skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely didn't intend for it to be that way - only so much as that V8 is the result of a long two years of dedicated work by a team of very smart people who produced an excellent result. Theoretically they reached a point at which they were happy with a solid release.

The Mozilla team is only just getting started on building tracing into Firefox. It's not done yet and it's still quite slow (in comparison to what the final result will be).

I wasn't trying to say anything silly like "oh wow, they're such slow coders!" more that the equivalent amount of work is only just beginning on the other end.

Obviously if you wanted to include all technologies involved in TraceMonkey then you might as well say "TraceMonkey, 10 years in the making" since the vast majority of the code comes from SpiderMonkey which has been around for quite some time.
Django 1.0 released
Why so little innovation?
Starbucks latte and the Big Mac cost $2.80 in the United States. In Hong Kong, a tall latte is $3.22, but a Big Mac is only $1.54

My first instinct is that the Hongkongnese don't drink coffee.
I considered going to grad school or taking that money, time and effort and use it to start a company. It was a very easy choice given my current situation.

What made it easier was some friends just finished grad school and now have an average job with slightly higher pay - that doesn't sound appealing.
Had to plug it:

A "Lispy" language to javascript: http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
From what I can tell V8 is JavaScript only... Although from that comment by Dave, it seems the implication is that it could act as a target for other languages?

To me this implies there is some kind of intermediate language that can be targeted, but I can't see that from the documentation available. Or will JavaScript be the intermediate?

Anyone know what the intent is?
Anatomy of a Heisenbug
And the blog post where you can congratulate the team: http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/sep/03/1/
I don't get the hype, it's a cool browser, but this new era thing, defining moment, I'm not sold yet...

one thing I'm still looking forward is local integration, it seems far away a smooth integration between web applications and local machine
Some suggestions,
Last year we spent some time in Romania. Romania has Sibiu, Timisoara, Brasov, Sighisoara ... all very cool medieval towns. Rasnov and Sighisoara are both hilltop fort villages.

Also, you might also be interested in Lviv, Ukraine.

Have fun!
cesky krumlov, czech republic
Ugh, I definitely think that it's very "overhyped". It can be seen even in these comments, and I thought that HN would get me away from this kind of "Wow, something shiny, it's a new age for computing!" hyperbole.

Google Chrome is certainly a very respectable browser, but it's not revolutionary; it does have some iterative advances, like tabs as processes, but it's by no means some coup d'etat of the current powerhouses.

First of all, V8 and TraceMonkey are competitive and both have barely begun to achieve their potential; Fx 3.1 will be at least as fast as Chrome is today, I'm sure.

Google might be able to whisk away a few snobby/brand-obsessed IE users, or IE users who never gave anything else a chance for whatever reason, but the majority of IE's marketshare (people too afraid to install software, and people who freak out when they have to learn something to use their computer) is going to stick with IE. Anything respectable that steals IE marketshare is great, don't get me wrong, I'm just a bit skeptical that Chrome will see more than 5% stable marketshare anytime soon.

Chrome is missing a lot of Firefox's features. It has a couple that were cut from Fx 3, but overall, I think it provides a worse user experience. You get no extensions, there are few real-world sites where you'd notice the speed increase over Fx 3 (and 3.1 will be on par, and if I understand correctly, betas aren't more than a couple of months off) (you would notice the increase over IE; as my computer illiterate IE-using friend stated, "WOOOOO IT'S SOOO FAST"), and very lacking in terms of extensibility and customization, compared to Fx.

Chrome is a great technical asset, and it's exciting to see Google throw their hat in the ring, because it provides a lot to the community and will be for the benefit of all browser developers. It will push innovation forward, and that's definitely a great thing. Mozilla will graft the best parts into Firefox, Google will do the same, and things will continue on happily, finally with healthy competition again. It's undoubtedly an exciting time in browser development, and frankly, this innovation in JavaScript engines and browsers as a whole is long overdue.

Chrome is a nice thing, but it's not "a new age in computing", or any other such ridiculous hyperbolic statement. Have some perspective, people.
Based on the deluge of resumes I've seen coming into tech shops lately, the bar set by college degrees is so low that you need to dig to find it.
This is definitely a big step. I had a horrible time with schema changes using sqlalchemy until I started using migrate http://code.google.com/p/sqlalchemy-migrate/.
what about all of _why the lucky stiff's stuff?
BBC to launch music download store
i think adobe's position is: if they completely opened up the flash format, then they couldn't make any money off of it. they give away the player for free, so they make their money from the developer tools. if they opened up the .fla format, then they'd get killed by competitors, because flash cs3 sucks.

so it wouldn't help them any to grow the flash platform, if they lose their ability to make money off of it.
> iPhone (with bugs and all) is the dawn of new era

The iPhone is the dawn of the US waking up to the fact that mobile phones can be cool and used as general computing devices. Much of the rest of the world had known this and been using cool, general purpose mobiles for years.
Anyone with these traits probably is good, but a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good. I imagine there are plenty of plumbers and accountants who don't work on personal projects, have hidden experience, or play with bleeding-edge technologies and are still good. In those fields, schooling is still probably the best indicator of qualification.

The more artistic the profession, the less telling someone's formal education seems to be. Since programs can do anything that our minds can think, programming tasks range from the hardest of hard sciences (say, compiler optimization) to pure art (videogames, for example). I suspect the best compiler optimizers went to (and perhaps now work for) the best schools, while I doubt there's much correlation between schooling and great game developers.
Great new functionality. It took me very little work to migrate an old project to the new version - and the majority of that was removing my use of deprecated features (and using their replacements).

Thanks to everyone that contributed.
Noooo! Don't tell people about this town. I don't want it Prague-ified.
I second this. Romania was quite beautiful.
Pinwheel Galaxy Shines In The Darkness | The Astronomy Blogger
Central Prague is like that, if somewhat overrun by tourism. I accidentally arrived at predawn and wandered around as the light came in -- highly recommended.
Minimum Mass For Galaxies Discovered:
I agree. All I can say is... the OP mentions indicators. It is absolutely correct that they are merely hints. You still have to interview them and/or test them and/or check references from former employers and/or check references from former colleagues, and/or...

In this particular case I speak as someone who has received both praise for my ability to write code that my colleages find crystal clear and vilification for writing code that my colleagues find inscrutible.

Did I mention code samples? I have code I can share. I like it when I'm interviewing and someone has code they can share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roermond (Netherlands)

Julius Caesar called it Villa Optima. It was destroyed in 1213 and rebuilt by 1232. It was occupied by the Romans, France, Austria, Germany, among others over the years. There was also some damage in WWII but despite all that the city is mostly intact.

And don't be fooled by the modern convenience of the Outlet Mall (which is beyond the remnants of the old city wall). Most of the shoppers are German (not that there's anything wrong with that) and incidentally there are several short-haul bike routes into Germany. There's a bike shop next to the train station and there are a few cute German towns within 20km.
Google's User Agreement via Matt Cutts
There is some interesting language in Chrome, but Matt Cutts asked around after seeing some of the response...
I don't think it's fair to call it a misconception. It is a claim or maybe even an accusation. One that Universities are are commonly accused of. One that is being extended to YC.

Universities might similarly defend against this claim by pointing to the resources spent on educating as opposed to filtering. But I don't think that this is necessarily a good defence. If anything, it points to an institution's internal priorities, not its value to potential students.

It seems to me that if YC is consistently successful, it can't avoid becoming a filter in the eyes of investors. This would eventually come to affect applicants' perception. If YC increases a company's chance of attracting investors, this might become the motivation for participation. Investors listen to pitches or even invest because of YC's track record. Startups apply because of investors' perception.

Similarly, University applicants often think along the lines of creating an impressive resume. This is partly because it is true (an Oxford degree is better at getting jobs then an unknown one) and partly because people tend to undervalue educational potential of things beforehand.

Throw in the fact that top Universities get the power to choose the best applicants & it becomes difficult to tell if they are picking winners, creating them or just in control of some bottleneck.

In any case, I think it's a point of interest.
I, for one, welcome our new brushed metal overlords.
Bruges, Belgium:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges
I always wondered why Princeton does not produce more start ups...no shortage of riches or intelligence in that area. My guess is that the academic climate is centered around pure research...am I far off?
Chrome is a browser...and flash is a plugin for browsers.

Lets look at it this way: I highly doubt "javascript games" (I think I've seen ONE, and it was from here in fact,) will come and take over flash games. In the same way, javascript can't overtake flash in many aspects.

Flash will inevitably (if Chrome wants to be a widely used browser) be compatible with the Chrome browser. And people will use it and life will go on. Chrome does not in any way affect what happens to flash.

Silverlight on the other hand, is a piece of shit because Mac adoption rate is quickly picking up, because people like ME use LINUX, and because none of us were able to watch the fucking silverlight videos on NBC for the olympics.

That makes me just a tad angry.
> I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug[ Engelbart]'s ideas.

- Alan Kay
A 'global people map' that doesn't mention Africa?
I'll upmod anything that talks about big trucks and tubes!

My wi-fi network is called "This is not a big truck".
Sounds interesting...were that I could move to the other side of the country...
Do you mind posting your short list when you figure it out? I had my first holiday around Europe recently, mainly sticking to the capital cities except for Bavaria, and next time I'd like to explore off the beaten track a lot more. All the places mentioned here are going right into my ideas for next time file.
It's easy to claim that society is going down the wrong path, especially if you define that path somewhat nebulously (not enough innovation!) and don't give any concrete examples.

Just what kinds of innovation are people looking for that they're not getting? And further, what innovations from decades ago are we still relying on today and not innovating through?

In so many areas, from medicine to biotech to clean energy to nanotechnology to space exploration to the web, we are seeing new waves of progress and research. Is our pace as fast as it could be? Probably not. But let's call it what it is, instead of predicting gloom and doom.
Congrats to the Django team for making the big 1.0!

Loads of new (but mostly currently in-place) features make everyone happy! No more newbie confusion on whether to download from the SVN trunk means I can finally sleep peacefully. :D
I loved visiting Vinci, Italy. It has a lovely little museum with the works of its most famous son.

Montepulciano was amazing as well, but perhaps falls under the Siena category.

Cuzco, Peru -- at least the central core -- may be an example as well. As would other Inca settlements.
New Book?
Dubrovnik, Croatia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubrovnik
Rothenburg, Germany is a really cool place. Might want to check it out.
Prague is beautiful, but the architecture there for the most part is a few centuries post-medieval.
I went to Rothenburg ob der Tauber:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothenburg_ob_der_Tauber

Not exactly off the beaten path today -- it's been Tourist Central since the 1880s -- but it was off the beaten path for hundreds of years before that, which is the important part.

Stay overnight. Many tourists don't, which makes it a good way to avoid some of them. Wandering around the corners of medieval buildings near dusk makes the whole vibe even more fun.

I also can't argue with Bruges, Belgium, which has the advantage of having actual non-tourist-industry inhabitants. Plus, Belgian beer! (Not that Bavaria is lacking in the beer department.)
May be. But the two products target completely different demographics.
I think I might give this a go over the weekend, if circumstances permit...
I'm sorry but I can't drink the kool aid on that one, because it sounds like your implying that other software implementations by other developers before Google didn't "design" their software - which would be a complete fallacy.

Don't get me wrong, the multiple processing is fantastic, faster javascript is great, along with all the other toys that Google have in their browser.

However, all this means is Google does it better than anyone else hands down and that it's going to do fantastic things to further the web. It will push other developers to be better, kind of like how iphone pushed other phone manufacturers to be better... but in both cases that is more or less an advantage of being late to market.

Anyway, the point is that I think you might have swallowed the hype a little bit too much in believing that Google is the first generation of browsers that was "designed" for web apps because it was designed to run them better than the many generations before it.

That would be like saying Chuck Yeager was the first man to do powered flight because he broke the sound barrier first.

The Wright brothers would not be amused.
>Every email I send through Gmail is Google's?
No, but Google has a non-exclusive license to use it however they want.
My dad is a nuke engineer (studied under Rickover) who hires bomb designers -- he maintains that the physics behind building a bomb is simple and easy, and far from classified. What distinguishes the really scary weapons from home-brew isn't the science behind it, but all the engineering tweaks that optimize the results. Given his background and Q clearance in DOE, even if he wasn't my dad, I'd be inclined to believe him....
That post's conclusions aren't really universal for tech.

Yes, many companies take and don't give a lot back. But some big names definitely contribute (Google, Yahoo, Apple to an extent...).

There is also plenty of innovation done by people in their spare time. So much so, that software patents are a hot issue: who wants to be sued for making something cool, only to find out that Microsoft claimed it a year ago?

It's also funny they don't mention Microsoft or other companies whose actions alone were enough to freeze innovation in several areas. If your goal is to make money, you can't compete with the establishment...you have to move on.
HN: Vote weighting is already in place - silly stories sink faster
Looks like Hacker News has votes weighted (but not by authority as I suspected). Right now on the from page you can find stories that are older, have fewer points yet way above stupid "about:internets" link. Very nice!
Will Google Chrome have a devastating effect on StumbleUpon?
At least temporarily anyway since Google Chrome does not offer an extension API yet.
Congrats to Scott McCloud! Being an independent (non-superhero) comic creator, even a celebrated author and theorist like him, doesn't pay all that well. I bet he's going to get more work...eventually work from overfunded startups!
Salamanca is like Toledo, just bigger and nicer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamanca

Also a lot of interesting places at "World Heritage Sites" list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Heritage_Sites_in...
An easy way is Amazon FlexPay at aws.amazon.com
No. With less than 1% market share? ~10% stumbleupon users on my site are still using IE 6.
Bout time!
it is coming soon. rails 2.2 is going to be multithreaded.

ruby 1.9 has not been released (it is still a dev release at this point.)
Velocity dispersions in a cluster of stars: How fast could Usain Bolt have run?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=294314
Not quite. There are certain sites and filetypes that are considered "lightweight" and whose scores are (currently) multiplied by .3. These include tweets, images, Onion stories, Xkcd cartoons, and so on.

The new code has been running for a while, probably over a month. I was wondering how long it would take users to notice.

This seemed the best solution to the problem of easy-to-upvote stuff like tweets and cartoons floating to the top of the frontpage. I didn't want to ban them, but I didn't want to end up like reddit either, so I added a multiplier to compensate for lightness.

Edit: The initial "Not quite" no longer makes sense because the post has been changed based on my answer. Originally it was asking if per-user vote weighting had been turned on.
Ah you're right - must have been my network. This is some good stuff!
I noticed it about a week ago, was looking for a way to confirm it before posting my suspicions :) And by the way, who decides that it is a lightweight story?
all the simple stuff has been innovated already, now innovation involves millions of dollars.

As to why? Supply and demand, the truly innovative stuff has a very limited use. The social network that tracks Britney Spears has a use to millions of people.

Why bother coding something complicated, when you can copy paste some open source code and make millions
Another vote here for Rothenburg. It is perhaps even more "medieval" than Siena (though to be fair, I spent two days in Rothenburg, and only an afternoon in Siena).

The downside is that it is very tourist-y. It almost seemed like the only things there were hotels, museums, and gift shops.

The upside is that it still feels authentic. I picked my hotel pretty much just based on price and availability, and it was charming - you can even see it in random pictures like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Street_in_Rothenburg.JPG (I forget the name, but it's the one with the bell sign). My friends stayed at a different hotel, and had the same experience.

Walking along the walls at night can be an amazing experience - it had rained earlier, it was foggy, street lights reflected off the cobblestones, and no tourists in sight... it felt like we were transported to a different century.

As for taverns, I would recommend Zur Höll (meaning "Hell"), it's supposed to be over 1000 years old - and if you manage to get the table in the basement (which is actually a giant bellows), that claim seems quite believable.

http://www.romanticroad.com/hoell/english/dine.htm
Warning: link is a PDF.

Scribd can't seem to convert it.
You're not too far off.

There are two very different populations at Princeton: undergrads and grad students barely recognize each other's existence, much less talk with one another, and therefore don't found with one another.

The undergrads are constantly, constantly marauded by recruiters from wall street and consulting firms. Many of the rest are trying to get into med or law school.

The populations in the hard sciences, engineering, math, and comp sci are quite small. Most of those are in fields which don't found companies out of undergrad much -- molecular biology, for example. And of the hard sciences, the dominant cultural influence is from foreign students holding international science Olympiad medals. It draws the fire from the notion of founding a startup.

The rest are grad students. Some of these do found startups, but they're fewer, and farther from capital, and often quite set on an academic path. Plus, unlike at MIT or Stanford or Berkeley, there is, for some reason, an urgency on the part of the administration to get you graduated by your fifth year. Don't ask me why.

Also, it's just not as strong of an engineering school in most of the disciplines or fields that are startuppy. Even within comp sci, there are mostly people studying large systems, and theory, and parallelization, and security, and computer science policy, and compilers, and so on. Not so many in HCI. And since most startups succeed where they can fill a before unarticulated need, that hurts them.

Finally, it's a little bit of the product of the admissions department. Many people are admitted based on extracurriculars which look good on paper, but neither stretch one's abilities, nor are particularly novel (if they were, they'd be hard for admissions to understand), nor are particularly technical. Bleeding heart stuff. A lot of the startups that I saw come out of Princeton (which friends got involved in) are either vaguely defined environmental/political websites, or connected to academia in some way. Not to say Princetonians don't have the chops: both Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt came from the EECS department.
Microsoft ... should offer 64-bit as default on new builds

Dragon NaturallySpeaking -- even the just-released v.10 -- only runs on 32-bit Windows.

http://www.google.com/search?q=naturallyspeaking+32+64+windo...
How to Freelance to Your First Million. It's been done.
Well, right now I think they're trying to stealth-improve by putting Gears into all browsers(but of course it'll still be fastest on Chrome)
Feel free to drop us a line. We might be able to give you some data to play with.
Within the context of running and promoting the Services.
Krupa and I recently enjoyed traveling through the Abruzzo region of central Italy which has many more hill towns. Wish we had gotten to Siena though!

We especially enjoyed Civitella del Tronto:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civitella_del_Tronto

and the surrounding area includes pretty sweet hikes including one that visits a cave (Grotte Sant'Angelo) with documented religious uses back to BC times.
Millionaire seems kind of a stretch, though the article linked to uses the phrase "dollar millionaire." The first company says 200 employees, $2 million revenue. The second one says $600k at $20/hour. So the first one is $10k per employee, the second one works out to 30,000 hours billed. There are only 8760 hours in a year.

My point is, these aren't freelance workers, they're businesses with employees. So "freelance" is misleading, and I suspect "million" is too.
And if you want to say a different thank you, here are some wishlists. Add more that you know of.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&...
Mythbusters RFID episode axed after 'pressure' from credit card firms