skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have a point, though I would liken this lack of a feature to something more like "this blu ray player can't connect to the internet via WPA2." It's not entirely essential to its operation, and an upgrade could be around the corner.

[Hacker News bug report: I had to come to treeface's comment page to reply to this message. I wasn't allowed to on the main thread]
Right on. This is exactly why I started to actively avoid consulting gigs where I'd have to work with Microsoft technologies - whatever knowledge you gain has a shelf life measured in weeks, because they're constantly on to the next shiny trinket.
SAP Admitting Infringement In Oracle Case
The "just" in:

"it just means that it has a very specific requirement for the knowledge of the participants,"

is not a trivial exercise that should be left to the reader.

The technical issue for Stackoverflow is to make editing an standards enforcement efficient and socially desirable to a highly tech savvy community.

It's not storage, it's filtering.
For those wanting to learn the history check out:

Where the wizards stay up late, http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326...

Also, check out this, a true gem on google video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4989933629762859961#
To the extent that the libertarian voting bloc goes Republican this year, it will probably have something to do with the $1.4 trillion deficit. During the Bush years, people that have roughly libertarian values went Democrat (you can look up old Cato articles for details) so it is not as if they are beholden to any one party.

Unfortunately our system forces people to choose between the lesser of two evils and right now many people are blanching at the deficit.
Description basically applies to the internet, not just apps. This is just further proof of what everyone already knows. Software patenting is broken, and the U.S. patent office grants idiotic software patents.
The problem is that they're unwilling to jump on WebKit. I imagine this might have something to do with the historical prominence of the IE team at Microsoft.

Using WebKit (and possibly even the JS-processing code Google pushes back to the WebKit community), they could get it up and running in far less time than it would take to build it themselves. A small (or large, well-organized) company wouldn't have legacy issues like this (or at least wouldn't let them get in the way of making the right decision).
This is the article you want to read
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/29/verizon_iphone_seiden...
Ask HN: 15 minute server load average over 125
So we are preparing to launch a site on Monday and one of our servers stores and serves PDF's as well as converts the PDF's to individual screens from each page in the PDF.

One of my coworkers decided to create a recursive script to upload the needed launch files (2000+) via Curl to the API of this media server. This server was never optimized to handle all these requests and now the server is unresponsive with the last command that was accepted approx 4 hours ago showing the loads as:

10:51:04 up 86 days, 3:39, 2 users, load average: 187.47, 175.52, 128.39

A top result from about 20 minutes prior showed:

top - 10:34:55 up 86 days, 3:23, 2 users, load average: 109.13, 81.57, 48.53

He should've stopped the process then, but now we are in this mess... Should I just restart the server or will this load possibly eventually catch up?
I especially like the time series mode where flot assigns very meaningful time labels on the x axis when you zoom in and out. (based on unix timestamps * 1000, so easy to retrieve from a database)

You can load data from python quite easily using an jquery ajax call and json.dumps() in the view on the server side.

In general it surprises me how well the client side graph libraries scale if you load a lot of data into them.
Python 3to2 (code in 3.x, support 2.x)
IETF is now standardizing link rel values
But that wouldn't be too much of a problem. Actually it's a good idea, so that you can shovel in different data, in case those get hot.
On P, NP, and Computational Complexity
A new one?
I think the connection that "computer numbers are base 2" is what's missing. You input them into the computer in base 10, and they are printed in base 10. The base 10 representation is wrong because information was lost when converting to a fixed-width base 2 number. But that is hidden by the compiler or program, so it confuses programmers and users.

It works in Excel...
Or even most recently used blocks, instead of files.
I have a baby and I’m doing a startup. Whoopie
Thanks for the feedback. We are definitely planning to connect an app of some sort to the site.

I think/hope that as any social site the community will be somewhat organic. I do notice now however that the users private mood journal (an aspect that is one of the direct benefits to the end user) is not prominent from the main page and I will be correcting that shortly.

Thanks again!
It can be jarring for (say) a purple link to turn blue. And if you were absent-mindingly mousing around (people do this) and then look at the link under your cursor, you could get “lied to” that it’s an unvisited link.

Biggest deal? No.

Easy fix? Yes. (Especially with Sass, where lighten(@visited_color, 3) makes it trivial…)
I love your idea!

I'd recommend to start designing what you expect users to do in your service. For instance, when I visit your site as a new user, what do you want me to do?

Also I'd recommend to start from paper prototyping before writing codes. Once you build strong user flows, then hire/order design issues.

There are many crowdsourcing service as http://www.elance.com/
And this headline does not link to Fortune because...?
That isn't even an anecdote, so I would probably classify it as a "baseless assertion" rather than "anecdotal evidence."
For those not familiar with Cocos2d iPhone, it is a fantastic open source 2d game framework. The 'mac support' in Cocos2d iPhone is still experimental, and missing a few features :

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/archives/1074

The roadmap indicates mac support should be ready this release cycle (0.95), but it probably won't stabilize until 0.96. Once finished, porting games written with Cocos2d between iOS and Mac should be trivial, allowing for differences in input.

If anyone is interested in learning more about Cocos2d iPhone, I've started a tutorial series for people with little or no programming experience:

http://www.coconutcollege.net

It's not finished, but I think it provides a good introduction to the basic concepts.
Who needs instructors, for Christ's sake?
That network load canard is a little dated. Gigabit ethernet gets you 125MB/s, a couple bonded NICs will get you 250MB/s. That's almost definitely way more bandwidth than your database can push by doing a bunch of random reads (500 IOPS/sec * 4kb = not very much), unless you've got a really expensive SAN (in which case buy a $500 10GBE card for you DB machine), so reducing network load from the DB is sort of a nonfactor. Reducing round trips still makes sense, but if your DB is CPU and/or disk saturated, it doesn't actually save you anything.

Performance really comes down to what work are you doing, where does it take place, and how many disks and CPUs can you get involved to spread the load. For small amounts of load, you could say there's some gain from pushing more work in the database but it doesn't matter anyways. Large load, you're making the DB a bottleneck.
Geocities to be released as a torrent
I can't thank you enough for that link, so I'll just say it simply. Thank you!
I used to think I needed long uninterrupted stretches of time to do good work. It turns out I was wrong. I'm working on a side-project now, putting in less than half an hour a day (but making sure to do it every day). Strangely enough I'm making better progress in many ways than when I had the luxury of spending many hours on side-projects.

I'm blogging on my progress, if anyone is interested: http://prehacked.com (read http://prehacked.com/pages/about-this-blog-53 to get an idea of what I'm working on).
Can you expound a little more on this please. Let's say I write something, how, exactly can they appropriate the technology?
Different people have different learning styles.
I remember when @PaulG joined Twitter he quickly gained several thousand followers in a few hours via a link from Hacker News. This data is based on only 400-500 users. I would say the majority of the Hacker News community is left out.
Well, I never called myself a white knight, but that's beside the point.

If someone breaks into your Facebook account, bad things can happen, but none that (directly) involve physical harm. If someone enters your home, they could easily cause you physical harm (and in many jurisdictions you'd be well within your rights to shoot them).

Your analogy is flawed because a person's home is not analogous to their Facebook account. Their car might be -- and I don't think opening an unlocked car door and leaving a note on the dash is wrong.

It's like when people equated Amazon's revoking of 1984 to breaking into a customer's house and taking the book off the shelf. It's fearmongering, and isn't an accurate analogy.
The title of this post is so ridiculous I refuse to honor the link by reading it.

Anyone who really thinks Farmville or social networks had anything to do with this incident needs to learn about what it means to have a mental illness.

This is a tragic incident that could have been prevented if people had understood and identified what was really going on with this woman. I'm extremely uncomfortable with this post's existence.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Edit: I'm extremely uncomfortable with this LINK's existence. Gizmodo is being stupid with this article.
Shouldn't you be able to do mostly sequential writes if you have a b-tree structure and a copy-on-write filesystem (like btrfs)?
The fact that Microsoft is still working on desktop HTML5 doesn't mean a thing to a smartphone customer when every other popular smartphone has it already.

For the same reason, it's hard to convince myself that I'm being "silly" for having an expectation as a web developer that a new mobile OS platform in 2010 would have decent HTML5 support. What a step backwards for the mobile web.
I'd be interested in hear stories about getting acquired by any large tech company.
Ok, you're up to 3k random reads per second at the absolute peak. Realistically more like 2k for 6x10k disks at RAID 0, and it's awfully hard to even fit 10TB on a RAID1+0 setup. What's that, 10x2TB? Good luck with the latencies on those 2TB disks.

Still doesn't add up to 10k select statements per second over a 10TB dataset on a singlenode. Even without writes, that's not happening. I call BS on grandparent post.
It should be mandatory for any incoming politician to take a couple introductory economics courses before serving. There are too many laws where incentives are not aligned properly, fundamentally dooming the policy to failure.

A good example of an incentive problem that's recently unfolded: now nearly 50% of US households have no federal income tax liability.

Edit: It's nearly 50%. It was 38% in 2007, 47% in 2009. Also, 40% of households "make a profit from the federal income tax system, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes".

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2010-04-07-income-...
People don't realize how much fat are in the noodles, either. They're in that awesome shape because they're deep fried!
This. Though a Verizon Wireless logo on the back of the iphone isn't out of the realm of possibility. Verizon is probably seeing this as an opportunity to gain a whole slew of new customers AND as a way of siphoning users from AT&T, simultaneously hurting their rival and boosting their subscriber count.

The cost to the user (in terms of hassle, $$, etc) of changing carriers is high, but the iPhone's "halo" status and the horrible reputation of AT&T's network will cause a lot of people to follow it over. I know I probably will.
Ask HN: Hosting a Ruby on Rails app
I'm thinking about going with Ruby on Rails for an app I'm building and was wondering what people's experiences were as far as hosting. I don't have the money for dedicated servers so I'll be going with a shared plan.

Has anybody had any regrets after going this route?

I've read that Rails doesn't perform so well in these types of environments. Is it something to worry about when I'm still small or only if my app becomes very popular?

I saw HostingRails.com had a special offer for their Stacked plan. Has anybody used them and can provide feedback?
I can't guarantee that, but I also can't make that guarantee about non-standardized tests. Plenty of professors make crappy tests which are just rote memorization - that's a pretty easy way to improve your evaluations.

Forcing students to think on a test will only hurt your scores.
What is stopping the "captain" from taking a little detour to the English country side, better yet, New Zealand, and kidnapping a few farmers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google
Other relevant top info from the one that was working earlier:

top - 10:34:55 up 86 days, 3:23, 2 users, load average: 109.13, 81.57, 48.53

Tasks: 318 total, 115 running, 203 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie

Cpu(s): 45.1%us, 8.3%sy, 45.4%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.2%si, 0.0%st

Mem: 3919896k total, 3360108k used, 559788k free, 4332k buffers

Swap: 5963768k total, 2167852k used, 3795916k free, 264276k cached
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
I've wondered this myself a few times. If I were going to do a startup myself, I'd probably stay right here (near the northern tip of the state). For any topic/problem that will hold my interest, I know at least a couple other people nearby who'd likely be interested as well, and with my cost of living as it is now, I'd have a pretty long runway.
This isn't hard realtime systems. Nobody is going to die because it takes a few seconds extra for them to download updates (the human brain takes a lot longer to process it anyway).

And JIT compiled java can be faster than native code, even in situations where you would not expect it (such as signal handling code).
Is NASA Covering Up the 100-Year Starship?
Arduino's are neat, I have one too. One caveat to be aware of is that Processing isn't very portable yet; so it's a bit of a lock-in there.

TI has some neat micro-controller kits in the same vein as the Arduino you should google for. Cheap too.
There's a chance that Apple will build the phone with both radios.
Notary Exam
NotaryExam.org launches offering free information about becoming a notary public per state basis. NotaryExam.org offers its readers information about the Notary Exam. It has some links to Notary Supplies and more.
I have used Visifire[1] -- it's very good and easy but it's silverlight.

-----

[1]: http://www.visifire.com/
Me too. I'm pretty sure mostly because of the list of Hacker News members on Twitter I maintain: http://twitter.com/tlrobinson/hackernews

Also, I noticed the first time this was posted I got a bunch of new followers. It's kind of a self-reinforcing list.
Might be more accurate to say that Javascript was becoming ActionScript - ActionScript 3 was based on a draft standard for EcmaScript 4, which at the time of AS3's creation looked set to become JavaScript 2.0, but that didn't end up panning out.
The pricing model leaves a little to be desired. If I build an app that others use, i have to contact you? Really?
If you have no real evidence for this assertion, then why do you even try to make the argument in the first place? Couldn't you just use that same logic for Mac users?
Most likely it was the time it took you to go to his comments page that made the difference. When comment threads reach a certain level of activity, the HN software starts putting a delay before you can reply. I believe it's meant to curb useless chatter and flamewars.
How many inkpens or mainframes did you use during the last month? How many might you have used 50 years ago?
I'm surprised that JWZ (and, seemingly, several of the commenters) was expecting a full OpenGL stack on a mobile phone, and seemingly wasn't aware of the differences between OpenGL and OpenGL ES, particularly with respect to the absence of the long-since-deprecated-in-regular-OpenGL Immediate Mode.

It sometimes seems as though, as a consequence of all the strides made in bringing more serious OS support, better languages and much more coherent UI work to mobile phones in the last few years, many programmers have lost sight of the fact that these are still relatively low-powered embedded devices.
Citation on that 50% please. I have never heard that.
Sorry for this off topic comment but it's related(kind of):
I've always wondered how a crime committed on a ship can be caught. For example, the crew of a ship mutinies against their captain and throws him overboard. When they get back to port, they claim that their captain was swept overboard during a storm. The crew, as one man, sticks to their story. Will anybody ever be able to prove otherwise?

This approaches being the perfect crime as the number of crew members go down, doesn't it?

How is this handled?
I'd go with Heroku to start. Its free to start, but does jump quickly to $36/month, and you can decide at that time where you want to take it - more Heroku, VPS, dedicated etc.

I haven't used Heroku, but then I haven't deployed a 'small' rails app since before Heroku started.

Edit: Also, make sure you're using Ruby 1.9.x - this alone will give you a bunch of extra performance to allow you to run more users on the same configuration at the low end
The Great iPhone Serial Port Hack
For those of us outside the us, would you be able to expand on the "federal income tax liability" issue?

[edit] Thanks, that helps, but I still don't understand what you think is being correctly or incorrectly incentivized here.
Using a non-blocking server with Python does not really make sense since most libraries in Python are blocking by nature and gevent only solves the most simple conversions by monkey patching (and like the author notes this is very error prone).

If you want to use non-blocking in Python then using something like Twisted is an option since Twisted implements most things in an non-blocking way, but Twisted hasn't really gained that much traction in the many years of its existence.

So yes if you do a hello world benchmark then you get a 4x speed improvement, but if you do any library calls (such as doing a MySQL query) you will get decreased perfomance since the MySQL Python library is blocking (and most other libraries are blocking as well)...
I think there is something missing from the analysis of iOS applications as entertainment. Not only can I show you my new Vuvuzela app while we're sitting in a bar, I can show it to the waitress, your girlfriend, and the guy sitting next to me. iOS apps are entertaining because they are social.

A macApp is less sharable than an emailed website link. Besides my dog who am I going annoy with my Vuvuzela? (so to speak).

I suspect that macApps will sell based on utility rather than entertainment and that the removal of flash and java are expected to generate much of the initial need.
As someone else noted, if Lion includes most of the Cocoa Touch APIs, it'll be trivial to port iOS apps.
I may not live to see my great great grand children, but I want to live long enough to see us reclaim these little guys.
You might (also) have some luck asking this question on quora.com.
ActionScript is a superset of JavaScript with syntactic sugar. All the "differences", mostly type annotations, class-based oop, and traits, are superficial and do not modify the language to any reasonable degree. Every ECMAScript program is also a valid ActionScript 3 program.

What do you mean "javascript doesn't compile"? if you mean it doesn't have a native ahead-of-time compiler for an existing physical processor, well, that's not a language problem but a community/effort problem :-)
A sealed record of the number of prisoners on departure.
And for users who choose not to install it, do they get a modal prompt for every page load?
But can you imagine how different the reporting would have been if say a teenager had killed his baby brother after being interrupted during a game of GTA or Manhunt.
my response to all this craziness since I forked the original project: http://blog.millermedeiros.com/2010/10/zepto-js-and-mobile-j...
I looked MeeGo up just to see if that was the case yesterday. lol
Agree. But I'm deeply convinced that frontal lectures belong to the past, pre-Google past,

and it is the predominant way of instruction today, regardless of student's personal learning style or preferences.
Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don't have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it's just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can't, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Are you going to support Hailstorm? SOAP? RDF? Are you supporting it because your customers need it, or because someone is firing at you and you feel like you have to respond?

Joel Spolsky, "Fire and Motion," 2002

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Ask a Hacker: Does The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Know What She’s Doing?
How is this different from a crime committed anywhere else? If my friends and I push another friend off a balcony, we could say he tripped.
Probably not worth the hassle. I guess that's the danger of setting the incentive too high. :)
I wonder if you can also use this framework to include a 3-D printer.

It's the same XYZ axis control, I think all you would need is a different head. You may be able to even mount both heads at once, offset from each other.
As a returning adult student who is currently struggling to complete a bachelor's on a part-time basis, this type of study is not always feasible. I am more than capable of learning advanced material but it does take effort, and poor teaching becomes a huge time-management issue for a number of reasons.

A teacher who can explain difficult concepts can save you literally dozens of hours of self-study. At least, this has been the case in my experience. Having someone to ask questions of is huge. Having a good study group is not always a dependable solution.

On a more immediate level, if I have to spend three or four hours of useless time in class, that's time taken out of my schedule to actually learn the material.

Granted, I have a commute and a job and family, so it's not quite the same as if I were a 20-something undergrad, but should we value their time less than my own? Many universities are chock full of teachers who are good researchers and grant writers, not necessarily good professors, and I do feel that this is a big problem.
Great interview, thanks for this.
I imagine it's pretty risky, since the local farmers would presumably have weapons, and know the land better than the captain.
What if they shared it with a contractor?
Pretty sure he meant Dalvik.
In Praise of Irrational Exuberance
"If I may ask, you mean you will like the government to "force" or "regulate" the airline to take over the recruitment so that there is one male and one female in every cabin and at every age group?"

That's not what non-discrimination means at all. What the demographic mix of the employees ends up looking like ought to bear a strong resemblance to the mix of applicants; nothing more.
More than any other software dev I know, they seem to constantly be trumpeting that "this is a complete ground-up rewrite!" as if that were a good thing every time.
Snurf blerg schlep albargady!

^^

That's me deliberately misinterpreting your comment, beating the straw man with a killer counter-argument and declaring victory.