skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, there is the engineering aspect, but I didn't mean that, I was talking about the same fundamental philosophical question you were.

That is, "are there problems for which we can easily verify a solution but not easily find one". P=?NP is only relevant to this philosophical question, if we accept that "polynomial" is synonymous with "easy". That is a widely accepted statement, but not entirely obvious. As it was said in the linked poll, even a polynomial running time could hide contants so large, that it is prohibitively large not just today but anytime in the future until the universe collapses upon itself. On the other hand there can be NP-hard problems for which we can find arbitrarily close approximations in reasonable time. The question is how well are our theoretical efforts capturing this intuition.
I'm not a projectionist, but:

- sound is either on the same reel or on a DTS disc synced to the reel.
- I was surprised that a rather small theater in my metro area (no stadium seating, out in the boonies) has digital projectors in all of its screening auditoriums.

For modern movies, I would imagine that in 10 years or less there will be no more acetate prints and all distribution will be digital. For digital prints framerate is solely limited by the response rate of the projector and the throughput available in the playback system.
Wouldn't you rather have higher salaries and a higher barrier to entry thereby increasing the quality of education?

Which comes first? And might performance after entry into the occupation also be important for setting rates of compensation?
I'm confused, is cjson still recommended? Is it still maintained? Its status seems ambiguous based on the PyPi discussion. Furthermore it seems there's a number of issues with cjson that need to be resolved...
I would wager that this upper limit, whatever it is, is context-sensitive. Depending on the details of the scene, and the emotional state of the viewer, the eye (and the brain) will notice less or more. (Also, many of today's films use very quick cuts, where a significant clip of an action scene is a mere 10 or so, and viewers are likely adjusting to drinking in a lot of visual information in a short amount of time).
A psychology professor talked about this by giving himself a backhanded compliment. He said that IQ and income do have a positive, but not perfect correlation. He said this was due to many factors, but often because people with higher IQs, sometimes pursue professions that are intellectually challenging, such as a career as a professor.
On my Ubuntu netbook, I love GEdit http://grigio.org/pimp_my_gedit_was_textmate_linux
That doesn't sound correct.

Consider it as a mass flow problem. You're ingesting a certain mass of air m at a velocity v and releasing it in the opposite direction. Assuming no losses in the U tube, the only thing that changes is the direction of v. What matters is the total momentum, mv.

If the tube were straight, mv would point out the back and the airplane would go forward. With a U shaped tube, you have instead -mv which is the same momentum, but a different direction, and the airplane moves backwards.

Now that I think of it, it might be easier to visualize as a conservation of energy problem.
I found Facebook useful back when I was single - less creepy than real dating sites, and much better coverage of people from my circles. But even that utility is diminishing, as people appear to do less there.

Of course, I know many people who practically live on Facebook, but I suppose that is mainly due to boring desk jobs instead of actual gossip addiction.

If Facebook starts winding down, it will be interesting to see how all those millions of sites relying on FB for their social features and authentication cope.
Back in the olden times people built personal websites, customized them to their liking, and posted creative things they made, their photography and other hobbies, and writings (which eventually got renamed "blogs"). Some of these websites had interesting private discussion forums that were separate from the rest of the internet. It was a glorious time... and then Blogger, and Facebook, and Twitter came along and normalized everything, leaving only status updates and pictures and useless ramblings.

There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks.
That was never correct. The eye is not a camera, it doesn't work at frames per second.

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

Humans can notice stuff that hapens in 1/200th of a second.
Chiliphone Changes Color of This One Button
I think what facebook does for a lot of people is allows them to have an online presence without having to:

1) Buy a domain name
2) Pay for hosting
3) Install WordPress, etc.

This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff.

The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack, people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by copying other people's hacks).

I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.
It may be low hanging fruit, but imagine rotoscope work on a 24fps feature vs a 60fps feature. The work has just increased 2.5x for the same shot.

For fully rendered content, there is likely no additional man hour time, but for any frame by frame work involving humans, post processing could take a lot longer.
Why not adaptive framerate? Project the film at 60fps but gradually switch (this is the tricky part) between low and high framerate as the scene demands?
Correct. I should have said "neo-liberal economics".
I'm happy now. I imagine I'd be more happy if I had more stuff/cash, for some definition of happy. Therefore it's good now and it only gets better.

The problem starts when you decide that you don't have enough, and this makes you unhappy. Then you pursue the stuff thinking it'll make you happy. Starting from that viewpoint, I don't think it ever will.
Visit your favorite torrent site that has Japanese TV shows and search for 60fps. (Sometimes the video is encoded as 30fps and is interlaced, in which case you need to turn on bob deinterlacing to get 60fps. But this seems to be rather rare these days.)
This is a situation where inconsistent enforcement of law actually works to the consumer's advantage in reducing the number of edge cases where companies make speculative bets on exploiting weaknesses in the formal certification process. Especially with the FDA carefully trying to avoid setting any precendent.

It would be difficult to draft a definition of "abuse" that didn't encompass raising cost of a drug a hundredfold above the market rate in order to recoup costs invested not in research, but in acquiring the company that achieved FDA certification (mostly using existing NIH funded research) for an already widely-available treatment.
All I see is a guy who set up a naive test app in Sinatra (served by WEBrick for all we know) and found that it served fewer requests per second than a test app he wrote in PHP. Then, where most people would have tried to find the slowdown, he just skipped all that and decided that "apparently" Ruby is slow and "probably there is some lame reason why this happens." On the basis of one application with one particular set of libraries that he didn't even benchmark.

Like, if I run a C++ program off a 2X CD-RW drive in a computer with a Motorola 68000 and it's slower than my Ruby site is on my 8-core Mac Pro with an SSD, do I get to write a rant about how slow C++ is?
You might as well skip past all the toys and get Emacs and start on the lifelong journey of understanding it. Vim might be worth looking at too, but it's not my cup of tea.
Neither matter, what matters is profitability.

It doesn't matter if you can serve 10,000 requests per second if the cost of that request exceeds what you're paid for it.

For most sites ruby is profitable, the value add from ruby is decreased cycle time between releases which can increase the profitability of your site more than increasing the pages per second can.

The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond a single server, and when you do need to scale I prefer things like drop in support for S3, drop in support for memcached and a whole host of other performance increasing techniques over raw pages per second.

The benchmark benchmarks the very simple case of a single PHP page, what real PHP app have you used that is a single PHP page? The request times for something like WordPress are insane because of the number of PHP files that need to be interpreted per request.

edit: To clarify the jist is that low margin activities where increasing the speed of your page by 5X would have a great impact on your profitability are not the areas where you should focus you efforts. Instead focus on high margin areas where you could write your pages in SnailScript and you'd still be profitable.
Subtle Google easter egg
Even better, say that you will give them 20 hours more for free (at a "value of X$"), and after that support will be charged at X$. Don't discount support, or you'll be working for months/years at that discounted rate. On the opposite side, you should charge more for support than for regular work.
I can't recall the source, but this "max eye frame rate" was shown to be a misinterpretation.

The individual eye's components do have a frame rate, but they are not synchronized, so the eye as a whole can detect changes smaller than that.
San Francisco, CA - Web and Mobile Engineers

Manymoon is the #1 app in the Google Apps Marketplace. We have multiple open positions for full-time engineers as we build our new social productivity platform for small businesses.

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I think the biggest part of this change in facebook usage is that we all just grew out of this college network and started adding co-workers and all sorts of other mature audience. This then causes you to tread facebook as a different kind of communication tool.
I guess you can say the experience on facebook just matured all together and people are using it differently. Everyone is more cautious about the way they come across on the social graph and what they make public.

After all thanks to Zynga we now all got our mothers, relatives and what not as facebook friends. And like the article says, who has time to setup lists?!
Gmail is moving, fingers are fitter, YouTube goes centennial
but communities die if content is chosen strictly by popularity

Too much melodrama from everyone. Lame April Fools 'news' is created and submitted every year, we all know it's coming, so maybe just avoid discussion sites for a day and move on.
While I think several of the responses to petervandijck are on target WRT Horowitz, Peter nails two major HN dysfunctions in one short post:

- executive hero-worship
- living in a fantasy world where parenting is not a fundamental activity in society

Part of what I like about Horowotz's essay is how his elucidation of becoming a CEO (which I have no experienced) echo my experience of becoming a parent.

BTW, the gender stuff is NOT elidable. If y'all weren't mostly men, y'all would take women's work much more seriously, and be much more skeptical about the way heroic CEOs fail to acknowledge the woman who is caring for their kids in the typical narratives of their awesome business accomplishments.
The s/n ratio of the internet is already abysmal because of spam and other forms of parasitic commerce. Adding 6 billion pages full of baby pictures, Twilight: The Fourth Coming reviews, etc probably raises the bar.
Fools of the Year
Fine, I'll rephrase. If the hosting company took the simplest possible precautions, then this would not have happened. You can't trust people that don't work for you.
It's great for those little tweaks like adding a symbolic link.
I actually pulled this up on last weeks startup weekend and we made some prototypes.

We tried it first with streetview, where you walk around and learn new words on a different language.
We have the best results when we combined it, with a special spelling where the letters were objects also. (like in elementary school, for example "A" is for Apple)
Like that you will remember the objects and not just some random characters.

The "let's go for a walk" and the "stay in this room" mobile versions are still in the pocket, so let me know what do you think about this.
It's ironic that our ability to measure radiation with precision instruments is so very sensitive and precise.

The fear that radiation inspires comes directly from the way it can make you sick invisibly. Many people in the early atomic age without any instruments to detect radiation were poisoned invisibly and without warning by testing fallout and allowing worker and miner exposure to save money.

So we can measure this more closely than other kinds of danger but mistrust and invisibility still drive widespread panic.
Facebook is absolute caching nightmare also. However a news site is much easier to deal with.
> Unlike libertarians, Conservatives believe that those who were the recipients of good fortunate have a moral obligations towards the rest of society, in particular the people who do their best but just have less marketable skills.

Wow, complete disconnect with reality. Conservatives are the ones who cut social programs repeatedly.
Cachey-cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BEkQRiU...
Play a game of Brickout on Scribd
> Unlike libertarians, Conservatives believe that those who were the recipients of good fortunate have a moral obligations towards the rest of society, in particular the people who do their best but just have less marketable skills.

(In the United States) I have never heard this as a conservative viewpoint.

> In fact, earnings are strongly linked with intelligence, which indicates that they are linked to productivity, just as economic theory predicts.

I'm confused. What does productivity mean?

Are schoolteachers productive? Are CEOs productive? What metrics does one use to compare the productivity between the two?

Even if you can measure the productivity of each, isn't their productivity necessarily contingent on other things functioning? In other words, wouldn't a coal CEO's productivity decline if all coal miners quit?

What about if the CEO quit, or died suddenly? What would happen to the coal miner's productivity as the board searched for a new CEO? I imagine it would change much less than the other way around.

If you assume that productivity at any given point is finite, and the CEO suddenly dies, where does that productivity go? Does the president suddenly gain all the productivity value the CEO had?

In a microcosm like a coal company, I'd question who really 'gets' the productivity points. (Miners vs CEO vs board vs shareholders). I wouldn't think those making the most money necessarily have the actual highest productivity values. It would seem to be nearly the opposite, but maybe I have this scheme of modeling things all wrong.
In what way is it equally inexpensive to shoot twice as much film and use twice as much film to make every print? Digital tech is what's going to make high framerate capture and playback economical.
Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany - Python (Django) developer - http://www.jonasundderwolf.de

We're a small web development agency taking on bigger projects. We use Django, FeinCMS, git, PostgreSQL, Fabric to build faster, prettier, and more usable sites for our clients. Looking to start on a product of our own later this year as well.

On-site only at this point - Berlin is a great site to be, though!
You're taking my analogy too literally. I meant a wave that is just a wave.

there are certain elements of the current situation that do seem awfully familiar

Perhaps, but I've been involved in the startup world since around then, and the fundamentals that made the dot-com bust what it was are not present now. People didn't know what they were doing back then, and every MBA was sure he knew he could make millions with a .com domain name. There was a lot to learn. Not everything has been worked out, for sure, and irrational exuberance rears its head more often than we'd like. But this is not a repeat of the '90s bubble. Companies are making real money, and are able to sustain it. The general public is used to what the internet is and is willing to do business with it. The first generation of internet-savvy youth are coming of age. There are few IPOs, and the companies that have done so (e.g. OpenTable) are profitable and growing. That's why I insist that we are not in a bubble -- not a stock market bubble, not a tech bubble. There are overinvestments, but they're not going to bring the industry or the stock market to its knees.

Chicken Littles are running around yelling that the bubble is coming, and a few people are trying to reason with them. I'm attempting to be one of those people.
Sonoran: the year's most anticipated typeface
I'm afraid I don't understand why people say things like this. Why would pissing everyone off ever be a plus to a discussion?
Departing CEO Eric Schmidt Tried To Get Search Team To Hide Political Donation
So I have to spell it out for you? The typical pro-nuclear-power rant goes like this: everything else is more dangerous than radiation, therefore radiation is not dangerous.

This is not valid logic, which I hoped to demonstrate by stating an absurd variant of that kind of logic.
interesting how things come and go and come back. Some years ago it was Yahoo moving their web layer from C++ based templating to something of more higher level, now Facebook [implicitly] moves their layer down to C++ ...
The title is sort of inflammatory, but did you read the article? It's an observation about peoples' behavior on Facebook and how it has changed. She's not saying "Facebook is Boring! Down with Facebook!" She's saying "I loved all the status updates! Why are they gone? Where did they go?"
iTerm2 has this feature with a much nicer layout.

http://www.iterm2.com
Studies have shown that people convert better and view more pages if a site is faster [1]. And page load speed is a factor in your Google ranking [2].

[1] http://www.watchingwebsites.com/archives/proof-that-speeding...
[2] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-sit...
I'm skeptical - this lawsuit was filed on March 7, 2011, but the only time you hear about it is now?

There's nothing on their website about their lawsuit, additionally, if you google around for it, the only thing on it is this Wired article.
Technote #31: The Dogcow
Probably talking about conservatives in Sweden, where it's the other way around.

Anyway, now we just have to determine whether the money earned by high IQ people adds more/less long term value to our civilization than money earned by medium IQ people.
Think about it deeply, and forget it
1) AMZN and GOOG have proven that pageload speed does in fact directly relate to profitability.

2) Regarding "The vast majority of sites don't need to scale beyond a single server," you could make the same point that the vast majority of sites are not profitable either. It's a total non sequitur in either case.

3) Your point that it "costs less" to develop in Ruby which can increase the profitability of your site is an incorrect assertion. It may be true that the time to develop in ruby can decrease your R&D costs, it does not affect your cost of goods sold and has no impact on your margins. If you just say "it costs me $100 less to develop in ruby, thus I've made an extra $100" you need to take an accounting course.

More to the point, if you are building your business with your optimization being focused on decreasing development time, you have already lost sight of the goal.

PHP sucks, but there are a ton of profitable companies that use it because it is wicked wicked fast. In my mind, that makes it suck less. :-)

-David
Smartphones will soon exhaust current memory technologies
How to get rid of ad network binaries in your mobile apps
The current certificate infrastructure already sits on top of DNS. If an attacker can control your DNS then they can get any CA to issue certificates to them because they can accept emails at that domain.
It seems a lot of people over look ESI support in Varnish. Proper use of ESI in pages that have content sections that update at different intervals can make a large impact.
It is not the responsibility of the critic to fix problems.

Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument itself.
First of all, "not using the internet for a day" is not really an option for many people. It's like telling someone that doesn't like traffic to "just not drive".

I think the frustration arises from the fact that these stories are becoming unescapable. They're popping up on every news source, and every Twitter stream. It's almost impossible not to see them popping up everywhere. See it once, fine. See it again? And again? And again? It starts to get annoying. HN happens to be one channel where venting these frustrations is relatively easy.
Agreed, but I will take boring any day over the abomination that was MySpace. User-customizable styling only works when users have the taste and technical knowledge to use it appropriately.
did you really tried it? was the C++ program slower?
Running out of Post IDs
From Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way":

>If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs, tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer. All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file. We will use gedit because it is simple and the same on all computers. Professional programmers use gedit so it's good enough for you starting out.
My email address is already in my profile. Not sure why you can't see it. I don't mind repeating it here if you can't see it for some reason: kamil@kamilkisiel.net
Haha good catch. Should read "factors numbers into primes".
Planet Earth -- operations engineers, PHP developers, mobile developers, database admins, data analysts, and more

Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit behind Wikipedia).

We're hiring lots of people this year. We want people who can work at our scale, love and hate PHP as much as we do, and want to help change the world with a tech staff that can fit around a couple of tables in a Chinese restaurant.

Don't underestimate the technical challenges here. After the past couple of successful fundraisers, we are looking at what "2.0" means for our software and infrastructure. And what it means to be everywhere in the world, from African villages to Silicon Valley to South Korea, on the devices people will be using in the 21st century.

Our main offices are located a couple of blocks from the BART in downtown San Francisco, CA, but we will consider remote candidates from anywhere.

There are also a lot of non-tech jobs we're hiring for -- check out the full list.

http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs
We were just talking about this a few weeks back, with a few more libraries compared with interesting results: https://convore.com/python/faster-json-library/
I'm on Mac OSX; is there an equivalent?