skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What I really wanted to express is a dissatisfaction with a general attitude among some framework makers towards performance. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. If the slowdown of ActiveRecord was down to fixing a dangerous security bug or possible loss of data, that would be such an exception. But piling on new features in a way that degrades performance needs to stop somewhere. Hard constraints are good to focus the mind even if you accept rare exceptions.
Maybe you can find some inspiration here: http://bubbletimer.com/
In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker. I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the "too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One.

The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?
That depends on how you define 'active'. A quick Google gives me some Facebook published statistics [1] which say that more than 250 million people log on every day. Goldman Sachs seem [2] to say "600 million+ monthly active users".

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-mi...
I have family who are on 2GB plans for $50/mo, and they regard that as fairly good.

That's not good at all. I suspect that's the Telstra BigPond "ignorance tax" package. Almost any provider will give them a better deal.

Eg, I get 30Gb/month on Internode for $40. (I live in Australia)

I'd recommend looking at iiNet and Internode packages for them.
It broke mine... I used redsn0w to get it going again and then tried the iTunes update again. Seemed to work for me!
Hmm, I've never benchmarked anything before but I guess I will give it a go. (After my exams!)
Sony restoring PlayStation after breach security 
Gamers and security experts had criticized Sony for its handling of the incident, which sparked lawsuits and cast a shadow over its plans to combine the strengths of its content and hardware products via online services.
Your comment has completely lost me. Are you saying that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I mentioned Goldblum infecting an alien ship with a virus from a macbook? How is that ignorant? Of course a non-susceptible OS can still transmit a virus to a target OS. That's why many major mailserver deployments implement systems to defang mail passing through them. Are you asserting that I'm profoundly ignorant, because I think it's unlikely that "we" loaded a macbook up with a destructive virus for an operating system that we've never seen before and know nothing about from an alien world on an alien mothership?
It's even worse than that. They're saying, "somebody created a profile for you...us!"
There is actually a porn spam exploit going around Facebook right now based upon this.
Facebook platform is only good for games. No other type of app can get traction there, because facebook is an entertainment medium , no matter how hard they 've tried to become more "serious". The thing is, it has gotten increasingly off-putting for indie game developers to follow facebook's labyrinthine platform roadmap. Their platform designs and updates are notoriously amateurish and short-sighted. I believe they have changed 3 platform leads, each of whom introduced a new API. Their weekly code pushes regularly introduce bugs along with the fixes.

For us, it's taking more time to adjust to facebook's everchanging APIs, policies, designs etc, than adding features to our games. The fact that facebook nonsensically banned Adsense advertising does not help either.

That said, facebook is still the most efficient amplifier that can provide exposure to web apps.

I would personally vouch for another provider that can offer a stable social gaming platform. There were rumors about a google game network, and i m hopeful about it
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=274469

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611583 <- This one has comments.
Just as an aside to your final point:

I think a case can be made that huge software companies generate gigantic sums of cash. They have to do SOMETHING with this cash. They could give it back in dividends but most investors would prefer they instead used their internal cash-multiplier machine because it probably runs better than their own would should they have to reinvest dividends.

So what do you do? Acquire.

Look at Microsoft. Look at Google. Adwords, Android, Chome, Maps, Voice, YouTube, etc, etc, etc, all acquired.

It still takes a talented company to marshal the resources and assets of these acquisitions into a successful, larger conglomerate. And in the cases where the sum is more valuable than the parts, THAT'S innovation just the same as a homegrown product or language.
The land-speed record: How to build a 1,000mph car
Hmm, actually a pretty good idea, but their execution destroys the brand they are creating.
No one want's to be a second tier friend.

But it seems to me most people have up to 10 close friends, up to 100 sort of friends (the colleague you like and talk to daily, but wouldn't ask about your sexual problems), and then a large number of people they want to follow or not fall completely out of touch with (second tier friends who you no longer work with, but might ask a favor at some point).

I've found that people get upset if you don't ad them on facebook. It marks them as unimportant to you. I doubt they'd like to be categorized as a second tier friend, or demoted to third tier.

I'd say rather than creating categories, it would be better to allow users to make groups of friends, and select which group gets which news. That way you could say "Oh I'm sorry I didn't invite you to my party, I had you down under work people"...
How speech patterns sway opinions
I think you're too focused on looking at it from a technical perspective. I think what erikpukinskis is referring to is "hardware-agnostic software platform" as a business model/industry environment.

Maybe IBM did invent that, but it was accidental. I'm not sure they did though, I think MS did.
> I'd personally find a recommendation from a friend

Plenty of people already use that method. And a lot of them go to see homeopaths and chiropractors based on that. Can you image what would happen to those people if they had to use recommendations from friends when they had actual medical problems that require actual doctors?
Any word on what they actually changed? Would be interesting to know what they did differently this time around.
Corporate News 5: Software Piracy rate decrease in INDIA
It apparently won't ever happen. I'm surprised the author of the article took it so seriously. I've gotten spam like this for years and it just goes directly into /dev/null when I see something like "so and so sent you a..." or "so and so left a comment about you at...". If I saw that Honestly spam, it would have only held my attention long enough to delete it.

That we're still putting so much attention into an email like that all these years later suggests that we're never really going to learn or become fatigued. We'll just accept it as "part of life".
Out of interest, what language is your framework for? I'm seriously thinking of stopping using PHP because of the weight of the frameworks -- at least on Python there are microframeworks in which I am not left with a massive bottlenecks on the simplest Hello World page. Sure, you can scale but it's becoming ridiculous that I am forced to be so frugal with processor intensive tasks in the rest of the web application just because of the framework.
Sorry I threw that into the same sentence when it made no sense to do so.
CPU does not necessarily have to be the bottleneck.
I sense some exaggerations here. "Scores of users", "eleven pagelengths", but no link to the discussion. Maybe that's actually just a few dozen people there? Then, "bricked devices", only they are not "bricked" at all, they merely failed to update and you need to restore them.

So, basically, the article says: There are a few users who have problems updating their iDevices.

I wonder if this happens with every update or just with this one? Actually, I would expect every software that is used by several milling people to fail for some eleven pagelengths worth of people.
Doesn't seem much different than that Rip Off Report guy. Except, unlike him, they don't seem to be trying to extort money out of people to change the comments about them.
How about reason 0: You depend on a platform that can shut you down in an instant without any justification and without possibilities to reactivate your app?
Requests per minute!
20% to 30% has typically been the difference between threaded and non-threaded perl interpreters.

Have you checked if both your old and the new perl have the same threading settings?

I expected some performance improvements from the upgrade, but I found 20% to be pretty surprising -- still I won't complain :-)
Good point. SAP is an order of magnitude bigger than Skype but the point about getting into this space if they're serious about getting into a different space is a good one. Netsuite, intuit & salesforce are trading @ $2.3b, $16.75b & $17.9b. They could conceivably buy all three with just this 'overseas cash' they supposedly need to spend and still have change. Thinking about MS's available cash in terms of companies they could buy really puts some perceptive on it - huge.
Solidarity with Bahraini people' group marches in Qom
Храненето и вашите очи - Активия
Тези витамини могат да бъдат намерени в много различни източници на плодове и зеленчуци като портокали, киви, грейпфрут, сушени кайсии, домати, чушки, сурови моркови, включително зеле и спанак, зелен грах, зелен фасул и брюкселско зеле.
Thank you for that post. I wish I could go back in time 5 years and read it then. I'm an MBA + CS degree bearing startup founder with autodidact Rails skills too. Now, I don't really need the advice anymore having it figured out myself already but it's nice to see I'm not alone.

If you are lucky, the self-doubt makes way for self-confidence eventually. Even for completely new things you start thinking, "well, I managed the last few times, it will probably work out OK this time too". I wonder if all the confident people I see starting out just have naive bravado or are very good at hiding their self-doubt.
The problems here are manifesting on Ruby 1.8.7, but not 1.9.2. There have been big performance problems found with 1.8.7, for example in this issue:

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994-ruby-on-rails/...

What was originally a performance optimization on 1.9.2 caused a terrible slowdown on 1.8.7. It was reported and fixed within two days.

Does that still fit into your "not giving a shit about performance" critique? I think the "real problem" is that there are two major releases of MRI Ruby (not to mention JRuby) that have very different performance characteristics.
Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?
Some people do: it's called mod_perl. You can compile a stripped-down Apache (written in C) with mod_perl (also written in C) built in. This basically runs as a C http server that understands Perl, running the script within Apache process space. It's pretty darn close to the metal.

The interpreter is the sticky part here and something for which Perl gets some criticism in this arena, but the Perl interpreter is also written in C and is quite fast, if not small.

Bag on Perl all you like as a language, I know I do (and I use it, as well as Rails), but if you can get past the language hump mod_perl will knock you sideways. You can easily pump out a network card's worth of static content with a leftover desktop machine, and DBI is no slouch when it comes to integrating dynamic content.

Slashdot, Valueclick, Craigslist, IMDB...all mod_perl.
So there was another submission of this article on the front page a few minutes ago. It was submitted earlier and has more upvotes... but now is on the second page.

Doesn't that submission really deserve to be the canonical one?
I'm in Melbourne and I've just got unlimited adsl2+ for $50 pm. Last plan was 40gb adsl2+ for $60.

Skype (video & skype-2-phone) usually works very well (not always, but lately usually better than land lines for overseas calls).
absolutely brilliant commencement speech by Robert Krulwich.
Five Reasons why Google's Linux Chromebook is a Windows killer
Currently to pay it i have to convert bitcoins to fiat currency (and lose around 2% in the process). I'd like to be able to skip this part.
Same here. I had planned to buy a Sony Android phone, and was also looking at their tablets. I'd rather give HTC my money.
I've recently started appengine-boilerplate, which makes setting up new appengine projects much quicker and more fun. Includes html5-boilerplate, openid-authentication, memcaching, etc. https://github.com/metachris/appengine-boilerplate

If anyone wants to help, authentication with OAuth and MailChimp integration would be great places to start :)
this argument comes up over and over when talking about facebook APIs etc, but this is an inherent risk in all kinds of online and offline applications: from the electric power company to the ISPs, to browser vendors, to facebook, there are all kinds of dependencies you have to rely on. True, facebook is more likely to have conflicts of interest with your web app. But the main issue is that facebook doesn't yet have a financial interest to maintain a healthy app ecosystem.
No, people like you are the cause of the problem described. The whole point of the article is that "we all know that in practice MAX_INT+1 is negative" is wrong.

Apologies for the confrontational tone, but someone making that kind of mistake out of ignorance is understandable. Insisting on wrong thinking after having it explained in detail why it's wrong, isn't.

If you can't live with the fundamental design principles behind C/C++ then the correct approach is to not use them. Don't ask the compiler writers to go against those principles.
Nonsense. You buy a PS3 BECAUSE you can play online games. Whether you do that or not, it's part of the package.

Their screw up was letting the network be down so long, being hacked TWICE, preventing any of the game producers from earning money while the PSN is down, preventing their customers from playing games they bought, etc. etc.
Home Depot doesn't have to train their staff to inspect propane tanks, they only have to make sure they buy from a supplier who provides good propane tanks. But of course, since propane explosions can easily hurt bystanders, and "Fred's Discount Mailorder Propane" doesn't necessarily have as many incentives to ensure safety, so in this case I would say regulation is a good thing.

But there are cases where dangerous things aren't regulated by the government and it still works out pretty well, like roller coaster rides. In that case insurance companies actually play a big role in disseminating industry best practices.

In cases where companies produce danger for people other than their customers we shouldn't expect them to necessarily be responsible without government oversight - like with pollution. And in something like a hospital where people tend to die even when the hospital does everything right I wouldn't expect people to be able to differentiate between good and bad hospitals well enough - and the evidence I've seen is that people don't currently choose hospitals based on how good they are even with the government publishing statistics on the matter. I can easily imagine that in a totally unlicenced market the problem would be worse.
What it’s like to work at Facebook
I interpreted this as "quieter than <previous model/competitors' cars>". Also, I treat statements like "It's three times quieter." as completely worthless. "Quieter" is a relative term, and one has to be quieter than something for the statement to make sense.
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Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549140
From a google developer, responding to complaints about the new per-instance pricing: "If you are using Java, we just launched the ability to make your instances multi-threaded allowing you to use fewer instances to handle the same
traffic"
https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thre...

I'd be surprised if they didn't do the same with Go, by the time it reaches production status.
Strangely, the two posts are slightly different. (The screenshots are different, for example.)
Solution found for iMac 2011 hard drive bay fan issue
Have you considered doing a poll instead of a discussion question? You might get more lurker participation.
There isn't a shred of the original mongrel parser left. I'm not 100% sure but http-parser looks more like it's inspired by nginx than that it actually contains nginx code.

Disclosure: I know both http-parser and nginx fairly well. I'm one of the 'other Node contributors'. :-)
Poll version: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549204
Whoops--lands me on a godaddy ad page, offering to sell me the domain.
IPhone 5 rumor roundup for week ending May 13
On the other hand, there seems to be a big shortfall in the supply of doctors, in the US at least, so less strict testing than we have now might be a good thing.
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/why-cant-we-have...
Wow a lead gen.. Did they ask for a telephone #?
Wait, what diseases? And are the risks worse than those involved with food preparation or janitorial work (both unlicensed)?
EDIT: Lice, obviously, but that's both treatable and not particularly dangerous.
Just last month one of my friends with a debilitating back condition that forced her to spend many days in bed was told by medical doctors that she needed surgery to get rid of the pain. On the advice of friends, she went to a chiropractor and got immediate relief. The chiropractor solved her problem without surgery. Medical doctors have their place, but so do other healers.
Implementation of the Smart Proxy pattern using RabbitMQ and Erlang
"The best way to deal with people modifying your hardware is to embrace it the way Microsoft has"

What do you mean by this?
The lead quote: "Of the 10 former patients who talked to me, maybe only two still seemed to be significantly bothered by problems of ADHD."

So we're basing our survey on 10 former patients who would talk to the doc.
Some of the examples at the end are laughable.

If new[] throws an exception, this leaks
a ﬁle handle and deadlocks the next caller.

Poorly written code is buggy? No shit, Sherlock! — to paraphrase the OP.

The Frequently Questioned Answers has good, insightful criticism of C++ is here: http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/
How to start your startup in 4 steps
> And, to be honest, they have a point, because PC game piracy is out of control.

No, they do not have a point. I bought Settlers 7, shortly after release, for full price. I couldn't play it. My internet connection at the time would "blip" every ten minutes or so, it would go down for a couple of seconds and come back up. Every time this happened I got kicked out of my game.

The next Ubisoft game that came out, I pirated. Why? Because the pirated version of Settlers 7 /works/. If I'm paying something, I expect a better experience than I would get if I didn't pay. To me, that seems like a fairly basic tenet of economics.

Many game companies "get it". Valve for example provide me with unending streams of new content for games I have paid for, even going as far as giving me a free copy of Portal 2. Thanks Valve! You win money.
I use Jquery Timers to accomplish a similar goal. http://plugins.jquery.com/project/timers
What is this in reference to? Twitter itself?
The cited project is about proving that a C program has no undefined behaviour. If such proof can't be found, the code may still be okay.

So the existence of that tool doesn't contradict the statement of the article.
My own framework and ORM writing days are long past and the software I write nowadays has very different constraints (data/text mining).

I totally share your sentiment about having to be frugal because of wasteful frameworks. My approach is to prefer libraries over frameworks. I start out using the most bare-bones configuration possible (no frameworks, no ORM, no CMS, etc) and then I selectively add well maintained libraries created by people whose attitude I understand.

I think code reuse is generally overrated, particularly when it comes to the rather trivial things that web frameworks do.

This is probably not very helpful to you. I apologize.
Am I the only person that really, really doesn't want this? I didn't want it 15 years ago with custom browser plugins, I didn't want it 10 years ago with Shockwave, and I don't want it now.

I've never said to anyone "You know what I think would make the web awesome? If it used 100% of my CPU, took ages to load pages, only worked in one browser that's being forced on users of a particular operating system, and was in 3D!"

I'm not a fan of "X is the new Y", but honestly Google are acting very much like Microsoft were some years ago. I'm even having more issues debugging HTML+CSS in Chrome than Internet Explorer these days.
can you provide examples of this?
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I think your example might actually support the parent's POV more than it refutes his stance. Exception handling isn't just slow in 1.8.7. It may be slower in 1.8.7 than 1.9.2, but exception handling is universally slow. There are a variety of reasons for this, but unrolling an exception is fundamentally slow and until there's native support for them on the die, that's likely to remain the case.

So, creating a situation where you're guaranteeing an exception is raised during non-exceptional execution flow is generally a bad idea. It may be cleaner or more concise code-wise, but performance-wise it almost certainly will always be slower.

For the most part I believe the parent is correct in that there is a much stronger emphasis placed on code conciseness/clarity than there is on avoiding performance anti-patterns. It's hard to measure whether the gains in "code agility" outweigh the local performance hit by making it easier to surface other performance problems. When there's less code involved it usually follows that it's easier to spot and fix problems. But I worry because my own experience suggests that death of a thousand cuts is a considerably harder situation to get out of than dealing with a handful of gnarlier bottlenecks.
Here you go: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549813
On Quora: What concepts are the new (digital) wonders of the world?
Is it just me, or is Google's Chromebook fighting yesterday's war? Chromebook for me doesn't make sense, not with Android. I'm sorry, the zdnet article is crap.

Chromebook is not a Windows Killer, and none of the five reasons cited would not compel the grandmother who lives next door or that man who doesn't care about the religious nature of Microsoft Office versus LibreOffice. Nor do I see a compelling reason for a business owner to make a switch.

Normal people just want things that work when they turn them on. And they don't want complicated.
I'm a fanboy of nothing except six things;

- freedom
- freedom
- freedom
- wtf public license
- good software
- user friendly business models

You're right, I'm an upset linux fanboy. I'm upset about the time we've lost because of recent internet explorer versions and the companies supporting junk software instead of the modern ones.
DIY shower curtain. I mean Draw It Yourself curtain
Reminds me of the perennial "year of the linux desktop" proclamations that were so prevalent (and mostly wrong) about 5-10 years ago.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Linux#Year_of_Desktop_L...
Web App Hacker's Handbook 2nd Edition - Preview