skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Performance surely doensnt matter in the main stream - my grandma's computer has comparable processing power to supercomputers 20 years ago( and she has a Pentium 4, that has been obsoleted many times over already) [1]. But I think google would pay attention to software performance on their Terabyte-eating map-reduce clusters. Or someone who doesn't want their iphone app flagged as "battery hog" for that matter.

"Pay attention", not as in squeeze out every extra cpu cycle they can, but as in do the 10 % extra thinking that would get the reasonable 2-10 fold improvement over the naive implementation. At least that's my experience - maybe i'm just really bad with my naive implementations, YMMV.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28computin...
Deploying a basic Ruby application in Windows Azure
> These questions always seem so ridiculous

Maybe I am misreading this. But I don't quite see why. The poster seemed to want to relearn C and was asking other people's opinions on what would be interesting small projects to start out with.
I think JS was mostly hated because of the available implementations at that time and the differences between them.
Depends on the fuel used and cooling techniques. Looking at the predominant fuel mix currently used internationally, there is only 80-90 years of nuclear material left - perhaps worse than peak oil. That's why the new emphasis by the Chinese and a few other governments on Thorium Energy & Molen-Salt Technology Inc (iThEMS) is really, really interesting. The US should begin to invest in this technology too- we invented the concept in teh 1950s and 60s, but dropped Thorium because it didn't produce any useful Plutonium byproducts needed for Nuclear Bombs. Here's a good article about the Chinese use of this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/
Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep?

My experience is that it's not about the cost of an individual chair, or mattress, or desk, or whatever. It's about the cost of the process. The ideal mattress for you, today, might only cost a few hundred bucks, but you may have to put half a dozen of those cheap mattresses to the test to find it. And then your needs might change, because people grow older, and you'll need a different cheap mattress.

Your needs are going to change from day to day or from year to year. So what you want from furniture that's built to last is: Adjustability (you can change the height, the tension, or the angle without sacrificing structural soundness or necessary rigidity) and/or flexibility (the furniture is suitable for a wide range of postures and uses; a classic example is memory foam, which slowly adjusts itself to you). Not to mention: Portability and resale value, because you'll be auditioning a lot of stuff.

Consider desks, for example. At any given moment in my life, including this one, I could take my computer desk and replace it with a strategically stacked pile of cheap cardboard boxes. And, indeed, when I get a crazy new idea for a room arrangement (standing desks!) I tend to prototype it with cardboard boxes. But: The cardboard boxes are risky; they tend to fall apart over time, or fail very suddenly at moments of high stress. They also have poor structural characteristics; typing on a platform built out of cardboard, for example, can be quite unsatisfying, because it is squishy. And most importantly, the cardboard boxes don't adjust well at all. To change the height or position of my monitor or keyboard I have to find other boxes, or take everything apart and restack. Ergonomics is a game of inches. The ability to easily adjust something by an inch one way or the other is very valuable, and you are going to pay for that, either by buying something adjustable, or by auditioning two or three versions of everything, or by spending a lot of time jury-rigging things.
From the comments here, most of the developers commenting on the adult industry are being fairly liberal with the term "industry". Sort of like equating the slot machines at the local bar with the casino industry as a whole. Ignore the fact that Apple is adopting business models pioneered in the online adult industry, or that PayPal was years behind what was offered in the adult industry regarding credit card security.

One thing the adult industry can't push on right now is iOS Apps, where most of the action is taking place. But companies like GroupOn, Foursquare, and others are using technology and business models that adult has been using for a long time.
It just means that you can have large numbers of participants being wrong and so, by their sheer weight become unmanageable to a smaller entity which however has the correct picture. This is why short-selling is not for the faint of heart. You need to know not just that the market is wrong, but when it will realize it is wrong.
> Hatred is predicated upon use

That's not true -- plenty of people hate Lisp who've never used it.
Should it be a bit harder to submit on HN?
Just a quick question/concept: should it be a bit harder to post on HN - thus leading to higher quality links/submissions? In general, the quality of content posted is amazing, but what if a description of minimum character length was needed to post? Average number of posts per user might decline, but there might be more discussion per post, creating more value for the community. Is this a good idea or bad?
I agree. But if they are making money off it, then why are they talking about it? The trading community hasn't exactly been known for its altruism.
What do you recommend to those who just want to try out Enlightenment, instead?

I have just familiarized myself with Linux via Ubuntu. I saw this Bodhi on Distrowatch and thought it's a good way to look at Enlightenment.
Worth noting is that "kill the other team" is a blanket term that encompasses many different levels of violence. Yes, in some games you do actually kill people, but there are so many variations - in platformers you often just jump on their cartoon heads, in strategy games it's more about conquest, like playing Risk.

Looking through my own gaming library, there are a lot of completely non-violent games where you could class it as "mortal combat" - for example in Osmos you play a single-celled organism (sort of) trying to survive by absorbing those smaller than you and avoiding those bigger than you.

There are many games out there less violent than Call of Duty that kids could play to bond or make friends, but they get overlooked because they get lumped into a category, and then the media parade the most extreme examples from that category in front of us.
Sorry, that doesn't make sense. HFT is actually not at all capital intensive compared to some other strategies that hedge funds run. The whole point of HFT is to produce high sharpe returns on a small capital base. These strategies do not scale.
Okay. The last part is really bothering me.
chicken and egg problem: why would job-seekers join if there are no jobs?
Why Quora is spamming HN and Techcrunch !!
I agree with the premise of the article - however, as one notch in Nvidia's favor, I think most benchmarks demonstrate that the GTX 590 scales better in SLI than the Radeon 6990 does in Crossfire. Provided, you have a nuclear power plant in your computer to power SLI/Crossfire...
Andrew Wilkinson's Zappos "Redesign" which almost consisted of just putting gradients and drop shadows all over the page would definitely be easy with this project too!

http://www.metalabdesign.com/zappos/
I see the reasoning. Especially considering not all development takes place in California. And don't assume top adult companies don't pay well for developers doing PHP. It's hard finding good programmers regardless of the language.

PHP and Perl have a large foothold around the world, and being located in a nation other than the USA doesn't make a programmer less skilled.

So, with PHP, you have a higher chance of finding good programmers, though you'll have to sift through a lot more people who claim to know PHP. You'll be able to look in a lot more areas, and those areas can offer cheaper rates. And finding a Ruby programmer with ample experience is going to be difficult. I don't know many Ruby programmers who've been programming in the language for at least 5 years.

This is especially true where cost of living is lower. Put all of this together, and using Rails or Django makes little sense.
Best app store review ever
I completely get what this cat is saying.

I initially learned programming to help me automate some tedious duties when playing role-playing games (this was many moons ago).

The first non-trivial program I write in a new language is always related to my favorite RPG.
The quote in question is weaker than the headline might suggest:

"We are still a democracy, but we have moved in my lifetime towards a plutocracy. We do not have a plutocracy, I want to emphasize that, but the distribution of wealth and the influence of wealth have moved in that direction."

The headline isn't elaborated on until several pages below the fold. This is classless and sensationalist, and Haaretz can do better.
2011 Geneva Motor Show Photos
Startups Need International, Without the Pitfalls
Considering Apple is adopting business practices perfected by the adult industry, I don't see how it's not.
From the article. Buffet: "I wasn't worried because I knew the government would do the right thing.". I think it's screwed up that currently a good investment decision is one that assumes you'll get bailed out if things go badly. What happened to the concept of risk? This mentality is a major problem for the well being of the global economy.
the funny thing is that she thinks vintage air sells.
Revoke Auto Publish Permission for the Applications You Use on Facebook
In the appendix of that Futuremark report, the screen caps are rendered so badly, it looks more like serious driver bugs than cheating. Why were Futuremark so sure it's not bad drivers or some other technical fault? Malice vs. incompetence etc.
According to the article, "The computer system went down about 3 a.m. Saturday when a backup power system upgrade was being installed and a transformer malfunctioned."

Where's the redundancy? Why is everything on one system?

Aside from the Alaskan airports (and maybe Hawaiian), their partners American and Delta are at all those airports. How many fliers got moved over to them, instead of just cascading delays and headaches through the rest of the system.

Again, from the article: "He said his flight was supposed to leave at 8:50 a.m. but still had not boarded by 11 a.m." He was probably suppose to catch a connection in Chicago or Atlanta, but he won't now. So when he gets there, now it's American/Delta's problem...

That said, when I go to Seattle, I tend to fly Alaskan. Although I don't like the Delta and American legs, the Alaskan legs are pretty good.

I fly Southwest everywhere else I go.
No, they provide a service.

To understand what I mean by "imaginary" you have to understand (and accept) that a dollar, or a pound, or a real, or whatever, represents our agreement that we'll all play the same game. It doesn't represent a real thing. Google and Facebook provide information about actual things, like people, places and events.

Money provides information about itself. Which, hey, I like having an agreed-upon exchange rate so I can trade my labor for stuff (RIP Carlin). The problem is that exotic derivatives create an insane level of abstraction to the terms of our social agreement. Once you take away the ability of people to understand what money is for (I mean, seriously, buying insurance against the failure of a company you don't own? slices of a house's future value?) that agreement starts to corrode.

And yeah the short-term profits of these abstractions does create PROFIT, but it's an unsustainable cash flow. It didn't arise from producing a better quality product.

To say that Google's search service and CDOs are essentially the same thing shows a pretty poor understanding of both concepts.
Now now, tptacek, you know that thinking you're superior isn't an emotion if it's a fact ;)
There's value in the links, not only in the discussion. I don't see the point in discouraging submissions (except for spam/off-topic submissions).
To be fair, what the comment may be saying is something entirely different: Many countries don't have a Fifth Amendment. You have to talk to the cops, or they will force you. Possibly by torture.

(Even in the USA, cops torturing people into talking is not just a routine staple of crime drama, but is also tragically common in real life.)
Speed is a feature for Android over Apple
Adding a no follow on the link would stop the crawlers actually. Your current approach with return false and a no follow is the approach I most commonly use. The full result looking like:

<a href="#" onclick="DoSomeStuff();return false;" rel="nofollow">
On-demand cloud music - a new era
I'm all of internationalization. I always try to design programs so they can be translatable on the fly, even if I only start off with one language (being English).
HOW TO: Stop Facebook From Using Your Name and Profile Photo In Facebook Ads
FACEBOOK FACING YOUR PRIVACY FOR PUBLICITY
Good job.
I was thinking this money about something that migth interest you.
Here is the short story:
Sometime at HN it is penible to read all those hundred comments. There are few possible improvments:
- collapsible threads

How about a chrome plugin that allow one to add css to any website?
I know it look like a hackers only tool but how freakibg cool this could be.
Ask HN: Best Way to Collect Feedback for Mock-Ups
I'm looking for a service to collect feedback on mock-ups (screenshots) from my internal team and a private set of individuals selected by our team. I want to host the mock-ups and have some survey questions and a comments field. I want to be able to have different options for the same page and have them displayed together on the same page. Is there a service that offers this functionality?
Mint (http://haveamint.com/) is a very popular self hosted analytics package. Though depending on how strict your privacy concerns truly are you should still look into google analytics. Google doesn't allow you to store PII according to their Terms of Service. Though they do get various data, much of it would be hard for them to link back to a distinct user. With that said if privacy is still a top concern Mint is a great choice and many people even without the privacy concern are opting for it over google analytics.
One note: catalyst control panel just got a major redesign that is actually usable. For those who don't know, in the past CCC first showed you an ad when you started it up, then made you open a menu to choose a vague sounding option, then click a tab etc. etc. Once of the most annoying pieces of software I've ever used. Now it's the standard list of categories on the left, options on the right, and the world is finally at peace.
Whoa. Hotmail.
Not if you add some banner at the top.
>> that you can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.

It is hard to judge your own work, The best way is to get a friend to do it.

Another approach it to re-read your writing and compare it to early work. Letting 6 months go by will allow you to re-read your work with fresh perspective. Compare to what you wrote 2 years ago.
will let you know if i want in the future. but now im expecting your views...
Qatar invents artificial clouds to beat the heat at 2022 World Cup
Hatred of languages is pretty silly. I'd only go so far as to say I have frustrations with particular languages:

- Java: too verbose, no convenient way of passing functions around (anonymous clases are too verbose and clunky), lacked of unsigned types (apart from char) is sometimes irritating, mutable Date object is REALLY annoying. CHECKED EXCEPTIONS.

- Python: sometimes the acrobatics you have to do to get everything indented correctly (on a statement that covers multiple lines) is a bit irritating. I actually get a bit irritated by the "superfluous" colons. Module/variable name collision. The amount of times you have to write "self" (compared to, say, Java where 'this' is implied nearly all the time). Lack of a range/xrange that includes the final element.

- Javascript: it's important to separate Javascript the language and the DOMs in which it most often inhabits. Everyone has frustrations with the DOM, different behaviour and so on but the language is actually quite nice. My biggest frustration around JS is that debugging is probably the hardest of any interpreted language I use. Crude scoping (eg "var s = 'foo'" in an inner loop will have that defined outside of that).

- C: I love the simplicity and elegance of C but the lack of try-finally semantics (not that I'm advocating exceptions in general). The mess you can get into of who is responsible for freeing memory (caller or callee). Macro acrobatics (you've never seen so many parentheses in your life).

- PHP: inconsistent naming and parameter ordering. This is often cited but I think it tends to be overblown. You get used to it so at some point it simply offends your aesthetic sensibilities, which says more about the observer than the observed. Deep magic frameworks (I pretty much hate them all). People who try and turn what's actually a quite convenient templating language into Java/MVC. No cross-platform 64 bit int type. Really crude lambda semantics.

It's quite popular amongst programming language hipster-wannabes to hate on Java these days. The language I get closest to hating is... C++.

I've never in my life seen such a horrifically convoluted mess and if you look at C++0x (which is really C++1x now) it only gets worse. You see that every shop that uses it uses a (typically different) subset of the language because no one in their right mind would having coding standards allowing it all. Those slices can be pretty narrow too.
Sure. Drop me an email to set the details.
This article quotes a lot of self-serving executives who run subscription music services predicting they will be the next big thing but haven't they been predicting that since about 2001 and aren't Rhapsody and its brethren already offering something pretty similar that is only mildly popular? Don't believe the hype.
I guess it's right to use the word 'LOL' here :p
MC is sufficient for me but I've never used Windows Commander much.
Even better:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060816064658/hitmanforhire.net/...

An employment application on hitmanforhire.com which asks for your criminal background. I'm not sure if they're looking for a clean record or not, or someone who's already a criminal.
Muy engañosa. Misleading title. I see no references to languages in an article on a shift in US demographics.

There are a wide variety of local languages in the US.

Here in New England, French (Québécois) was the first language of folks in a number of the local towns, and I now tend to hear more Portuguese than Spanish in the local area.

As with anything else, TANSTAAFL. Know your market and your target customers' preferred language(s), and make the appropriate trade-offs around the costs of implementing and maintaining language variants.
There's nothing like trying to skype to 911 when you can't find wifi.
So you'd be happy to say anything to cops in any corrupt 3rd-world country then?
>> but the troubble with good writting is that there is no good way to get better.

Try reading

On Writing (Stephen King)

Bird by Bird

Although to summarize, the bulk of the advice in both books is encouraging you to write every day.
I just don't understand how a distro can call a package manager with unsigned packages ready for a stable branch. It's irresponsible, and if they don't care about that kind of basic need for a package manager, I don't want to put myself in a position where I'll discover (too late) what sort of other obvious oversights they've made.
3 Best Tips To Make Windows XP Run Faster
Whenever you start your computer, you are faced with a few moments of thumb twiddling while Windows XP Boots and prompts you to log on. No matter how fast or shiny your computers might be when they are new, they all seem to get slower after sometime.
Then there was the guy stuck in a NYC elevator for 72 hours without his cellphone.
Have as many kids as you can. Only they can give you the happiest and saddest moments of your life. And to better understand life, you need to know and go both extremes. Every smile is a hug to your heart, every tear is a kick to your soul. At the end of the journey, they will be the real treasure of your existence.
This article contains terrible advice.

Here is how to do it better: Search the coder's completed work pages on the freelance site using google's inurl: and site: search operators to limit your search to the pages showing coders completed work.

Target 10-15 coders who have completed something exceedingly similar to what you want, in the framework and language you expect, and received a high rank. Look for individuals, not companies, otherwise you can't be sure the expertise is still in-house.

Detail your specs exhaustively. Invite these coders to a private auction. Award the bid to the person who asks the most intelligent questions, regardless of price, as long as it is anywhere in the ballpark.

edit: The article's point about checking in frequently IS a good one, however.
Don't dismiss this so quickly. There are a lot of people from the culture that she is coming from who take her claims about "good energy" and so on at face value, and she can definitely speak to that market in a way that none of the suit-and-tie people in that crowd could ever hope to.
Capital is not necessarily money paid. If those two kids have the talent to create a successful website they are incurring opportunity costs due to the fact that they could be earning a decent salary with those skills rather than creating a startup.
There's nothing wrong with having an emotional response. Wallowing in it is another thing entirely.
> If you are any good, you do not need to talk yourself up, as others will do it for you

No. Do not depend on people to do this for you. I've made this mistake.

A few years ago I had a series of weak and bad managers; the review process where I work involves a "stack ranking" system where managers go to bat for you and people are ordered. (I know, it sucks. I don't have control over that, and aside from this I rather like where i work).

Weak manager = bad review. You get ranked low and a review is customized for that.

Depending on your environment, self promotion is survival. If you are in a tank with sharks, you do not want to be a tuna.
Especially seeing as it was just added to the Oxford Dictionary - http://bit.ly/dSmjvL
If it's a waste, than banks computer farms is a waste too.

Sorry, I don't understand this part. I'm pretty sure real currency isn't backed by hash function brute forcing. (I assume they use contracts along with some form of public key cryptographic hashing to sign transactions.)
They have two quotes on their front page:

"Since its first version, in 2003, Red Hat's Fedora Linux has been the best place to track what's on the leading edge of Linux and open source software."
— Jason Brooks, eweek.com

"Fedora has [...] released an amazingly rock-solid operating system."
— Jack Wallen, TechRepublic.com

Are either of those quotes truly true if the developers are okay with breaking existing functionality?