skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why hasn't this happened? Preumably if you use an advanced language you'll be a lot more productive because of the language and because you have the best developers.

> Why haven't we seen shops that use advanced languages just utterly clean up? "Oh, you're doing 30fps with 1m vertices -- we just did 90fps with 50m vertices -- and btw, we did this w/o using the GPU".

More productive doesn't mean more performant. It means building systems more quickly, a phenomenon for which there is ample evidence.

Large companies using less productive languages can still achieve great performance because they can throw lots and lots of resources at the problem, even if the payoff per head is much lower.
This is very reminiscent of "Spotlight" from Pattie Maes research group at the MIT Media Lab, a performance piece from 2005 (http://web.media.mit.edu/~orit/spotlight.html). They used a similar model to model interesting human interactions like yawn contagiousness as well.
Nexpense, Success through Perseverance
I love how the only justification of why the government might need such a computer, or why this spending might be a good idea, is "it will be bigger than China's".
Not sure if everyone has seen:

http://www.railsmentors.org/

But it's another worthwhile project.
Working on it... we actually didn't post this to HN or expect the traffic bump, or we would've done that before. It takes a while to get approved.

The main thing we're interested is drawing traffic to http://feefighters.com for people to run auctions and get the best rates on their credit card processing, but it would be nice to pick up some affiliate revenues as well.
Really? Think crypto-communist ploy-sci professor using their ancient office machine. EV fans come in many stripes.
"I've worked on plenty of Java projects where there were sections of the code that some of the programmers either didn't understand or didn't want to touch with a bargepole because they were 'too scary'."

And this is undesirable, is it not? Encapsulation aside, sometimes people get shuffled around in projects.

It's one thing to say, "OK, junior developers, don't mess with the tricky stuff in this project." It's another to say, "OK, I've decided to start writing this part of the project in a language the rest of you don't actually know."
That's definitely an interesting point. Had Microsoft continued to add features to IE during that time they likely would have created a bunch of new "standards" purely because of their market share.

There would not have been an incubation period where new ideas and standards could be worked out. Had Microsoft just pushed forward I suspect we would have a lot of "web standards" that wouldn't have much purpose beyond furthering Microsoft's monopoly. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft took this time off purposely to incubate new ideas, but it could be looked at as a beneficial side effect.
Actually, Google has Chrome for Enterprise that solves that problem by allowing updates to be disabled.

http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
Have there been any backwards incompatible changes in the way chrome handles javascript or CSS?
If you notice, the one that uploaded the files is a .edu account...
JSHint, a fork of jslint.
Safeway Invests in AisleFinder. WTF
Let me get this straight... they discussed innovation?

What was Y! CEO Carol Bartz doing there? Another Obama party crasher?
So does this mean you dropped the old requirement you had about needing to have previously been an educator.
That doesn't count as any record that Gandhi said it, especially if the phrase doesn't appear till 2001.

He's most likely paraphrasing his grandfather, which is fine, but also an example of how famous people get smarter and their words pithier as generations go by.
I meant no offense.

Fully agree with what you said - there is a lot of sampling bias because of relative rarity of PhDs (few bad apples can completely color expectations).

It was quite a surprise for me when doing a summer program at major US corporation and everybody was going gaga because our group had many PhDs.

In academia, everybody has doctorate, so degree in itself doesn't really confer any additional signal.

In industry, people take it as a signal even when it is not (person matters more than degree, the same person would be hireable / not-hireable whether having or not having degree).

But anyways, you wouldn't want to work at places / for people which can't / don't take such things into account.

That's why I mentioned meritocracy - it's nicer to work at places where it matters only if you can get the job done, not your degree / pedigree / who-you-know.

But yeah, human nature, hard to fight against, we all like signaling (it's useful heuristics after all).
I've owned a few droids and have written basic apps for the phone. In my experience the camera app is really slow. Unusable at times even because it just takes too long to open and get the picture taken.
Relationship Relevance In a Social Graph
I have come to HN the last couple of days talking about finding a co-founder etc. Well, instead of finding a co-founder (which I will eventually). I just started hacking away. I truly believe that we can establish relevance in online relationships that will lead to more productive research and collaboration, richer relationships and more information.

This is my 11th attempt at starting a company. I am a bit nervous but here goes nothing!

I do not mean for this to sound too promotional but I respect the community here and feedback is more than welcome and appreciated.

http://www.quohive.com to sign up for mail list.
The intro video uses the video tag to play this video: http://www.nissanusa.com/ev/media/video/nissan-leaf-intro.mp...

No flash there. It will fall back to flash in Internet Explorer.
speaking of HIV and plush :)
http://www.giantmicrobes.com/us/products/hiv.html

My ex got me one of those as a joke.
Free Software leader Benjamin "Mako" Hill doing an AMA
You're right, I haven't read all of your posts. I only have time to read 20,000 words a day and just couldn't fit it in. That said, it appears your stance is either shifting with time or you're playing piggy-in-the-middle while you sit on the fence. It was bad, but hey, mistakes happen, and what's qualified immunity?
This is a pretty interesting idea and I like the idea of the site itself. What percentage of tutors get work at the rates they have posted and how many hours do they get on average? I'm curious to know if anyone is doing anything besides getting beer money (so to speak) with the site right now.
The more resources to teach kids programming the better! Especially ones which use games, but ugh, += and @ signs on the front page!

I'm sure my kids would get used to the syntax without too much trouble, just like they deal with the idiosyncrasies of the English language, but Python seems like a better language to teach kids with, especially since there's only one way to do something in Python.
Correct me if I am wrong, but somewhere I read that a while back, Lisp implementations caught up to and surpassed Fortran implementations in terms of math speed... suggesting that Fortran's main strength was finally outdone.
How your last name affects shopping decisions
From the link:

Benjamin "Mako" Hill works on issues of technology, intellectual property, and society. He's a key person in the free software and free culture movements. Mako is a core-developer, active contributor, and founding member of the Ubuntu Project. For nearly a decade, he has also been an active member of the Debian GNU/Linux Project, which Ubuntu is based on. Together with Erik Moeller from the Wikimedia Foundation, Mako founded the Definition of Free Cultural Worksbased on the Free Software Definition.

Mako serves on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop Per Child project. Currently a researcher and PhD Candidate and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Another fun fact: Mako's apartment is where reddit was founded, and there is spray paint on the roof to prove it[1]. Mako has agreed to answer the top ten questions as of 2/22 in this redditor-built 12 foot Igloo[2]. Ask him anything.

[1] http://min.us/mvfPWXg#1
[2] https://picasaweb.google.com/danny.piccirillo/Iglootarium
Yes you can... Sort of.

I use php-form-builder-class (http://code.google.com/p/php-form-builder-class/) which is a beautiful library to build and validate web forms; and a port of the Perl module SQL::Abstract (http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?SQL::Abstract - roughly the most used library to build SQL from data structures in the Perl world) to PHP (http://coderepos.org/share/browser/lang/php/SQL_Abstract/tru... - docs in Japanese, but if you know the Perl version it's pretty straightforward), and that, when complemented with some glue code in a small library of my own, is about all I need to build a CRUD in webforms, in no more than a few dozen lines.

Is this a framework? It does what a framework does, but it's a set of libraries, not a framework. You still lay out the basic program structure.

Is this all you need to build a web app? Well for most applications, in my experience, it sure goes a long way. The rest that you have to do is pretty straightforward.
Interesting. I heard the other day that Enron implemented a somewhat similar concept in 1999: a market for bandwidth.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/11/48732
A Machine that Prints Organs is Coming to Market
Ask HN: Who Owns the IP?
Back Story: Two years ago, I cofounded a company with a business guy who had an idea and I fleshed out all the technical details, built three working applications, wrote several white papers and authored the majority of the text used in patents we filed.

A year ago we had two other partners in our venture which would have taken 10-15% equity each and had plans to raise VC which we estimated could take as much as 50% of the equity. I told my partner I would be happy ending up with 10% of the equity so I signed a loose agreement around that amount.

Fast forward to now: My partner has been absent for months, has not kept me in the loop about multiple investment we've taken and every meeting he's had with potential partners has flopped.

However, despite not taking VC investment and our other two partners leaving, the 10% equity number has stuck. So my partner is expecting 90% of the company.

My Question: I've decided to walk away from the venture. However, my partner is threatening to file a civil suit and an injunction to get me to hand over the IP to the company. He said I'm in violation of the following laws:

* Uniform Trade Secrets Act
* My state's Civil Theft statute
* Law of Misappropriation

Have I broken the law by not releasing the intellectual property that I built? It may have been his idea to start but it's entirely been my implementation.

I am going to consult a lawyer but I wanted to get feedback from HN since you guys are always so helpful.

Thanks!
WOW Private Investments in Green Sectors Tops 2 TRILLION $$$
Similarly the prosthetic mind controlled arm took 100 million dollars to develop:

http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/11/coming-soon-the-100-mi...

Meg Whitman could have either had a sweet robotic arm or a super computer for the cost of a failed political campaign.
For the log file issue I usually recommend using something like fail2ban to start blocking hosts after too many failed logins in a given time period (and unblock them after a while).

If you are running a shared environment the irritation of the log entries (or needing to run something like fail2ban or similar if you don't already) may be small compared to having to explain to your users again and again and again that the reason their SSH/SCP/SFTP client won't connect is that they need to tell it to use a different port (and then have to work out how to set a different port in the client they are using because they'll expect you to know).
Also there is no mention about Adaptive Payments which supports micro payments.

Micropayments - 5% + $0.05
Regular - 2.9% + $0.30
This is a good point. There is resistance from both the "I can get it free on bittorrent, so why pay?" crowd, as well as the "I am the copyright holder, everyone should pay for every license" crowd.

What I hope to achieve is a compromise that plays to the needs of both sides: to bittorrenters, this says "you are not pirating, you are playing a legitimate distribution role, pay and expect to be paid accordingly". To license owners, this says "accept that copying is not equal to stealing--treat your customers with the respect they deserve and there is a way you can be compensated for it, too."

So I am agreeing with you that this "isn't the difficult problem", but you may be overlooking the potential for synergy (win/win "compromise") if only there were a technological middle ground available toward which the discussion might be shifted.
Indeed. So now browsers can finally start to do what Flash can do. This argument is only recently valid then.
Not necessarily. On the web, few people can afford to succeed based on advertising. Compare that to the real world, and this is simply not the case. Location plays an important role. Take radio advertising. It makes wonderful sense for local businesses to advertise on the radio. They hit a targeted market, and usually they can reach a specific demographic depending on the radio station. (My father is in radio, so I've learned quite a bit about it =)).

Of course radio, like TV, have the advantage that advertising replaces content.

Billboards don't. However, they are informational rather than strictly advertising. Either they are promoting an idea/brand, or they are informing you to get off at the next exit for a particular service (or encouraging you to wait 15 minutes before taking a break at their place).

What this all means is that advertising in other formats serve a different purpose. Take the yellow pages back in the day. Having a larger ad usually meant people would call you first. Sure, you may not have thousands of eyes looking at your ad, you might only get 50-100 new customers, but that business easily pays for your ad.

This is what the web is struggling with, even now with targeted advertising.

Sure, you can target people's interests and locations and give them focused ads, but can you do that at an international scale? Very few can.
Likewise, you might want to check/tweak your apache config too (usually at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).

As you probably know, the default configs of both - mysql and apache are usually pretty minimalistic so tuning these in accordance with your load/traffic scenarios can pay you off big-time in terms of performance boost.

On that note, I'm sure they have some highly competent people out there at RackSpace who should also be able to help you out with all this.
In the comics, Batman does all the crime fighting and Bruce Wayne does all the charity work. So he tackles things from both sides of the coin.

Asking him to give up Batman would be like asking a city to give up their Police Force and just rely on schools to teach kids good morals.
Exascale systems are 1,000 times more powerful than the Tianhe-1A, the Chinese supercomputer that was recently ranked as the world's fastest.

Alright, who here watched Watson on Jeopardy and now thinks what ever 1,000 times more powerful computer they build will have strong-AI?
Using this logic, lynx is fairly modern having released within the year:

June 2010 lynx 2.8.7
Oct 2006 lynx 2.8.6
Feb 2004 lynx 2.8.5
...

lynx, now with WebGL, WebSockets (disabled) and IndexedDb!
Glad you mentioned choosing a obscure port. Not that 24 is wrong though <1024 are reserved for various protocols so usually I tend to select ports above this reserved range. Never know when you decide to roll out say mail on 25 and sure enough find out your ssh port is running on 25.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200720

A great deal of discussion there.
WELCOME TO LIFE. I've worked in academia, industry and finance. It's all a pyramid. Play the game or you'll be passed over.
FYI, this approach, in general and completely automated, is taken by the Spiral Project DSP generator: http://spiral.net/index.html

DSP transformations are represented in a Scheme-like language. The optimizer performs operations on this language then compiles to C code.

I worked on the Spiral project on things tangental to the DSP generator, but wrote my own optimizing DSP compiler based on Spiral technology for class in university.
ChunkHost is giving away free VPS hosting
You might want to check out Thrift http://wiki.apache.org/thrift/

It supports a ton of languages and provides an entire RPC interface.
62 up-votes on this link so far, #1 on HN, and it's not even true. A good title goes a long way.
ChunkHost is currently looking for Beta Testers (in the U.S. only) to shake this new service down! For Beta Testers, the first 512MB chunk is free.
I would hesitate to call it a conspiracy, which ascribes some true malice to the media. I think it's probably more of institutional bias towards the sensational and a catering to people's beliefs out of desire for more viewers.
How do we tell truths that might hurt? (Edsger W.Dijkstra)
More productive doesn't mean more performant.

Where performance matters, I'd think they'd just build codegen systems, using the advanced language. They should still have a fundamental advantage here since they could build codegen systems faster and presumably with better codegen techniques.

It means building systems more quickly, a phenomenon for which there is ample evidence.

So what is the evidence?

Large companies using less productive languages can still achieve great performance because they can throw lots and lots of resources at the problem, even if the payoff per head is much lower.

But even with small/medium sized companies you don't see this happening. It just seems like everytime someone tries to show me how some company has done something incredible with advanced languages it is really borderline. It's never, "wow, slam dunk"

For example, I've never seen a Wolfenstein 3D from an advanced language. Soemthing that just blows away everything else. WordLens wasn't done with some advanced language. Google search engine. Excel. VMWare. There aren't a lot of big jumps in SW, but few, if any, seem to have come to market quickly (if at all) due to advanced languages.

You'd think they'd be able to take these advanced languages and top flight devs to change the face of software. But it usually turns into arguments about how their code is less buggy or produced faster. Both hard to really judge objectively given one rarely writes the same program concurrently in two different languages. And the delta rarely seems large enough that it is obvious.
This is true even if you have your own Merchant Account. Though, if you have your own merchant account, your rep is probably more accessible.

While people like to blast PayPal, they all to often forget that merchant accounts are controlled by banks who can be even more uncaring.
My observation is that quite often, systems built with the 'advanced' languages are more sophisticated and are much closer to cutting-edge researchy ideas. That also tends to correlate with 'niche' and 'small company'. The essential complexity of the problem must be surmounted. If performance is the gate, C is still the best.

If development time, algorithms, and ability to wrap the language around the problem is the gate, an advanced language is going to be better.

According to the Alioth Shootout, OCaml, Haskell, and SBCL are in shouting range of C/C++ speeds. Link:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...

Therefore, if I was selecting an 'advanced' language for a performant real-world system, I would select one of those.
But where will we find all the inverse-sharks?
The events that led Toyota to recall 10 million vehicles may go down in industrial history as the biggest mountain of a crisis ever made out of the smallest molehill of a technical glitch. We now have verifiable facts, rather than conclusions drawn by the media based on assumptions, innuendo and fear.
So, I often have to justify the time I spent getting a PhD in computer science (Cryptography), because I have a start-up that programs Facebook Apps now a days.

The only reason I can, is because I really didn't spend that much time actually working during the whole period and spent a lot of time learning to surf and play tennis well.

I really feel like I learned a lot of valuable lessons from learning to play tennis and to surf. I'm really glad my PhD afforded me time and money to make that possible.
Regulators probe Apple 30% subscription plan
A new kind of vacuum
Here's a list of relevant articles:
+ The Washington Post editorial - "NHTSA Report Clears up Mystery - and Hysteria - on Toyota Cars"
+ Harvard Business Review - "Toyota's Recall Crisis: What Have We Learned?"
+ Bloomberg BusinessWeek - "Toyota: The Media Owe You an Apology"
+ Automotive News "One Year Later: Let's Get Beyond Toyota Speed Scare"
+ Fortune "The Safety Police Go after Toyota Again"
Banks are regulated. PayPal isn't. Presumably that's worth something.
This depends, what grades are we talking about?

I worked in a K-8 school where the computer teacher used Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) to teach programming in the lower grades.

What are the challenges you feel need to be overcome?
He didn't elaborate but it's a valid point in the PHP world. Most of the PHP frameworks implement a front controller that all application requests are sent through, but for a lot of applications this isn't necessary in the PHP world. There's no reason not to simply divide your application into separate files and let your webserver call the right file. Particularly interesting is how similar mod_rewrite is to many framework's routes type implementation. You can practically stick the same config in .htaccess and just let Apache handle it.

For a lot of simple applications my "controller" consists of:

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
// do my validation and any work needed then the redirect
} else {
// display the resource
}

You might still call that a "controller" but it's pretty different than what most of the frameworks call a controller, and we've pushed the task of routing the request to the right piece of code off to Apache.
I believe, this is a consequence of being ugly.
Opentable stores passwords in cleartext
Source IP filters really slow you down

Can you elaborate on this or provide a reference? I've never heard this before and am curious what the implications of various iptables filters are.
Ask HN: Is there a downside to applying to both TechStars and YC?
The Summer session schedules for both programs are roughly aligned, so I'm wondering if it makes sense to apply for both. Of course, getting accepted to both would be a great problem to have, but other than that not sure I can think of any downsides. Any insight appreciated.
I imagine it would depend highly on the specific wording of the agreement that you signed - sorry, I know that's not that helpful, but that's mostly what I've been told by the lawyers I know.
Or maybe people upvote it because of the content, not because of who made it ? If it turns out it's one of the publishers (or even a fan) instead of the author, this bug report will still be just as awesome.
How to hack growth of bod y?
Ah, I was wondering how much vim experience you had. Quite a bit! Well, thanks for being an interesting data point. :)

(BTW/FWIW, I'm on mac and keep the option key as command, so no extra key lying around for me to use as super.)
There's always mod_wsgi and writing a raw wsgi app- which honestly, isn't particularly hard or bad.
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Instead of buying an electric heater, I'd like to buy a server that automatically sells its power on a market like this to subsidise my electricity bill.

If all electric heaters in the world provided CPU power for us as well, where would we be?