knowledge ("What does event-driven mean?"), I will be so inundated with new information that nothing sticks!

Thanks for the suggestion about Twisted, EM and Node.js... I'll have to make some time to play with them soon.
Random trivia.

Africa is the only continent in the Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern hemispheres.

There is more genetic variation arising in the human species from within Africa than in the rest of the world combined.
I've seen soot on contacts. But then I have wiring in my house that Thomas Edison personally came and installed.
he left out this caveat about the nginx comparison:

"Please take with a grain of salt. Very special circumstances.
NGINX peaked at 4mb of memory
Node peaked at 60mb."
> We have achieved a beautiful blend between C# and MacOS that will turn Mac developer's tears of pain into tears of joy.

Really? Tears of pain?
How to Build Your Own Greenhouse
Do you think that marriage and kids stop someone from flirting and having extra-marital affairs?
Most of the time, with disk space as cheap as it is now the extra stuff isn't even worth the time spent deciding what to keep.

As for requiring a very specific configuration, most of the time that is only in one corner of the machine. I would even hazard that if you have strict requirements for every facet of the machine that differ from the defaults (and this machine is not handling super-sensitive information, super-high performance jobs, or publicly accessible) then you are doing it wrong.
Wasn't there some government grant they got or something that was to go toward electric vehicle (EV) development and not hybrid development?
No, it's pure "ick factor" and a desire to keep the existence of gay people off their child's radar.

I don't see anyone outlawing morbidly obese teachers or teachers with multiple speeding tickets, although those are not attributes you look for in a role model.

EDIT: It could also be an honest opinion that homosexuals are dangerous; still not related to lesson quality, but more honest than the role model justification.
IT seems that he has focused on the academic side of this more than commercial, though he seems to have a staff suitable to commercializing this. Maybe the DARPA or whomever gives him better terms on his deal than he'd get from Khosla?

It does mention PARC investing and owning parts of his patents.
It's more true than you might think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plancks_law
Proof that sometimes an outsiders perspective can come at a problem in a novel and seemingly successful way.
Paul Smith Cufflinks blue and signature logo
Why Limelight Networks?
Wasn't RFID supposed to fix this by now?
You Might Be A Computing Old Timer If...
Cory Doctorow called Squeak "logo for the 21st century."

http://squeak.org/
You just switched from volume to mass.
The writer is so badly (or purposefully) confused it's hard to know where to start. Well,

by expanding their admissions to include women and minorities while keeping standards high.

No. Again, no. There are very distinctly two sets of standards, one lower than the other, and it shouldn't require much elaboration as to why that causes legitimate resentment. or why it deviates from any real notion of a meritocracy.

The result of that expansion is now with us: Barack Obama

Umm, no. It's fairly clear to every non-brainwashed observer that BHO's skin color was a huge part of the elite's attraction to him. That behavior on the part of the (noun) elite, is distinctly not compatible with the maintenance of an (adjective) elite class.

Despite pushing aside the old WASP establishment—not a single WASP remains on the Supreme Court—these modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility, by many Americans

Sigh. Replace "WASP" with anything and I mean any other term, "Black", "Jewish", "Italian" anything in the world and ask yourself, "Why would the blacks/Jews/Italians not admire the other groups pushing them out of power?" Why would that be reasonable?

The stupidity is almost overpowering.
Is 2010 One of the Most Significant Years for Software Architecture?
it doesn't work at all on windows afaik. Pik is a decent recreation, but not quite as good as rvm imo.
ASP pages could be written in Microsoft's ECMAScript variation of JavaScript (JScript), and they even carried the tradition on to JScript.NET (with blazing fast performance. JScript.NET was the underappreciated step-child of the .NET ecosystem).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974588.aspx

I don't even know if that is still around, as it never really gained much traction.

Nonetheless, I was using the "same language on the client and the server" argument 14 years ago. Nice to see the world caught up to my utter brilliance.
Haha, I got my own domain name wrong! Clearly it's been a long day...

Link: http://ajax-gist.com/

In the end I built what was essentially a proof-of-concept asynchronous Rails 3 application. The libraries I used under the hood to get everything async were:

* Rack/Fiber-Pool: http://github.com/mperham/rack-fiber_pool

* EM Synchrony: http://github.com/igrigorik/em-synchrony

* Eventmachine: http://rubyeventmachine.com/

Using Rails for what is essentially a thin proxy is overkill, and I could have gotten better performance with Node or by writing a Rack application directly. But I wanted to take the opportunity to get a handle on what would be involved with doing this in Rails, as not too many people have done it before that I am aware of (and at the time no-one had done it with Rails 3).
So how does the concurrency of node.js compare to a web framework written in Erlang?
Use asterisks to surround whatever you want italicized. Sometimes, but not always, you can click the little gray "help" next to the input textbox to get such hints.
And politeness and optimism :-(
Keep your eye onthe prize! Corny, I know, but maybe just remind yourself every once in a while whats important. When you let your body and mind fall naturally to what it's attracted to, you can end up on a site like this or reddit or the like for a long time, but if you pause for a second and think about what you could be doing instead, you might pass on spending time here and doing some work.
Is this article serious, or is it a parody? (Honest question)
No, I mean don't tighten it at all! Not unless you open it and add anti-oxidant. If you tighten it you break the air seal, and allow it to oxidize, and aluminium oxide does not conduct.

The correct installation uses anti-oxidant to seal it, then you tighten it enough to crack the aluminum oxide, and the anti-oxidant protects it. If you tighten it without fresh anti-oxidant you are creating a hazard.

And pig tails are not outlawed - quite the opposite, they are the recommended way to handle aluminium wiring.
You realize your argument can be extrapolated to most every field that relies upon the public trust. Those fields have gone on to create codes of ethics, licensing or accreditation processes, or even legal penalties for those who do not abide by the decided upon boundaries for ethical behavior.

Just because our field is too immature to have such things doesn't make it any less important to call a spade a spade. Not all wars can be fought nor won through competition in the marketplace, as you suggest.
So, how does Africa compare to Asia, just so we're comparing apples to apples?
Thanks! It sounds like you definitely blazed a couple of trails. Nicely done! I shall certainly peruse all of this; I appreciate the thorough response.
The same has been mentioned to me before.

I very much doubt that I'd execute on this if it were dropped into my lap, but hypothetically supposing I saw a way to productize this, I would not need customers. It would be like inventing an AI which could successfully trade stocks in all market conditions. Sure, I suppose I could sell it for $99.95 on infomercials, but the more obvious path is to proceed directly to total world domination.

I would go raise capital, call in all of my favors with the witch kings of SEO, pull off Demand Media in parallel for as many niches as I could scale to (and if I productized this and had capital available, that number would be very high indeed), and sell out at a truly ridiculous multiple prior to the borg deciding my business model needed to be nuked from orbit.

Anyhow, good news for HN readers: the fact that this strategy is still done by bingo card makers and boutique SEO consultants and not a department dedicated to it at the New York Times means that you still have an opportunity to make a lot of money at it before your competitors with mega-brands, link juice flowing out their ears, and vast reserves of capital figure out how to exploit it.
Sorry guys, I got there first:

http://pics.ww.com/v/jacques/renewables/concentrator/

Patent pending ;)

Yes, I realize there is a lot more to it than that. However, there have been solar concentrators of all kinds of varieties, I've built a couple of proto-types the one in the pictures above was one of the more promising ones because it allows the collector to be stationary.

Interesting tidbit from that experiment, it's quite hard to bond a solar panel to a cooling surface that can dissipate 800 watts over 100 square centimeters, whatever you use to bond will melt or dry out and then your solar cells will self-disassemble. So you will end up with active cooling, which in turn will give you co-generation (both electricity and heat).

I really hope this guy will succeed, we could do with a bit more radical thinking in this space.
By any chance, did you found a tax software company that was acquired?

I feel like I've met you after seeing Barhopolis.
Another way of stating it is that heat flows from hot->cold.
You can't concentrate the light/heat from a blackbody source to more than the temperature of the source.

So you can't focus sunlight to more than 6000k however many mirrors you use.
The Perplexing Case of the Female Orgasm
What about bisexual men and women?
Shameful self-plug :)

I would like to think Last Man Standing was excellent :)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/165110/lastmanstanding/index.html
It's one thing to try and keep the group small to create a better, more comfortable experience for everyone, but denigrating anyone who doesn't present as "leechers" and keeping them out to maintain the purity of your group is disgustingly elitist. Your entire calculus is short-sighted and elitist; you are treating people as nothing but tools to advance your agenda. If they don't contribute something to you or your group you don't want them. What kind of community is that? Certainly not one that I'd want to be a part of, and certainly not one that has any hope of "preserving hacking and invention" as Zed Shaw described. First off, stop being so selfish and stop dividing people into those who can do something for you and those who can't. Secondly, if you want to foster a sustainable community you have to share, teach, and give to others. Who knows, those people might even grow into the knowledgeable, well-connected hackers that you so desire.

I apologize if I've completely misinterpreted your article, but after re-reading it a few times and thinking about it I still get the same impression.
see: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=349697
Exactly... That is why I recommend sticking to high-level libraries and tackling a simple real-world problem to start off.

Even just playing with writing some meaningful client-side JavaScript will be enough to give you more of a 'feel' for event-driven programming...

It's not going to give you a huge amount of knowledge straight out but it will definitely give you enough to get you started if you decide to go further.
Nielsen uses audio watermarks for device interaction with TV content
Very nice. This combines two of my interests, book writing and tech startups. :)

First impressions: the homepage looks good, nice and neat, but doesn't communicate "what's in it for me" to the user easy/fast enough. You have a great video demo, but I didn't even notice it was there until after I read comments here. Just do a screen capture of the page with the video, crop the video image, and stick that on the home page as a link to the video. Pictures are so much more engaging for visitors than just text.

Next, the FAQ and video demo, etc. should exist on the same site design as the homepage. I can understand this is an early release, and the crowd here at HN is familiar with Posterous, but anyone from the outside would think "huh?" when jumping to a different looking page. It doesn't look as professional.

The actual product looks very cool, simple and effective, as it should be. I especially like the character name generator. :) I think the site should also be clear about how the author's work is safe. As a dabbling author I will certainly bookmark this site! A feature request would be to see an overview of everything created -- characters, scenes, etc. -- on the same page to provide a good mental outline of the book for the author.
I don't understand the downvoting, so I'll make my position clear. If you read the article, the guy is now in financial trouble because the super soaker profits have largely dried up, and he has had to put other plans on hold.

What I'm saying is, if you find yourself in the situation where you have a big win, you need to lock away some of that to keep you in retirement. Then, you can go onto your next venture knowing that, if it doesn't work out, at least you won't fall on financial hard times. I honestly don't know why this is so downvoted, so perhaps someone can explain it to me.
Apple iPad Heads to Walmart — Does It Have Too Much Distribution?
I understand that the statistics isn't completely accurate, but it still should give a rough idea. Think we could get the data graphed for more cities? (I just moved to Columbus, Ohio:)
Most of the elderly do not have enough money to be cared for, and the social security trust fund is empty.

Considering the number of jobs that have moved overseas, and the malinvestment that has occurred in the last 10 years, I'm amazed that the unemployment rate is only 10%. (Actually, it isn't....so many people have fallen out of the categories considered unemployed, it is an artificially low number...the real number is likely somewhere between 15% and 20%).

And if all the young people are in jobs caring for the elderly (for which no one has the money to pay for), who will grow food, build houses, manufacture goods?

China? Well, it's worked so far I suppose.
Does anyone else find it funny that the United States was placed in the most uninhabitable section of Africa.
Real-time inventory tracking for as large a company as Best Buy is "fairly trivial"?

For large companies, it is a multi-million dollar investment to build a warehouse management system capable of showing near real-time levels of inventory. Besides the capital costs, companies can have very specific workflows for managing inventory levels. Also things like drop-ship vendors and sourcing items from multiple sources can make it extremely difficult to calculate or predict inventory levels prior to a sale.
> No, I mean don't tighten it at all! Not unless you open it and add anti-oxidant. If you tighten it you break the air seal, and allow it to oxidize, and aluminium oxide does not conduct.

Ah ok, I see what you mean now, yes that makes good sense.

As for the pigtails, as far as I know you can not make any new wiring with Aluminum in residential installations, pigtailed or not (I left my code book in Canada because it is of no use to me here, maybe there is some up-to-date online resource). Industrial use is still ok I believe.
My friend was working at the Strand when they did the Cell Phone Symphony! Too bad I don't live in NY anymore to experience all the craziness.
This is even harder to select for. Now instead of the keyword "Perl", we have nothing.
Let's take a concrete example. A Core-i7 980X Extreme Edition, the latest and greatest from Intel, can execute a maximum of four instructions in a clock cycle. (The numbers on actual code are probably a little over 1 instruction per cycle, which is really pretty good.) It runs at 3.33 GHz and has 6 cores. That's a theoretical maximum of about 43.336 = 79 instructions per nanosecond, on all cores combined. Assuming I didn't make some dumb arithmetic mistake.

Of course, in real code you'll be lucky to get anywhere near that.
Additionally, there are still businesses that use 3-column ledger paper for their books, write all receipts manually, accept cash only, have no web presence at all (of their own), and use mechanical cash registers. Unfortunately, the presence of technology does not always mean adoption of technology even if the benefits seem crystal clear to most others.
Is Google wasting its time with self-driving cars?
For a while Citibank used to have a dodge where they'd try to get a desk in a NY skyscraper to be declared as part of the Cayman Islands embassy, and therefore Cayman Islands territory, so that the person working from there could more easily run their shell companies without being subject to NY law.

My understanding is that this was stopped a number of years ago.
And a ustream version: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/522594
No worries! I'm always happy to answer questions via email as well if need be.
Income tax is probably always marginal, but in the UK at least this kind of thinking does apply to selling houses - when a house is sold in the UK the buyer must pay "stamp duty", which is a percentage of the value of the house, with the percentage changing at certain thresholds. For example at £250,000 the stamp duty changes from 1% to 3% - but the percentage applies to the entire value of the house. So if you sell for 250,000 the buyer pays 250000 * 0.03=£7500, compared to 249999 * 0.01=£2,499.

That introduces some distortions into house pricing, making it very difficult to sell a house in the £250,000 to £265,000 range - because you are competing with houses just under the threshold which work out significantly cheaper for the buyer. As someone selling a house which falls into that price range, you might be better off asking for slightly less from the sale (versus asking for just over the threshold and waiting much longer to find a buyer).