skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, they are all in a race to the bottom, mimicking each other.

I wish one of the blogs would hire a good roster of tech writers and put out 2-3 good articles a day, instead of 10-15 gossipy and poorly written articles a day.
Calling fillRect is massively slower than calculating the an index in the array. As a general rule, it is more efficient to modify native data structures directly, while updating the DOM as infrequently as possible.

I understand that you may have been wanting to benchmark the actual speed of updating the canvas, but it really isn't a fair comparison with updating arrays.

Invalidating the canvas 24 times a second doesn't help with the benchmark, but it would make the example usable, in that it would actually update the canvas element on your screen.

On my computer, the example from jdavid ran in 287ms, instead of the original which ran in 7427ms.
My US-made computer keyboard: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html.

On second thought, this isn't a major product at all. It's actually quite obscure. I just like it a lot.
That's correct. But I noticed a bigger problem:

you passed in [x,y] where x is from w to 0 and y is from h to 0. But in your indexing code of grid_1d, it is pos[0] * w + pos[1] which translates to x * w + y. however, since x is from w to 0 and y is from h to 0, the correct code should be something like y * w + x. I am sorry if I pushed too hard on the correctness of this code, but I am just not quite buying the fact that indexing a 1d array will be slower than indexing an array of arrays.
maybe if you tried putting a better screenshot on your game, with enemies or something, live action fire or whatever you game does it might be more downloads? I don't have an app so I don't really know, just a guess.
so it looks like you only released your game about ten days ago? that's not enough time to tell if it's a success or not.

i also released a low-key iphone game. it has been in the store for about a year. it has made me a little less than $7,000 to date. i am calling that a middling success.

http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/

i can't ever predict what the sales are going to be. along about august, when i had given it up for dead, i suddenly had my best month ever: over a thousand bucks. i have no idea why. right now it's down to about $250.00 a month. i hope it will go back up a bit, once i release some much-needed updates.

i don't have a lot of users, but a few of them are rabidly loyal. one guy did a favorable video review and posted it to youtube. another has been bugging me incessantly to add game center integration. yeah yeah yeah, i'm working on it.
Lack of huge upfront $$ to cloud an idea's success is not a problem.

I think it is good for a CEO to start from scratch (relative term, but..), since it teaches some important core business principles that many seems to be oblivious to. Like, make more money than you spend. Immediately.

One of the things I really enjoy that comes out of 37Signals is their Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud Blog.

Those posts hit the spot every time for me.
The iPad is an entirely new type of computer? You mean, like a pad computer as suggested by Wieser in the 90s?

> turned out to be substantially better than anyone imagined

By anyone you mean analysts, right?
It seems you can't be successful, especially in tech/web, without a dozen people hanging onto your coattails claiming that you stole the idea or that you were lucky.

MySpace were written off as lucky spammers, Zuck a theif, Bill Gates stole MS-DOS, etc. etc.
What We Know About Apple's Data Center
If Zuckerberg was a more likable guy like Leo Laporte or Kevin Rose I'd feel sympathy for him. The Winklewosses might be tools but Zuckerberg is hardly more sympathetic.
Don't know how long it takes me, but it's usually from the moment I want up until 3PM or so. I usually get up craving research (when I am on the up and up; other days I hate research and miss the bits and bytes, starting my day in Emacs.)

I rarely read the abstracts. I find interesting papers in the references of other interesting papers.

I usually skip the first 15% of the introductory prose, go to the meat, jump to the conclusions and "future work", and if I think the paper covers enough ground, I fast forward to its references and see if the authors are aware of the seminal works. Only then do I actually read it.

For the truly important ones, you're already aware for their findings from texts, since they're cited often. For the useless ones (the majority) you're just interested in one idea, technique, finding or implementation method, and it's easy to zoom in. But from time to time you will come across a diamond in the rough that isn't as well known as it should.
>> Your post, on the other hand, is reductive and boring.

So mean and bad mannered ;)

This guy, Parag Khanna, have been shown in school and Hollywood movies an extremely simplified model of the 19th and 20th centuries world. A model where all events are explained through the state politics and big business is ignored. Based on that stupid assumption he is saying that now the world is different, because there are powers outside the states.
How in the world can you stop that and why did the company have only 1 person handle such an important task?
Spam - Probably the Biggest Problem of Social Commerce
I'll admit that I probably have a higher standard of social responsibility and idealism than most.

For instance, the various privacy issues that have plagued the company from the beginning, to start.

Also, Facebook has been in a really good position to push for an open, distributed social networking protocol, but instead have focused on maintaining a closed, walled garden. So it's instead up to us in the open source world, severely under-funded and overworked, to build an alternative.

A socially responsible CEO wouldn't sell out their user's privacy for the sake of advertisers, and set a strong, positive precedence right from the beginning of the rise of popular social networking. An idealist would help build an open, decentralized protocol, document it well, and push for it to be adopted as a standard by the W3C.

What Zuckerberg does with his billions doesn't really change any of that for me.
Node.js v0.2.6 Released
Just imagine if that guy had been successful. Americans would have been debt free!!
The "angel investors won't make up the slack" part wasn't totally convincing. It might be true, but quoting average investment by a single angel versus a single VC isn't really the important number. It'd be more convincing to see aggregate figures: total VC dollars are down $x billion, are angel dollars up more or less than that amount? The article quotes figures for total VC dollars, but none for total angel dollars.
I love Jekyll. It fits into my workflow perfectly and made it really easy to translate the entire site into Japanese for that market. The whole thing took 3 days.
Search site to find out what type of body scanners airports use
Ah, thanks. I hadn't considered just how much cheaper cloud computing is making starting a business -- even though I've actually experienced same myself. Excellent points!
turn on mysql connection pooling and install Google Web Accelerator, you'll have to switch to apache to do Google Web Accelerator though.
ليلة رأس السنة
رأس السنة, ليلة رأس السنة, ليلة رأس السنة 2011, جوجل يحتفل بـ ليلة رأس السنة, رأس السنة 2011, ليلة رأس السنة الميلادية, ليلة رأس السنة فى الدول العربية, شعار جوجل الجديد ليلة رأس السنة, ليلة رأس السنة جوجل يحتفل بها
More info here - http://news.softpedia.com/news/Rogue-IT-admin-Close-to-Shutt...
The majority of the statistical data used to support the article's thesis is from 2009. The effects of the financial crisis of 2008 obviously had a major impact on investment decisions and results. If we choose a different metric for how to measure the opportunities for entrepreneurs, real world economic potential, the ongoing growth trends of social networking services, new internet based businesses like Groupon, and the explosion of mobile device app markets demonstrate that tech sector investments still have massive upside potential.
When Apple figures out social networking, and they will, they’ll make a killing
ah, but did it outperform Amazon? :)
Yes and no. The world is a lot more populated, but also increasingly urban, which by its nature(more communication and transportation services in town) means a larger proportion of people are easy to access.

As well, the proliferation of cell phones into rural areas is a inestimable breakthrough in communication. We've only started to see the impact of this.
I am part of a b2b software startup. Please get in touch with me - you can find my email address in my profile.
We need to remember that Ruby on Rails is still a relatively obscure technology in the grand scheme of things. The average CS grad straight out of college does not know RoR. Most of them are looking for jobs with Java, PHP or some other language they learned in school. The demand for Ruby on Rails developers is greater than the supply. I don't think it has anything to do with VC funding.
Ah, you're right about that! I'll fix it when I have a chance, though it wont affect the performance.

You're welcome to clone the repo, make changes, and run the tests yourself (just open index.html in a browser).

I was surprised too, but my rationalization is that the engine has been very optimized towards DOM-like operations for the past decade that doing math is comparatively slower. And another thing could be is that the 2d array could be effectively partitioning the space that the engine has to search in case it's doing something stupid underneath.

One day when I'm brave enough I'll look into the V8 code for arrays and objects.
41 months seems exceptionally high given that it was discovered before execution. It would take me an hour to dig it all up, but there are federal sentencing guidelines based on the dollar amount of damages. I don't think they take potential damages into account.
I guess one of their goals is to change this stigma by having more legitimate Nigerian online presence
This makes sense, thanks. No, I do not have it, but I am going to look into it.

May I ask how much you pay for yours, and what kind of coverage does it provide? Just looking for some type of baseline. Any recommendations on insurance companies to research?
I'm doing something pretty similar to rumpetroll (it is fully functional rumpetroll now, but we will add more features) using Backbone Model View Collections as my 'Sprites'. The code isn't public yet, but me and a friend have some plans for it. The only thing different is that we've completely dropped use of Backbone.sync, for the sole reason that the method based approach does not fit very cleanly into what we are doing and websockets. So we have one model as a 'dispatcher' instead, to which all models send messages which are transmitted over websockets. All sprites communicate via attribute change events which is a really good use of Backbone. On the server a tiny node.js wrapper uses Redis pub-sub to relay messages out to other clients.

The code is 'out there' but private, so if you want to take a peek at it, please contact me directly.

Thanks for a great framework.
I was trying to benchmark the actual speed of updating the canvas, in hopes that it was doing something clever behind the scenes. I can see that it's not a fair comparison, but a fair comparison is completely redundant with grid_array_1d (except a needlessly larger array).
Undesigned: The Symbiotic Relationship Of Steve Jobs And Jonathan Ive
It's not as lop-sided as this article might have you believe and has largely been mitigated as of late. This is because Cassandra uses read repair, which is a big component of it's strategy to make both reads and writes to scale linearly while also ensuring durability.

What is your suggestion otherwise? Any distributed database that is going to be inexpensive, performant, scalable, and durable will need to use some kind of quorum read repair system. Riak, Voldemort, and Dynamo all use read repair with high levels of production success.
Several people have remarked that this doesn't seem to be affecting technology entrepreneurship much, which seems true from what I've seen of software technology startups in my area. However, not being able to get funding profoundly impacts other types of startups that have higher initial/research/production costs: green energy, manufacturing, basically anything that isn't just a website and iPhone app. And that's really a bad thing, because it seems that far too many entrepreneurs are now going the cool webapp/facebook plugin route because there's a seemingly high potential for profit in the area. But honestly, we need non-software startups too, and for that we need venture capital!
BBC video on chip & pin findings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yyfcHSXZLc
The combination of CherryPy, memcache, oursql and DBUtils. This is a kind of lean and mean Python webapp stack.
Or they have an automated system that has root access to everything (say, to push config changes), and he had access to that system, or he had a way to crash/corrupt their SAN, or they only do black-box testing and not full code reviews (and the next guy to get assigned a bug in that same program found it), or they have code reviews that can be dodged with faked documentation, or...
The choice bits:

> During this time Makwana had root access to all of the main
> systems, credentials which the company failed to revoke until
> the evening of the day of his layoff.

> His intention was nothing short of replacing the entire financial
> data, including the backups, from all of the company's production
> servers, with zeroes.

> the admin appended malicious code to a legitimate script, leaving
> a page-worth of blank lines between the two in order to avoid
> detection.

> Had this malicious script executed, engineers expect it would
> have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not
> shutdown operations at Fannie Mae for at least one week.
If all else were equal, I would agree. Less money to invest means less money invested.

However the cost of doing a startup has also gone down. By more than the availability of venture capital. Therefore more startups can get going. Also companies like Facebook and Google have more willingness than companies had in the past to buy small companies that otherwise might be looking for venture capital.

When you put these factors in, it is not at all clear to me that the situation is worse for entrepreneurs.
It's not very surprising that new investment into funds would tick down a bit in 2009, the year they are discussing. These investments aren't made on the spur of the moment, and the planning period of 2008-2009 was dead in the middle of the largest economic downturn in 80 years. All sorts of people took money off the table while they watched to see what would happen. It's actually more surprising that they point out various metrics that "hadn't been this low" since 99/97 etc - those were of course grand days for venture capitalists.

The article notes an uptick in 2010. With all of the stories about money chasing deals, big early valuations and term sheets being brought to first meetings, I'd bet that uptick is probably a bit more than slight.

The effect of individuals bypassing funds and investing directly in early rounds shouldn't be overlooked. The article is very dismissive of the practice, but it is taking its queues from research done by an association with venture capital in it's name...
It's not a bad thing if they were bad investments to start with. Mal-investment creates bubbles.
What about what Rovio, the developers of Angry Birds faced? http://www.rovio.com/index.php?mact=Blogs,cntnt01,showentry,...
Top 50 linux quotes of all time
hi berntb,

you say "Also, I noted it is easy to give examples where other countries are much worse, without Chomsky or anyone else caring". if you watch the videos i mentioned you will get the reply you are looking for to this question and see that this claim is completely false.

thus also false is the claim of propaganda. all i can say is "watch the vids", and until you do there is no point in constantly repeating the above talking point since it's CLEARLY addressed and refuted in the vids mentioned.

again, now you're getting into the "hidden intentions" thing which is completely irrelevant with regards to my not being a fan of chomsky. all i can say is that the world is a complex place, some things i agree with and some things i disagree with. for me to say i'm a "fan" of chomsky is probably as (in)valid as saying that i'm "not a fan" of chomsky.
The only social responsibility of a corporation

Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility.

I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
During this time Makwana had root access to all of the main systems

This quote above, and the entire article boggles the mind. I've worked with big and small organizations that protected root on <10 machines like it was the key to preventing aging.
This subjective and one-sided puff piece with no tech in it - www.marco.org/769340032 - this qualifies as "Best Tech Writing of 2010"?
redis, node.js, socket.IO, ccache (not new, but new for me), QML
Most of the financial sector is eventually consistent. I'm not just talking about traditional banks, I'm also talking about the markets as well. Most revolve around batch settlement processes where consistency essentially occurs on a schedule. While at the micro level, the components of these systems are somewhat built on ACID databases, that becomes irrelevant when as a system, it functions as eventually consistent. Dynamo itself is based on the fully ACID BerkeleyDB at the node level.
Really?

From a number of australian providers, on links up to 30Mb/s, I have found this to be impossible.

Can easily get 2MB/s from an Australian site, but getting over about 200KB/s once I go international is about the best I can do. Multiple connections does get around this issue though
Most doctors have themselves to blame, they hate change, they hate tech, they hate having to learn something new. Even if it is to do with there specialty, they have to be forced by the government to study new stuff. There is a huge industry around getting drs to go study new stuff, which they are paid to do.

Doctors hate change, they want to keep things as they are. For most non complicated consults, people are much better of with a smart system rather than going to talk to a bored dr, but drs do not want to give up their control.
Actually it s very easy to plant a logic bomb using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_twiddler
Great, your comments are very helpful, thank you.
Disagree strongly on several points.

1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly.

And, even if he was above board on every business dealing, partner agreement or equity stake (we know this not to be the case already), there is still the little matter of Facebook privacy issues, which are well known.

Again, not clean money.

2. Facebook today, doing what they are doing with the money the have, is great. But we don't know what the twins would have done with the money and facebook of today and it is silly to speculate (it only shows biases).

Personally, I think nearly everyone involved in this fiasco is dirty to some degree. I don't wholesale reject the notion that ideas aren't worth that much (your earlier post), but I do reject that they have no value. What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? I don't care what the intentions of the twins were, zuck didn't need to do that (string them along..etc etc) if he was some quality human being.

To your point that the twins wanted to ride on the back of Zuck while making a buck....I'm not sure your argument is as compelling as you think it is. Every corporation has an unjust equity structure at the core. Founder share vs VC share vs first engineer share etc etc. Typical first engineer/non-founder share would be .5%-1.5%. Did Zuck get this deal with the Twins? Is this even fair? Valid questions, but either way it is still valid that Zuck basically aligned himself with the twins and then bolted leaving them with nothing.

Do I agree with them coming back for more money? I haven't thought about it too much nor do I think I will b/c frankly this whole thing bores me.

Lastly, I barely use facebook. I do respect what they've become as a technology organization, but I do not like their semi-shady business practices. I think of Facebook like I do Oracle: I would trust them as far as I could throw them. Both may be the top in their industry, but neither are clean.
You're probably right. I'm sure that I need more content to show up in more searches and better content to pull the eyeballs when I do show up.

Then there are the game improvements that I'm planning. The black helicopter will be wild.
Suicides in India show the dark side of micro-finance
Ahh, very nice, thank you for the boilerplate liability disclaimer and other advice -- will use the liability wording as an excellent starting point for a standard contract to use with future projects.
> I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.

You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
Hey, we're not "alone". Just check out the people I follow on twitter.

There is a huge community of PL enthusiasts.

We can setup a site, but the field is too diverse. Right now it mostly makes sense as each of use tweeting a summary of a paper :-)
Good to hear. I've read a lot about the runaway successes of other apps - it is easy to get disappointed. I still find it strange that my Gender Scan app does as well as it does though. There is even a copy cat app out there now! Hillarious!
How to get more friends on Facebookid
According to an article about the indictment, it was discovered by chance:

"It was only by chance that [the Fannie Mae engineer] scrolled down to the bottom of the legitimate script to discover the malicious script"

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9127040/Fannie_Mae_en...
hi shmulkey18,
thnx for the replies and the research.

did you watch the vids i linked to? i placed them there because they refute/clarify all the claims/mischaracterizations you mentioned and linked to.

i can't force you to watch them, but i'll help you out even further:

1) in vid 1, at 4:15 in vid 1, at 3:30 in vid 2, at 0:45

2) and 3) in vid 2, at 2:55

enjoy
It is pretty clear what is driving this - attorney's fees. The attorneys can conjure up all kinds of (remote) scenarios for additional, potential, settlements now that they had the taste of the previous settlement.
You think that debt wasn't leveraged? You think people can just not pay back loans and no one gets hurt?
I agree with your sentiment.

I don't think the thing you want to have happen is going to happen.

I think what could happen is, for lack of a better term, a half-assed wiki that leads people to code broken e=3 RSA implementations and feel safe doing it.
>You complain that ... and indeed to censor it.

The penultimate para in the original letter, wow! A befitting answer to a bully, and how! :)