skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This kind of balance sheet punditry is silly, it's just numbers and no context. Since the beginning Amazon's top priority has been growing revenues. If they started pursuing margins as aggressively as they've been pursuing growth they could probably drop that P/E pretty quick.
Here are two perspectives share price:

First value - you can think Amazon will dominate a market. To know if they are worth a price, you need some idea of the their earnings in that market and the return you want.

Another perspective is special insight. A company that executes wonderfully and that everyone can see is just brilliant is probably not undervalued. It is probably fairly valued because everyone agrees. To have a view that Amazon is undervalued you need to have some special insight that others in the market don't have. You don't care what the current view of earning is, the market has already taken that into account, you know they are going to do something wonderful that others don't. You buy based on that and sell once the insight is more broadly known.
You certainly can make that happen. Psychiatrists see this every day.
I am interested in your business idea, but by the time you get it off the ground, I'll have thrown most of my shit away, since I'm moving. :/
I really like their service-- my problem is that I can never remember the name of the website when I setup a new PC.
Would a repete customer really care what your rate is? If this is about impressions, the fact that they are returning indicates that you made a good enough impression that should far overshadow your invoicing rate.
Flockall Accepted Microsoft BizSpark
what incentives might motivate the business community to be socially responsible.

I don't disagree with the spirit of what you're saying, but people and businesses are naturally inclined to game whatever rules and regulations are in place if it means maximizing revenue.

While jail time may not be the answer, I do think a stick might be more effective than a carrot.
socket.io with node.js is working out very well for me. If you want to throw redis and rails in the mix, check out github.com/maccman/juggernaut
Why were they collecting this information in the first place? I don't understand how they could just accidentally grab passwords.
This is also what Gruber wrote at the time: http://daringfireball.net/2009/09/flash_snow_leopard
The article talks about several concepts as if they're new things and/or can't be done just as efficiently outside the kernel. For example...

> Normally load balancers reverse proxy to the worker that is most likely to be ready

This really is a problem especially for apps that have long-running requests. However, both HAProxy and Apache can be configured to load balance to the worker that is guaranteed to be ready. Why they don't do so by default is beyond me. I believe HAProxy's config option is called 'max_conn 1' or something.

Phusion Passenger also load balances like this with its Global Queuing feature. Since version 3.0 that's on by default.

In short: load balancing like this doesn't require the kernel to do the job.
thanks for the reply.
I haven't started to code, but maybe in some weeks.
It's more a chatroom with long polling that I will be building.
All your app is in one dedicated server?
Define "mainstream." This gives the false idea that such an interface would take over the way humans normally compute and interact with machines.

This interface is nowhere close to the level of replacing the traditional keyboard/mouse or the emerging multitouch tablet.

People simply cannot interact with textual data quickly enough and would easily get tired with that interface. I can code at my keyboard/mouse for 10-30 hours straight without much fatigue. I wouldn't last 30 minutes on that thing.

Nevertheless, it's really cool and I can't wait to see future interface designs. Just don't make the lofty claim that it will be "mainstream."

(just a personal opinion)
Why is programming management so stone-age? I realize it's been often compared to herding cats, but are things really so bad that a simple problem gets a "lazy programmers" and "get new ones" response? And from a management point of view, in any other domain it _would_ be a simple problem.

Imagine complaining that your architects don't make your houses energy-efficient enough. So you get new architects?! No... you talk to them, you set standards, you check their designs or have managers check them... you solve the problem with the many management tools developed over the years.

But when it comes to programming, we barely see this at all, at least not in small companies. Why?!
This totally depends on the person's situation. If you have an idea and can help the project financially, you are likely better off getting a technical cofounder. But if you just have a supposedly great idea and nothing else to bring to the table, either the idea has to be unbelievably good, or you need to start learning how to code yourself.
LPEG is actually quite fast. (Often as fast or faster than well-tuned regexp implementations.)

In general, Lua is usually faster than Ruby and JS because the language itself seems to have been engineered with a very clear understanding of where the language could be expressive/dynamic without unnecessarily sacrificing efficiency, and it's had a long time to mature. LPEG was written by one of the primary Lua authors, and it shows.

If you're geeked about PEGs, I highly recommend reading the paper and then the source. There are some details specific to the Lua C API, but it shouldn't be that hard to port or understand in isolation.
Higher education is not meant to be job training. No one gets an English BA because they think that's the path that will get them the best jobs; they get it because they think it will make them happy. And if the point of higher education isn't job training, it's silly to measure its efficacy based on how well it helps graduates into jobs which wouldn't have otherwise been accessible.

And the benefit to society of a person (who eventually waits tables) getting an education (which wasn't about how to wait tables) doesn't need to be manifested while that person brings you your check. That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.

As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry. Dealing with political rhetoric, forming opinions about sometimes highly technical public policy issues, and understanding economic policy at a minimum require an ability to critically evaluate rhetoric, some level of scientific literacy, and some numeracy, which are all benefited by a well rounded undergrad program. In some places, the political process requires that people not only be able to follow and evaluate political platforms, but produce arguments on their own (I'm thinking of state primary caucuses in particular). Having an educated populace is important independent of the desire of individuals to be wealthy or professionally successful. Just because we need waiters and parking lot attendants and bar tenders doesn't mean education is wasted on the portion of the population which fills that need.

If your concern is with public funds subsidizing education, I would actually have greater objection to funding educations for people that go on to earn high salaries in jobs that require high levels of education -- those are students who could afford to take loans and pay them back.
The string functions are (haystack, needle), the array functions are (needle, haystack). And, no, knowing that doesn't actually help me because I always seem to mix them up anyway during coding.
Stunning pics from the microscopic world
Thanks, I added the direct link.
That's exactly the test I would use for anything the government spends money on. It's called a cost/benefit analysis. If our elected officials are not doing that, we should immediately vote them out of office.

Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a rapist away from them for 2 years? Yes.

Would I demand 100 hours of labor from 25 people to lock a pot smoker away from them for 2 years? No.

2500 hours of labor to kill a few Iraqis? Not liking that so much.

2500 hours of labor to vaccinate 800 babies against MMR? I'm ok with that.

Now, it might not be cost effective to police the educational system for people wasting their education. But that's not the argument elbenshira was making, or what I was arguing against.
On-line graphviz workspace
"The bottom line is this: Amazon trades at more than three times Apple's current valuation, eight times RIM's valuation and just about two and a half times Google's valuation. This is simply way too high."

The article is almost laughable in it's simplicity - if you take CNN/Fortune articles seriously please don't invest your money. This article is overly focusing on one antiquated notation that P/E is the only thing that matters, an idea that isn't taken seriously by anyone close to Wall Street or finance any more (if it ever was, seems like this idea is only perpetuated by "pop" finance drivel such as Fortune).

There are several more interesting metrics to look at when evaluating a stock, including cash flow, profit margin, return on equity, growth rates, and many more.

Amazon has been consistently growing in double digits throughout the recession. They have a profit margin of 3% (compared to Apple's lofty 20%). They have a market cap of 80 billion with annual sales of 24 billion versus Apple's market cap of 280 billion with annual sales of 65 billion.

Where is Amazon's growth ceiling in their respective markets? Where is Apple's? What is next for Apple after the iPad (which missed sales targets)?

If you are going to invest in a stock, you need to ask these tough questions and think for yourself. You can't just look at a P/E ratio and know whether a company is over or under valued. Amazon rode the recession with a 40+ P/E ratio, and now the market is picking up again. Decide for yourself whether it is risky or not to invest in AMZN.
I don't think its clear that ARM would actually be that competitive with x86 at the high end. Many ARM features, like conditional execution, are great for increasing IPC for traditional in-order designs, but make complicated OoO designs more difficult. As you have bigger more featureful chips the relative cost of x86's decoding stage becomes less significant too.

All of which isn't to say that the article is wrong and that ARM isn't about to take over the mainstream (I could see it happening but wouldn't bet on it).
The world's fastest computer | #2Tagnl
Prosecutors seek to block Xbox hacking pioneer from mod-chip trial
Good for you! I read all of the other guys asking, "but why didn't you do this? ..." I myself am a throwback from the C/C++ days and I frequently re-write stuff in C. That's how it's supposed to be done. Write as much as you can as fast as you can up-front, then optimize your bottlenecks using more efficient methods. I'm happy that C improved your situation that drastically. I agree that the overhead of lighttpd, then apache, then php might have been the real killer in your situation, and using memcache might have helped also, but making a simple C server using fork() to handle processes and not opening it up to the world is a very good solution in my book. People think that if enough people start writing things in C, that they'll have to start doing it too - I think that's the reason for all of the backlash. Remember, there are a bunch of C and C++ programmers out there doing things that perform well and scale, but your audience on HN is mostly php/python/java programmers and web startup people who go the route of optimizing using more trendy technologies instead of down-shifting into a language like C. More power to you, fellow C programmer! :)
Is a New Orkut-to-Facebook Export Feature What’s Crashing Facebook?
You can install ClickToFlash to get a taste of it, so when you absolutely need to see some flash content, you can just click on it.

http://clicktoflash.com/

Actually I don't miss Flash at all except for one place: street view on Google Maps, which is done in Flash and I find it useful to take a look when I have to go in some place I don't know (it helps a lot being familiar with the surroundings once you are there).

Apart of that, I never enable Flash on other websites.
Sunspot for Ruby is another good Solr client that's popular with Rails applications.

http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot/

While Solr's API is pretty easy to work with directly, there's definitely something to be said for using a quality client for your platform.
I was at Startup School and did this hack as well (grabbing a pizza box) because it was obvious that there were plenty of other boxes to go around. It wouldn't work in a situation where there was a limited amount, like mentioned before, but it was a good hack for that specific situation.

Also, people who grabbed boxes often walked up the line and offered pizza. Hack + good deed.
> It can be quite soul crushing.

Always remember: "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."

If you want to do better than the cultural norm demands, nothing's keeping you. What's the worst that can happen?
Bootstrapping is where you can compromise. Like skipping the nigh touts.

Skipping a good UI for whatever reason (for a web-startup) is a bad idea.

Bootstrap so you can save money for good UI.
fyi you could have viewed the image before loggingin
I was on two, but Lumburgh asked me to go ahead and move my desk downstairs into the storage locker.
Ask HN: How has this community benefitted from open-source culture?
One benefit might be that an open culture encourages the "early release/frequent iteration" model. Another would be that it fosters education, since people who want to learn programming have more real resources to learn from.

I'm very interested to hear more - especially if you feel that an open culture has impacted you on a personal level somehow.
Cryptoz -- I agree, all public data once it is broadcasted. But as the article says "While the data was technically broadcasted to the public and anyone with the know-how and appropriate gear could collect the same information, it would be hard for anyone to collect such data on the massive scale that Google did." -- Google should have known better. Someone knew what data they were collecting.

And yes, people should have secured their wireless routers.
It's absolutely astounding how long it takes to open, too. Woe to the person who clicks the SQL Developer icon, 20 seconds later still hasn't gotten any response indicating that the system "heard" the click, and then clicks again.
TV Networks decide to block Google TV from their online streaming services
Looks like he was already using Python - why didn't he try Tornado, which is built for purpose?
B12 Fraction May Lower Risk of Alzheimer's
The iPhone is the worst...
This quote is taken out of context. Google was not specifically collecting emails, URLs, and passwords. They were collecting packets. Collect enough packets, and you will wind up with emails, URLs, and passwords in the data.

From the article, from Alan Eustace's (Senior VP Research & Engineering) quote:

>It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.
Thanks, Ill see about adding a location filter. Here is something in the meanwhile.

http://www.hackernewsjobs.com/search/?q=Mountain+View
Because the data is there. If you're collecting it without filtering, you don't have a choice.
I'm speculating, but I suppose value from this data can be anything from geographically locating ip-addresses to improve location based services to wireless-router manufacturer statistics.
Based on its target market, I'd say this certainly shouldn't be a problem.
Yes, right now its all on one server. The parts of the app that serve the pages you see are separate from the 1 second updater and could be on separate servers.

Right now the C app listens on a different port that lighttpd will redirect to if a pertinent request comes in.

There is a parent process that will fork upon connection and pass the socket to child which pulls the requested data and quickly returns it.

The one thing you will also need if you go this route is a SIGALRM handler. You just basically call signal() and set a flag before each socket read and write. So if the socket takes too long to return the signal gets called and kills the child process. Then you clear the flag on the other side of the socket read/write call so that the signal doesn't kill the process if the call returns on time.
Ask HN: 3rd party money brokerage service?
Hello,

Is there an online service that lets a business which connects clients to merchants collect its delegation fees easily?

(Releasing the business from the trouble of charging one side and paying to the other)

If there are several which do you recommend? Do they also support international users?

Thanks.
Apple and Google seem quite global.

What percentage of Amazon's revenue comes from the high growth Asian economies? What percentage comes from a temporarily recession ridden US, or low growth Europe?

RIM on the other hand seems like it could be dead in the water, the Palm of a new generation. That is why it trades at a P/E of 8.
They weren't specifically collecting this information. They were collecting packets that happened to come their way. Combine enough packets, and in some cases you'll find emails and URLs and password.
There is this great TED talk about IP in fashion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0
I'm glad Apple is returning control of Java to Sun/Oracle. Java is the most widely used language in the world (http://www.devtopics.com/most-popular-programming-languages) and is great for most programming tasks, especially large projects. IMO Apple has done a sucky job of maintaining Java. Not surprising, since it isn't their business. Hopefully Sun/Oracle will do a much better job of releasing an JVM for Macintosh.
This makes Google a white-hat hacker that shows a security problem. I've just been to Spain and was able to connect to unencrypted wifi spots on almost every street-corner with my phone.
It is pretty hard to change who you are at the core. But the thing about it is that you have your own way of succeeding. You see at some point in life, you more than likely have succeeded.

Instead of determination, you have passion. Instead of flexibility, you are a perfectionist. Instead of imagination, you can communicate well. Instead of being naughty, you are efficient. Instead of a partner, you are well connected.

The things that pg talks about takes years to develop, especially naughtiness and partnership. So instead of spending two years building a friendship to apply to yc, just go build the business. Inevitably, someone will want to join you when it is finished built.

So yes, if you are undetermined, inflexible, unimaginative, goodie to shoe, friendless, go build your dream.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.
I made a webpage that suggests things to do near you, can I get some feedback?
Is this useful to anyone? Should I pursue this further?

I was thinking of adding some kind of shared event calendar. What direction should I take this HN?
There's some real gems in the archives here. For starters, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835020 . More generally, try googling site:news.ycombinator.com keywords.

And, thanks. :)
I think it's beyond just being 'weird' - it's genuinely quirky for many things, and doesn't have good library support. IMO, this makes it sort of 'uneven' - really good at some things, and bad for others. The popular languages all seem to be those that are 'pretty good' for a lot of things, so once you learn the language, you can get many things done with it. Even if the language is perhaps not the best for any given task, it's good enough to at least crank out something that works ok.
Launch48, Startup Weekends, Hackathons,etc.
That person has a whole life outside of work where they can benefit from a richer understanding of the world.

Why should the 3/4 Americans without a college degree be forced to subsidize the private enjoyment of an individual? Should the government also subsidize my private enjoyment of video games, pornography or martial arts?

As an example, we're a (kinda) democratic society, and a lot of the sanity of our government and policy rests on the judgment of the citizenry.

If that is the case, would you favor denying the vote to people unable to make correct judgements, deal with political rhetoric or form opinions about highly technical issues? It seems that filtering the noise is far cheaper than increasing the signal, in this case.
Pardon me pointing out the difference between a plug-in and a web framework. Believe you me, this is a headache, but you have the right to your own opinion, not your own facts.
Huh, first thing I thought was "can I go back and change my answer to that 'describe something you hacked..' question?"

There are so many ways to interpret that question from the way the worded it.
The fact that they don't realize that the perception of someone who does this is "less than credible" is enough in itself to conclude that they aren't near as qualified as they claim.
Not to be the unpopular one but couldn't you also have used Flash to open a socket to a server written in [name your favorite language] and had the server intermittently (every 1 second, every 500ms) send out the current tick?
This things is sweet, do you plan to change the image once this one is completed?
If I was talking to you about a job, and I knew this ahead of time, I'd be a lot more likely to consider it even though I'm a python guy.

The fact that you made sound engineering decisions and continue to improve on what you can (while being practical) means more to me than your language choice, even if I'd rather be dancing with Django :)
Fridge (YC S10) on the BBC - Pared down, cut down social networking
Creating stronger privacy controls inside Google
"As soon as we heard they'd been supporting themselves by selling Obama and McCain branded breakfast cereal, they were in. And it turned out the idea was on the right side of crazy after all."

How about Sarah Palin tea?
As a programmer, I would be more interested in working with a non-technical founder who has these skills:

- domain experience
- a good network in the target market / sales leads
- ability to manage customer relationships and close sales
- good communicator
- familiarity with software development process, even if as an outsider

This set of skills would balance well with mine. I don't really care about working with highly technical founders as the second or third person at the company - that's my role. I want to work with someone who can sell and make sure that the product gets in front of customers.

The caveat here is that my interests lie in business systems, not in doing the next Facebook/Twitter/4sq clone.
They would not. No plugins, no system infrastructure, not even System Preferences panes, just single-package apps.