skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can't imagine what sort of thinking produced this sentence.

Probably, readability. Daniel probably assumed that his readers either a) wouldn't get why those distinctions need to be made, and would therefore be put off by such a bludgeon of an opener or b) would just read on already to see these details explained.

First, the login environment is really tangential to the discussion here. He's trying to talk about the fact that their threads' stacks were taking up too much reserved space for memory protection and how they slimmed those down. Precisely how big they are and why that is doesn't really matter, all that's important is that they're a couple orders of magnitude larger than they need to be (whether this is a real issue I leave for later ;-).

Second, if you read on, you see that the whole article is about threads and it soon doesn't matter that he said "process" in the first sentence. Maybe just replacing it with "thread" would be good, but it's really not a big enough deal to get bent out of shape over.

I really don't know about your third point, I've never run in to this particular issue and I don't know if spawning tons of threads actually wastes physical memory for this protection (doubt it), destroys the page table (this would be my guess), or something else (somewhere, I can imagine the sound of something thrashing). [EDIT: on re-reading, it appears the concern was virtual memory, and the page table is definitely where I heard that thrashing sound earlier. I now clearly see where they had performance problems with 10MB stacks, even on a 64-bit architecture] It sounds like there actually was a bottleneck, and I trust that these guys didn't just imagine it (though they could've explained the problem a bit better, I think). I agree with you that I wasn't convinced by "threads are too expensive" but I think I trust this is a fault of omission, not of research.

For my part, I can't get my head around your rewrite. Certainly those details are important, but they don't belong in such high density in the first sentence of a blog post, even a highly technical one. It's a matter of writing style, and I think Daniel made the right choice.

Regarding userland threads, I don't think these guys are developing (or probably testing at this point, though I'd be glad to hear if they were) on freebsd. That's the only place I know of with something actually called "userland threads"; there are several implementations on linux by different names that accomplish the same goal, but I don't recall seeing any with that name. Which threading scheme in particular were you referring to?
more like Textmate -> in what sense?
It still amazes me how different my perception is on starting successful businesses, versus most other people.

I mean, there's the whole "the idea is not the important part" slogan, which is true to at least some degree, which seems completely lost on the twins.

And take this quote: When asked if they could have turned ConnectU into a site with hundreds of millions of users, like Mr. Zuckerberg did with Facebook, the twins replied in unison, “Absolutely.”

Seriously, have you ever heard anyone who would say that they could absolutely succeed with any startup? The optimistic chances of success for any startup aren't huge, what makes them think they would absolutely succeed? Moreover, they're not talking about the kind of success that YC is happy with, or even the kind of success that VCs are happy with. They're talking about the kind of success of a once-in-a-decade company.

Lastly, I've worked on my own startup for almost the past year. It's been a year of attempts, false starts, "pivots", eventually throwing out some ideas altogether and starting from new. From what I understand, after the Winkelvoss twins approached Zuck, less than 2 months passed before he went and released Facebook. 2 months, to me, seems like such a tiny, inconsequential amount of time when you're talking about starting a startup.

Any way you look at it, from the facts as I understand them, this just seems like 3 people who have no idea what they're talking about, trying to squeeze money out of someone successful just because they can.
Your verbal virtuosity is vacuous.

And I maintain that you don't actually care about the poor. I don't know wtf you're talking about but I do know one thing has been consistently shown to be true:

Free enterprise lifts poor people out of poverty.
Linear programming was hoped to have been a strong enough framework to replace the market-based resource allocation system. Unfortunately, no single centrally managed computer could outperform a network of autonomous free participants. Modern government is the realization that there can be no prosperity without free agents, and that propaganda can persuade these free agents to acquiesce to being governed.
Amps is more like a maximum that they can supply kind of thing, not a how much they force out type of thing.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I feel like your arguments address semantics/linguistics and not the actual issue.

It might be that, yes. But as a philosophy professor of my acquaintance likes to remark, "clear thinking requires clear language" (the irony of this phrase coming from a philosopher's mouth seems to be lost on him). Using unclear language both misleads the audience and makes it unclear whether the speaker understands what he's talking about.

(I find the same is true of code -- the clarity of some code seems very highly correlated with how well its author understands the problem space in question.)

Between us we're using three different definitions of "stack size" -- the size of the actual stack, the amount of RAM allocated, and the amount of VM space allocated; needless to say, I think the first definition makes the most sense. ;-)

When we get the chance we'll post benchmarks between GNU Pth, NPTL, and our coroutine implementation.

I recommend trying other operating systems too. Linux is famously bad at threading, and only survives in benchmarks because most applications which run on Linux are equally bad in how they use threads. What you really want (and seem to be implementing) is an M:N threading system, which is considerably more performant than either 1:1 or M:1.
> The point wasn't that you couldn't change this value, it's that for our purposes (lots of green threads, shallow stacks) a much smaller default stack size is more sensible.

Slava, you're better than that. WHY is a smaller default stack size more sensible? If this is all you need, and you can change it manually, do that!
The English have a way with ... English!

Fancy that.
Are you bitter that a technology project was delayed, or that they had your money the whole time?

This is why I don't preorder. Even though I thought the WakeMate was interesting, I didn't have anything personally invested, and could just enjoy the story instead. My advice is to not give random people your money in exchange for promises unless you want to grow to hate them.
>What have you tried that I've written/advocated on that didn't work for you?

You're missing the point. You're handing out advice with no demonstrable expertise on...anything.

You don't discuss anything that requires talent, intellect, experience, or domain knowledge. You write about things you pull out of your head or other content you Tom Sawyered other people into collating for you.

Speaking of "content", that neuroplasticity and habits post is a travesty.

Your whole blog is so thoroughly preoccupied with your person that I can only think you are suffocating on the fumes of your own alternate reality.

In brief you are:

1. Without demonstrated accomplishment

2. Arrogant

3. The only thing you're superlative in is narcissism

4. Giving out advice to deluded hopefuls who want to have a site about nothing and to be paid for zero productivity and not work a day more of their lives than they have to.

People with work to do, work they love, they don't need people like you.

Bonus time! Since people don't seem to get it yet, I've taken the liberty of making an annotated version of the front page of his 'blog'.

http://i.imgur.com/ET2hf.png

With that, I'm done chasing this matter. I am exhausted with battling this banality.

Exeunt.
Luca,

On your About page (http://www.adormo.com/project/en/aboutus.htm) you have a spelling mistake. "Wordlwide" should read "Worldwide".
I may be wrong, but I don't think that Marx advocated first blood. He thought that a peaceful revolution was possible in several countries, but anticipated a violent response from the power in place in others.

Anyway, you seem to forget that a lot of violence has been conducted, if not in his name, under the guise of ideas developed by Adam Smith. How may bloody dictators have been backed, when not put in place, by the US, for economical reasons?
I always find it absolutely fascinating to see how many people ride their bikes whenever I'm in the Netherlands. Where I come from, I think you'd have a really hard time seeing somebody ride a bike in public who's older than 30 years. It's probably already difficult to find someone who's older than 20 and not a student.

In the Netherlands however, people of all ages ride a bike on a daily basis. It's not unusual to see more bikes on the bike lane than cars on the street. I remember once I was walking through a Dutch city and had to wait for more than a minute before I could cross the street, because there was a huge chain of bikers passing by, they just kept coming one after another. And that wasn't a sports event, just regular people. Oh, and they go hella fast and ride up really close to the one riding before them.

Really cool!
If you don't mind me asking, how old are you and how long have you been studying this? Also how did you find a qualified teacher?
There was a very interesting article in the Economist about this. The gist of it is that 24% is indeed steep, but bear in mind that:

a) These are very small sums of money, so the proportional overhead is much higher
b) Microfinance loans represent about 30% of loans, the rest coming from local loansharks, who typically charge around 2-300% apr (and have more violent debt collection procedures). Any cap on rates will lower that percentage, and so make things worse.
Regarding userland threads [...] there are several implementations on linux by different names that accomplish the same goal

This is a really good list: http://www.gnu.org/software/pth/related.html Many of these projects are dead or unmaintained, but there are a few worth paying attention to (notably Gnu Pth itself). In any case, the problem isn't too difficult - it took Dan a month to do it, and that includes patching various open source components to fix performance issues and adapting our existing codebase to use proper programming style (this took a significant chunk of the time).
My hopes for you in 2011
The Kasparov v. World match was a democratic process in the modern understanding in that people were offered equivalent choices (almost equally strong), selected by the experts, with little public understanding of the deeper ramifications of the decisions.

In a democracy, people are asked to make decisions in fields that really need expert knowledge to discern, but fortunately (or some say, 'unfortunately), these choices are pre-selected by a group of experts. These people are both voters (where the experts are "public opinion leaders) or legislators (where the experts are lobby firms).
Not all of farmer suicides in India is micro-credit related. There are many other forces in play, for example bad and corrupt policies. You would find it surprising that the worst hit states are those where agriculture is more industrialized than others.

In the name of import reforms, the quality requirements for imported seeds have been drastically lowered. Traditionally germination rates of seeds used to be tightly regulated and the farmers expected that they would be able to re-use part of the harvest as seeds. Lack of mandatory seed quality designation is a problem. Earlier the mandated germination rates were higher than 90% for much of the GM seeds it is 65%, and more expensive.

The market has been flooded with GM seeds with poor germination rates, higher input costs, no re-usability and lacking the pest resistance that was promised. You would find a high correlation with the suicide patterns and introduction of GM varieties like BT cotton.

The agriculture sector used to be served well by the (national and state) banks. That credit has almost but completely disappeared, by way of change in government policy. On the other hand, in Indian cities it is common to be spammed on your cell-phone by banks continuously, for loans that you do not want or need. Same goes for advertisements on TV. So one major factor is mis-allocation of credit. For the banks it makes sense because there is more profit to be made of (defaulting) car loans than loans to agricultural enterprises. With no banks offering loans the farmers usually turn to private money lenders who charge arbitrary and astronomical interests. Most of the lending related suicides have their source here.

The sad part is that this is a decade old phenomena and the average urban Indian has been unaware of it (partly by choice). The popular media did not report it. The movie "Peepli Live" has given the issue much needed visibility.

If anyone is interested a very good resource with analysis and yearly trends etc. is
http://www.indiatogether.org/2010/feb/psa-suicides.htm and
http://www.indiatogether.org/agriculture/suicides.htm

I am looking forward to peer to peer lending to start in India, much like prosper and kiva.
It's possible to release code and media under more than one license simultaneously.
Regarding userland threads, I don't think these guys are developing (or probably testing at this point, though I'd be glad to hear if they were) on freebsd. That's the only place I know of with something actually called "userland threads"; there are several implementations on linux by different names that accomplish the same goal, but I don't recall seeing any with that name. Which threading scheme in particular were you referring to?

I said "userland threads" to distinguish it from kernel threads, which are (as they noticed) rather expensive.

What RethinkDB really want, and seem to be headed towards, is a proper M:N threading model: Launch one kernel thread per CPU (N), then spread M userland threads between those.
And the followup: "MySQL is not ACID-compliant", http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7091415/
You might start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo#Scientific_investigation

If you're interested in how to perform the actual meditation, this is a great book: http://www.amazon.com/Bliss-Inner-Fire-Practice-Naropa/dp/08...
Oh, I thought you were talking about one particular implementation, my mistake.

Yep, I think so too. I don't know of anything that does that on linux, sadly.

Man, I gotta dust off that freebsd partition again.
There is no real roadblock.
Just try 4.2, it's not slow.
when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

— Why The Lucky Stiff
Capitalism and free enterprise produced everything good? A bit over the top aren't we?
WHY is a smaller default stack size more sensible?

Because if you have a large number of threads on an architecture with a small address space, you take away memory space from the buffer cache which can have catastrophic effects on performance.

If this is all you need, and you can change it manually, do that!

This needs to be understood in the context of the previous posts. The issue with NPTL is significantly lower performance on large number of threads due to context switching. Dan implemented a solution that uses coroutines to address that problem. This post deals with the over-provisioning issue described above, and it starts out by describing the default configuration for pthreads. Adjusting this to a smaller number on the NPTL implementation isn't enough, we needed to adjust it for the coroutines implementation.
Dear electronics companies. I am willing to pay more money if you build your products in the US / Europe / Japan and actually do QA.

(Actually, I have nothing against making stuff in China. But it seems that people outsource to China only to save money, and you get what you pay for. In this case, your house nearly burning down because someone wanted to save a fraction of a penny on capacitors, or something.)

Example: I have a Soekris router instead of a random Netgear or Linksys. It cost $300 instead of $25 that a WRT-54G would cost, and it doesn't even have wireless. But, it actually works. The VPN works. The firewall works. It doesn't drop packets. It doesn't overheat. It doesn't burn down my house. Is this worth a 12x price premium? Yes.
While I agree with your general gist, "Capitalism and free enterprise produced everything good" is a bit of an exaggeration. Capitalism didn't "produce" labour rights, it didn't "produce" national parks, the sexual revolution or the abolition of slavery. I don't think we can simplistically say that captialism is the cause of all that is great in this world, even though it's a pretty major component.
Because if you have a large number of threads on an architecture with a small address space, you take away memory space from the buffer cache which can have catastrophic effects on performance.

Say again?

Address space exhaustion is a problem, sure, but it has nothing to do with the buffer cache. The kernel's address space is completely separate from any particular process' address space.
There's more to the suicides than microcredit. I commented on some here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2055046
Man, I gotta dust off that freebsd partition again.

Just spin up a FreeBSD instance in EC2. :-)

(And while you have it running, please run your favourite stress tests and try to find bugs. I think it's starting to get decently stable now, but it needs lots more testing.)
If my app is not designed for the iPad, no.

If it is, I don't have to test on the previous 2 devices.
This is a great article. I especially liked the idea that

> humans today are starting to play more like computers

ie, the advent of computers that are prejudice-free pushed human players into a whole different way of playing; from just the previous sentence:

> a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't.

What I don't like as much is the constant complaint that we're not trying hard enough to make computers think like humans, that Deep Blue and all its ilk dumbly calculate millions of moves without really "thinking".

This reminds me of the efforts that are made to have robots look like humans (walk like us for example).

What's the point? A Roomba doesn't have legs and yet it's better than me at vacuum cleaning (meaning, we both suck, but I suck more).

We wouldn't want pliers to be shaped like a hand; computers are pliers for the brain: they extend it, but they don't need to be shaped like it.
Facebook is a business. You can not open source everything.

Facebook controls the social graph. Apple controls the App Store. Google controls the search and ads alghorithm. Heck, even open source companies making money through consulting control the list of consultants.

In short: Businesses will control their business model. They'll be for "open source" or "competition" in anything else, especially complementary markets.

E.g. Google ("don't be evil") will push open standards for Android and net neutrality, but only because content and internet access are the complements to their search business, which they will keep closed.

Don't waste your skills being too idealistic. Facebook, Google, Apple, even Microsoft and Yahoo bring huge net value to society.
But as a philosophy professor of my acquaintance likes to remark, "clear thinking requires clear language"

I think you need to balance that with taking some shortcuts, or you'll never get to the essence (or at least your readers won't).
I ride my bike everywhere all year round here in Berlin and I find the main point of making it more enjoyable/safer for cyclists is having many other cyclists. It raises drivers awareness and provides a critical mass. I know this is some kind of chicken and egg situation but I find it to be true.

When I was living in England the Cycling Touring Club there deemphasised
separate bike lanes arguing that they were for the convenience of drivers and not cyclists. For a long time I wanted to believe this but now I have arrived at the conclusion that integrated bike lanes (the ones on the same level as the actual road not behind a line of trees) are actually useful and it makes me feel safer using them.
congrats justin and team!
Is playing a social game where you interact with other people any different than going out to a club or bar? Joining a bowling league? A cycling group? A health club where you go to regular group exercise classes?

The meme that video games are inherently evil needs to go away. Why is it socially acceptable to join many clubs and spend time with those people all the time but not "people on the Internet"? Like the Internet is somewhere only people that can't make "real friends" go..

Addiction to anything is bad but playing WoW or any other online game doesn't mean you're automatically "a loser" in the rest of your life -- and I don't mean just casually playing. There are people in all of the top guilds achieving high ranked world kills on new content that are also successful in other areas of their life.
Caveat: it's very easy to extend the criticism of WoW to life itself.

Working all these years to be a paramedic, going to school, going to work, for what? To drive some people to the hospital? They're all just going to die anyway. Life is meaningless!

What the author is really saying is: "I find more meaning in the real world than in WoW."

But this isn't necessarily true for everyone.

Having said all that, I think WOW is more dangerous than heroin.
Not from HN team but i think of traveling in Bangkok in Januar too so would love to hear about it.
MandalaDV - http://www.newbingosites.org
Vertica (http://vertica.com) - massively parallel columnar DBMS for querying multi-terabyte databases. BTW, heavily used by Zynga in 200+ nodes cluster.
TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2010

http://tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Surely once for-profit companies get involved there is a conflict of interest between poverty alleviation efforts and the interests of share holders/investors.
They claim that there is free content similar to The Teaching Company's audio lectures.

Where? The content is not in the same form remotely. At best it is scattered around across hundreds of separate videos and mp3s with different codecs and sources.

The Teaching Company is selling a product. It is hardly a marketing-only business.