skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So do most government controlled facilities. Everything you get "free" costs in the long run, but something as basic as health insurance should be something that is 'free' for everyone regardless of their circumstances. Also the idea of big companies profiting from illness is not good IMHO

In the US you pay a massive amount towards warfare - I don't think that is a good thing.
I know this sounds terribly lazy, but the day when I'll simply get all these benefits from a pill tailored to my own bodies needs will be a sweet day indeed.
The code for Lua, OCaml, and qmail are also quite good.
It's also true of Perl. But it wouldn't have solved the problem in this case...a blocking IO single-process vs. non-blocking multi-process configuration is obviously not going to fare well, and it couldn't be made (significantly) faster by rewriting some bits and pieces in C.

There are also pretty big costs associated with shell scripted processing, like spawning a new shell for every command (while Perl, Python, etc. do not, unless you're explicitly forking). While there was a thread about programmers greps a few days ago, and out of curiosity I compared find+grep to grin and ack, and found that find piped to grep required a quarter the time of ack (written in Perl) and more than an order of magnitude less time than grin (written in Python) to perform a simple search, I also know that for more complex cases the cost of shell-based processing grows as complexity grows.

For an interesting comparison, look at the GNU autotools vs. cons (in Perl) or SCons (in Python). Both cons are dramatically faster than the autotools. Partly because they aren't as complex and don't target quite as many build systems, but also partly because they do most everything from a single running process.
If the CEO sets the ceiling pay, and an acceptable range is $100-125k, what then constitutes acceptable pay for (non-CEO) founders? Is $60k too high (given reasonable funding, pre-profitability)? $80k?

Just curious at what the usual funding agreements end up at.
CNN Fail: Counting to nine is hard
Ask HN: Good books on mathematics for somebody who's only taken high school math?
I was just reading Lockhart's Lament again (http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf, if you haven't read and reread it yet), and I got a tremendous urge to really start getting into math. Problem is, I don't know where to begin with it. So I figured I'd ask: what books out there discuss math in the same way Lockhart does? I don't want a drab textbook: I want something that makes math as fascinating as it was in middle school, when I actually had fun learning about this stuff. Something that really is ecstatic about math.<p>I remember having a book about Fibonacci that was like that, but it was a pretty small book. Just as an aside.<p>And, if you don't have a good math book (though that's what I'm looking for), are there any books you've read that inspire that same sort of ecstasy in you? Personally, I've found myself inspired both by Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, along with Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. (Even though the latter wasn't exactly a scientific book like it purports itself to be, I was still fascinated by the concept it discussed.) Anything else?
Both Perl and Python have far nicer ways to link to C than SWIG. Having worked with both, I think they're about equal these days on the binding to C front (though, as always, in Perl there's far more than one way to do it, and there's only a couple of obvious ways to do it in Python).
Sinatra 0.3 Features
1608 hours of work logged since November using RescueTime
Haha true. Reading those "Roadrunner laws" though was really interesting - trying to think back to the cartoons and making sure they all applied.
Small Micro sized remote controlled devices (air & ground based) that can provide both video and audio surveillance. The video and audio can be collected, stored and processed. A single voice can be isolated in a crowd; a single face in group; Multiple targets tracked. The technology already exists to this and more ...
I thought the post on webapps hacking was great, succint and comprehensive. It'll be my checklist while I prepare for my first startup.
The "..." above had some important bits in it. My point was, how much of the speedup came from switching to C, and how much came from all the other stuff he did (much of which could also be done in Python).

Switching from a scripting language to C doesn't mean an automatic huge speed boost. It depends where your time is being spent.
I've always assumed that this font coloring is meant to discourage people from making lengthy text-based posts on HN.
Do you know of any perl & C++ solutions other than perlxs and swig?
Hate to hijack the thread but can anyone offer some examples of good Python and/or C code to look through/read?
You have to add the costs of licensing. Anyone can publish a game for PC, but you have to pay Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo to release a game for their console.
I would highly-recommend reviewing the source code of the KohanaPHP framework. It is very clean, elegant and well-structured OOP code written by some very talented developers.

http://www.kohanaphp.com
Is Web 2.0 already on its way out?
Fooled again by the normal distribution I see. Too bad the outliers are what matter here. That is the whole point of health insurance. You don't get health insurance because you expect to get sick, you get it in case you get sick. Moreover the benefits far outweigh the cost. There are many non-sickness-related healthcare issues that may affect you as a startup founder. I know a number of people with really bad RSI and no health insurance who sure wished they had it right now.
Only 15 days with more than 12 hours total put in? What kind of startup are you :~) ?

Seriously, that's some really good real-world confirmation about what kind of time real startups are putting in.
Picasa 3 Terms of Service has same problem as Chrome
Agreed. Just because a language has a low barrier to entry, doesn't mean it should be blamed for bad code. I linked to the KohanaPHP framework source as an example of very well written PHP code.
Photos of Production GM Volt Accidentally Leaked
Day One Recap TechCrunch50
I guess they have a little more work to do after propagating the Chrome changes through the 40+ languages.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/update-to-google-chro...
Use rescuetime! You'll be very disappointed that you don't work nearly as long as you think you do.

It's really just a re-normalization though.
My thoughts:

Slinkset is good when your boss says, "I heard about this web 2.0 voting news site thingy and I want us to have one that looks like the rest of our website because then I can say buzzwords." It allows you to make it look in-house enough, but it still looks slinkset-y. It's good when you're an implementer of technologies rather than a programmer of them.

Beyond that, these types of sites only work when you have enough members. Have a community of 25 and it's not going to work well. But often your boss/customer might demand it anyway because it's the cool new thing.

Beyond that, it's a hosted service that hasn't defined a revenue model. Most likely that means that at some point in the future, it's going to get worse for you (cost you money, have ads, etc.). So, I wouldn't want to put my site on there without thinking that through. Maybe that doesn't matter to you because your IT department has the money to pay what I'm sure will be reasonable fees. If this is your personal site that you want to be a new community HuffPost, I'd rethink it since you're beholden to someone who has basically said, "we'll make you pay later. In the meantime, just enjoy." While I'm sure the Slinkset people aren't like being in debt to the mob, it's not a position you want to be in with a site that you want to make big.
Free VPN services and the Great Firewall of China
Browse through the Zend Framework. I don't know why more people don't recommend it as a well written large size PHP code base. It's a little exception happy but that's more of a style issue.
> Use rescuetime

Alas, no love for linux...
I think that's what a letter or word limit is for, though.
New multi touch gestures on MacBook Air and MBP
You mean this kind of lipstick?
I think a suggestion from your reply will prove more constructive
75 Percent of My Office Is Under 28
TechCrunch50 has few younger first time entrepreneuers
I haven't read the detail of the specification, but is a great idea.

The amount of similarity between pages of Markup (esp XML) or related pieces of JavaScript could be significant.

I found this Google PowerPoint that hints at some of the benefits
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:RIkP-5qZ4awJ:assets.en....

The PPT claims About 40 percent data reduction better than Gzip alone on Google search.
Fantastic operating system, horrible release name conventions.
In addition to jQuery, check out YUI. It is incredibly well documented and featured. I see it overtaking the other JS platforms soon.
Can a Human See a Single Photon?
PayPal Integration
How long would it take to integrate PayPal into my ecommerce store? How about an Authorize.net solution?
The Future of I18n in Ruby on Rails (from RailsConf Europe 2008)
Support for something like this would be a step in the right direction, but I think there are a couple of simpler ways to improve HTTP:

A similar peeve of mine is HTTP headers.

If a browser opens a connection to a web server, and the connection is keep-alive, the browser will send several requests down than one connection.

But for every single request, it'll send out it's full headers. That's really wasteful and idiotic. Send full headers when the connection is opened, there is no need to repeat every single time.

Also if the connection is keep-alive, it'd be reasonably simple to have gzip compression over the full data - not per request. This would achieve the same as the google proposal, but in a better way IMHO.

The HTTP headers can add up quite a bit if you're using XMLHttpRequest or similar. Also if the data is small, compression isn't worthwhile. HTTP header spam is a PITA.

So if I had my way:

* Headers only sent once at the start of a connection, not per request. Send them if they change - eg a new cookie has been set since the last request :/

* A new transfer-type to specify that the data is gzipped as one - instead of gzipped per request.

Those 2 simple changes to HTTP would make things so much better.
Oh, for crying out loud.

I respect Mark Shuttleworth for putting his money where his mouth is; desktop Linux has come on leaps and bounds in the past few years and it's thanks in no small part to Canonical.

But you can't compare yourself to MS and Apple and, in the same breath, name your new OS "Jaunty Jackalope". What is this, one of those Words and Pictures videos they show to primary school children?! If it was an actual release codename, fair enough, but unlike other software these names seem to stick. What's wrong with "Ubuntu 9.04" or even "Ubuntu, Spring 2009"?

(I'm using, erm, Hardy.)
These aren't a list of features, it's a changelog -- a really hard-to-read changelog at that.
Interesting article about an amazing service, have to remember it for the next time I run into a similar problem. But please don't use it to blast out my personal data to hundreds of "untrusted" people...
"everything [he] described" regarding code was porting code over to C.
There is an open-source Linux RescueTime app that that seems to work pretty well for some folks.

https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader
Threading support is better in python than in perl? I'm not familiar with perls threading model (or libraries), but this seems wrong - considering things like the GIL in python.

Could you elaborate a bit on this?
ITunes 8, not the iPod, dominates Apple tweets
Ask HN: Multi-Monitor w/ Laptop?
I've been running two monitors on my desktop pc for a few years now and I really like it. In fact I'd say it's a requirement for me.

My next pc purchase will in all likelihood be a laptop. When I'm at home (or at the office) I'd like to maintain a multi-monitor setup with my 2 LCDs. My first thought was to use a docking station to pull this off.

Has anyone had any luck running a laptop in a multi-monitor scenario using a docking station? Are there any docking stations out there that support this?

If found this...

http://www.digitaltigers.com/sidecar.asp

...but it seems kind of expensive.

Any thoughts? Recommendations?

Thanks!
Sorry for the formatting, I wanted to get it up. My goal with this was to connect the changelog with my previous posts about these new features (that I wrote against the development branch). Didn't expect it to get linked from here...
yay! incoherent ruby stuff! heheh i look to a language to teach me about other languages, i don't know if ruby would do that for me.... i'm probably wrong, and it does get the job done, but i've a lot of ruby people ask me how to do some custom header thing or some other gloves-off task, and i dunno what to tell them since java, python, .net, and everything all have classes that make this a snap, but rails stuff hides this real deep? or makes it hard for moderate programmers to find? i'm just curious, sorry for flame bait ;p
Obama's online ad spend: Social networks get little
I've never used C++ from Perl, only C, but there is a version of Inline for C++ here: http://search.cpan.org/~neilw/Inline-CPP-0.25/

The nice thing about Inline is that the bindings are obviously named (function foo() in C becomes sub foo in Perl), and it's all automagic. Of course, if your C/C++ code is big or an existing library you want to bind to rather than just a few bits and pieces, perlxs (and its related utilities) might very well still be the way to go. There is XSpp, which supposedly makes C++ and XS play nicer together. But perlxs is dramatically better than SWIG in most circumstances I can think of (I don't mean to imply that SWIG is not a wonderful tool--it's a fantastic tool, but both Perl and Python have language-specific solutions to most of the same problems that are superior).

But you can't beat Inline::C (and I guess Inline::CPP) for simplicity. If you know both Perl and C/C++ their usage is absolutely obvious. perlxs requires a little more reading, and I have to consult the docs whenever I cross paths with it. Python has Weave (part of SciPy), if you like the inline model, though I'm not sure it's being maintained heavily these days.

If large data sets are your problem (some of the things you might use the numeric data structure tools in Boost for), PDL might be a solution, since it has a lot of tools for manipulating large data sets without having to revert to writing your own C. Likewise NumPy in Python. And, of course, there are already Perl bindings for Boost in CPAN, though the vast majority of Boost seems to be just making C++ more like Perl, rather than adding anything that Perl coders would find interesting.
Make multitouch apps with Firefox
Hi blakeperdue,

This sounds like a pretty useful feature. I'll put it on the back burner for now, but what I'm thinking of is a simple HTML page generated and published to a server for other people to view.
Also the idea of big companies profiting from illness is not good IMHO

Ah. You know, I never really thought about how when I buy food, I am helping big corporations profit from hunger; when I buy books, I am helping big corporations profit from ignorance; when I buy clothes, I help big corporations profit from the wrath of nature. Fortunately, I am more concerned with getting what I want than with worrying that someone might, as a terrible side effect, benefit from my actions.

something as basic as health insurance should be something that is 'free' for everyone regardless of their circumstances.

But it's only 'free' because the necessary resources are taken away from other people. Saying you are entitled to healthcare is saying that no doctor or nurse is entitled to their own time -- it's yours, until you declare yourself satisfied with the health care you've gotten. Similarly, no researcher is entitled to his own ideas, property rights dissolve when the property is something you want but for which you are unwilling to bargain, etc. That is barbaric.

In the US you pay a massive amount towards warfare - I don't think that is a good thing.

Neither do I. Unfortunately, the cheap kinds of war are unpopular.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. I like Sinatra for teaching the underlying http protocol. Unlike Rails, it doesn't hide things from you, but just tries to make it cleaner and easier to write an app.

I maintain that Sinatra:Rails::PHP:J2EE. They all have uses, but aim at different ends of the scale.
They do seem to stick, but . . . am I the only one finding it increasingly difficult to remember what the names are and which release they represent. This is true of OS X, too. I use Ubuntu 8.04 and OS X 10.4. I have to stop and think what the "codenames" for those are.

Maybe it's just premature (?) senility.
So a third party website get to track what site I visit and which app I use, when and for how long?
thanks, I'll check it out.
The post or the headline should give a hint about what 'Sinatra' is. (Turns out, it's "a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby with minimal effort". An example program is:

get '/' do
'Hello world!'
end
MerbCamp registration just opened, it's $50
Can you recommend a good book for learning about database basics?
I am a new programmer, starting in Rails and feel like there's a LOT I don't know about database theory. Can you recommend a good book to help me out?
The whole he used to be for the little guy, and is now for the big guys happens in almost any industry when the company gets big. Its the whole selling out concept.
A snapshot of my bookshelf's "math" section, which really hasn't changed much since I was in high school and hadn't taken calculus:

W.W. Sawyer, What is Calculus About? and Mathematician's Delight

Courant and Robbins, What is Mathematics?

Hogben, Mathematics for the Million

Steinhaus, Mathematical Snapshots

Ivars Peterson, The Mathematical Tourist

Davis and Hersh, The Mathematical Experience

Polya, How to Solve It

Huff, How to Lie With Statistics

McGervey, Probabilities in Everyday Life

Raymond Smullyan: The Lady or the Tiger, Alice in Puzzle-Land, others

Anything by Martin Gardner. I happen to have picked up Mathematical Magic Show and Mathematical Circus, but I'm sure there are many other collections.

I also recommend cryptography stuff. David Kahn's The Codebreakers is not really a math book, but it is awesome and it stars mathematicians, as does Simon Singh's The Code Book. You could read Schneier's Applied Cryptography.

This is HN, so I would be remiss if I didn't point out that you can learn a lot of fun and useful math by reading SICP, Knuth, or any good algorithms book.

If anybody out there knows a good, spirited statistics book addressed to someone who knows calculus, tell me. I keep planning to go through Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory but I never get around to it; see "Related Resources" here:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Having said all of that: I have a Ph.D. in physics/EE, so I've got to tell you, if you haven't tried calculus you haven't lived. ;) I'm not sure how to go about learning calculus in a fun way for a mathematician -- I took fairly standard first- and second-year college courses in calculus and physics and learned it that way. The folks on Amazon seem kind of enthusiastic about Spivak:

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Michael-Spivak/dp/0914098918/...
Alan Kay's talk at Creative Think seminar, July 20, 1982
Animoto: The No-Infrastructure Startup
New version of OAuth Ruby gem released, now supports RSA
Wow. Pretty amazing to see that post-YC dip (we had 'em too-- I haven't spoken to a YC RT user who hasn't seen a 30-40% drop after demo day-- that held steady). Makes you wonder-- is 3 months the right length of time for YC? What would you get if YC was 4 months? What if YC invested ~$50k and the experience was 6 months?

Of course, if DHH is right, maybe I'm actually getting MORE done. But it doesn't feel like it.
Simulation.. why is the meaning of information outside of the scope of the current curriculum for fundamental computer science?

Is it not seen as valuable? do the right tools not exist?

I studied as a EE, where simulation was sort of intrinsic to representation. Fundamentally, isn't the purpose of any language to communicate about approximations of external process?
Great tips, this should be a post on the homepage.
A fair point, I should have phrased that differently. What I meant to say was that basic healthcare as a cost is independent of salary.

Having only paid tax for one year of my life so far perhaps it is easier than I had imagined to adopt the notion that other peoples money = free.
A Connectivity Holiday
TC50: Payola or a dodgy site from Ashton Kutcher, I know which I’d pick
Agreed.

I used rescuetime, or maybe some competitor, for a few weeks.

I spend 60 hrs in the office, and am far more disciplined than I ever have been before in my life...and it was hard to clock 45 hrs of REAL work.

Depressing.

On the other hand, better to do that AND HAVE DATA than to do it and not know the truth.

Data lets you create a feedback loop and improve.
I've got a standard Dell docking station with both an external monitor and the laptop's LCD panel working together. It was pretty straightforward. The only tricky bit for me (on Ubuntu) is not being able to directly undock and have it intelligently deal with the disappearance of the external display. I still don't have a good solution for that one.
For C, FreeBSD. For Python, BitTorrent. IMHO.
Yea, fetching one URL at a time was a major issue, but things like the executable size in memory was also a problem. Remember, this is an old machine. Mysql takes 400M for its index for my data, my other processes run on the same machine also and all take memory. I initially added swap for things, but that's clearly not the right direction.

Also, I'm 40 years old. When I went to college, C programming was the norm, so it wasn't that difficult for me and didn't take long to implement and seemed like a great place to start to optimize things. It's fast, saturates my home Comcast pipe (they might cap my bandwidth, which I'm now worried about) and takes about 200M of memory with 30k URLs loaded into the queue. I suppose that I could reduce the memory requirements of the app some more by keeping the URLs in a BerkDB or something, but I think that 200m is acceptable for my needs now. For me, it's all about getting the most out of my available resources without throwing more money at it.

Re: gnu utils and 60's and 70's comments ... Yea, I admit that my knowledge of the gnu utils started in 1990 and I know that unix has been around since the 60's, so my initial post stating that the utils have been around since the 60's and that CPU speed and memory sizes were larger than they actually were back then were incorrect. My bad. ;)
All terrain wheelchair could reduce paralyzed blues
Where Google Should Not Do More
I took calculus my junior year, but again: I don't trust my high school experience to tell me whether or not I like something.

Thanks a ton for the names. I'll check out the library later this afternoon!
You may be interested in Rack (http://rack.rubyforge.org/). Rack is a minimalistic Ruby webserver library that really makes it easy to roll your own app or framework with little magic or interference.
Monkeypatching JavaScript for profiling