skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You really think Microsoft could ever come up with anything well thought out and well designed?

Anyone using siverflash or whatever it is?...
Help HN: Vim text editor install on mac
I'm finding it a little dificult to instal Vim on my mac, can anyone point out some good resources or a step by step.

thanks
I have been looking into Jumpboxes for research on an article, maybe you could set up a jumpbox lamp stack that worked across all platforms for your test environment. Jumpboxes are like self contained virtual servers, and may save you some problems.
I use debian on a linode, with YC funded Virtualmin to handle the Control panel, I chose debain because VM has a simple install script for this distro. A wicked setup all round
I wonder if, having used an impossible-to-explain algorithm to arrive at your solution, you could compare your solution against a few very simple algorithms, and offer up the best fit as a rationalization.
> slightly rusty PHP 4.x/MySQL 4.x

My first instinct is "take off and nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure", but in all seriousness, it's a pretty good question, as lots of people have to deal with fixing up code like this instead of just doing some big rewrite with tools that are nicer.

If you're not familiar with how Rails (and Django?) do things in terms of having devel, test, and production environments, those would be a good thing to have a look at in terms of a model to copy.

Try and aim for this: production server, staging server that very closely mirrors the production box, and then, if possible, try and get the code so that developers can run local copies on their own machines. Since you don't have version control and if you have pretty quick learners, my guess is that jumping to a more 'modern' one like git is a good bet. Subversion works fine, though.
Microsoft's video accidentally reveals that they have only ~200k servers
And sometimes your hot company flames out and you'll regret not taking the money and running for the rest of your life.

This is what managing risk is all about isn't it? You just plain don't know!
Right, that means that you are doing your own cache invalidation (by changing the etag or last modified time), not relying on some magic proxy which watches for PUT and DELETE. That also means that you can use normal HTTP and ignore this REST nonsense.
Does it mean that google still has less than 1M?
This doesn't make me excited in the least. The author seems to be describing a potential 2009.
Here's an interesting statistic: Based on 148357 servers consuming 72500 kW of power, Microsoft's average server is using 488 W of power at any point -- so clearly Microsoft is not following Google's approach of using smaller servers which each draw 200W or less.

Is the Windows kernel better at using large boxes than the linux kernel? Is Microsoft worse at managing clusters than Google? I'm sure there's some reason why Microsoft uses fewer more powerful servers while Google uses more less powerful servers.
Design by Sketching
My 13 year old son have never programmed a single line of code, but spends hours watching anime on youtube. I'll try to see if I can teach him to program ruby.

>print MCMLXVII + 41
2008

A language that you can hack to be able to process expressions like this, must be the most pleasent langauge there is right now.
I'm not aware that I said anything about Microsoft's design abilities. I'm hoping for Microsoft's clout to kill something I consider horrible language design. And I don't care the least what Microsoft's motivations are. Just read the ES4 draft and then let's have a debate about that design if you like.
It also appears to be mostly automated in this.
Joni Mitchell is a woman dude.
Serving static files with Django and AWS - going fast on a budget
I think perhaps we're talking about a different aspect of REST.

What I find annoying is people objecting to "POST /actions/subscribe" (with the params in the post body) because it's "non-RESTful" -- the url is a verb and REST demands a noun.
HTTP is an implementation of REST. REST is an architectural style defined by Roy Fielding in his PhD thesis.

The point of using common verbs for common actions and sticking to it is that you get to be able to predict the interface.

The overloaded POST vs PUT thing is much less of an issue than other un-RESTful things. The reason not to use RPC style interfaces is that you hide data behind the interface. One of the major wins of RESTful architecture is to make all resources addressable. E.g. I can directly refer to data using a URI.
Cloud Failures Are Serious - Time to Revisit P2P?
Actually this article was published in March 2003 as a Microsoft Technical Report:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?tr_id=...

Jim Gray giving a presentation on the paper here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9016327917737413988&...

Definitely an interesting paper, I wonder how the number have changed in the last 5 years.
I played with AS3, not only were I not impressed, I hate how it is a scripting language yet more verbose than java. I'm not saying AS2 is any better. AS3 fixed many things that were wrong in AS2, but at the same time, they bloated it to a point were it is not really a scripting langauge anymore.
How to Find a Job (when the economy sucks)
Jeremy Paxman ridicules Robert Burns as king of doggerel
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http://macvim.org/OSX/index.php
Umm once and for all? Computer specs and prices change every week...
I used macports and porticus and installed vim-app.
The german site my-hammer.de does reverse auctions for craftspeople.
Because the merely "doable" is becoming "trivially easy".
Did anyone say she wasn't?
Google builds, Microsoft (as far as anyone knows) buys. It could be that Google simply can't economically source the components and/or make them work to use fewer larger servers. Or it could be that Google prefers to rip out an entire server when it fails rather than repairing it in-place, so they want each one as small/cheap as possible and don't really care about compute power per server.
1) Use MacPorts
2) Send whatever error message you get to the package maintainer
3) Profit!
seems like this guy hasn't heard of talent acquisitions, which is what Jaiku was.
Think of each observer attempting to push a rock into their palm and having it appear on the other side, without enough force to push it through. Think of everyone on the planet attempting this simultaneously, thousands of times. If the rock disappears and reappears on the other side for one observer, doesn't this accomplish the same thing, at least for that observer, that the suicide attempt does?
I wouldn't make any assumptions about Google's servers. Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.
Job site script 
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Unisys, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and SGI sell 32 processor (and more), and they'll do it for a lot less than Sun will.

However, in most cases, your 32 processor Sun box is replaced by one Quad Core Xeon machine, and it handles the same workload in an eighth the time.

This is why Red Hat don't bother competing with Microsoft - they make the biggest part of their revenue from replacing Sun gear - and two of the four guys I worked with closely at Red Hat were ex-Sun staff.
That would imply an operations staff of more than two thousand people to operate Google - nearly ten times the size of the company.

Aren't there like 20,000 of them now?
Interesting. Was there no 'mount' command, or for those of us who like to save commands, 'df .'?
I think "javafied" is a bit unfair. ES4 continues the tradition from the original JS to copy Java-syntax where appropriate. "class X extends Y {}" looks indeed very Java-like, however the semantics are quite different, much more akin to classes in Python. But it would be silly to choose a gratuitously different syntax just to satisfy the Java-haters.
AOL acquires SocialThing... is AOL where startups go to die?
"English is what English-speaking people speak"
Early look at Android; developers get new sdk soon
Demo Day at Y Combinator Offers Glimpse of Web’s Future
A console version of Vim is part of a standard OS X install, is it not?
In bricks-and-mortar businesses that have real overheads (rents, wages, taxes, utility bills) and need real customers paying real money in order to sustain them, you could never say you were profitable unless your balance sheet is consistently in the black (otherwise your bank/accountant/CFO will disagree and you would be out of business).

As I work on my startup, I would never call it profitable until the total income it produces exceeds the outings and includes payment for the time I spent working on it at market rates (i.e. remuneration if I had been contracting/working for others, or a realistic payday at the end of it).

I appreciate for many, doing a startup is a passion and they work insane hours (as do I) and anything that gets publicity is good (hence, saying I earnt X in Y or was profitable after Z days/months to seek attention), but want to see people be more realistic about what being profitable actually is.

If your startup is a hobby and something you’d do anyway that generates some spare cash, then fair enough. However if you are looking at it as a serious business model, and something you want to do full time, then you should account for the time spent on it.

Can you sustain your family on the income you generate? Can you grow the business using the cash flow it creates? If not, then you are not profitable. Sorry.
Rudolph's commentary is reproduced at the bottom of this page:

http://www.physicsnerd.com/qi.htm
Does performance matter when seeking "simple" examples?

I vote for quicksort - not because it's quick, but because its implementation has the same form as its proof. It's simple if you use the Erlang-style version.
How web 2.0 are you?
Is your ISP spying on you? Here's how to find out
Public info is generally some mix of inaccurate and out-of-date.

I was working based on this paper written by Google researchers in June 2007, which refers to one of Google's "typical" servers having a theoretical peak power of 213W and an actual peak power of 145W:

http://research.google.com/archive/power_provisioning.pdf

While I agree that in general information about Google's systems is a mix of inaccurate and out-of-date, I think it's probably safe to trust numbers given in research papers published by Google... especially when the numbers deal with how much power is being used, and the topic of the paper is power distribution within datacenters.
If you don't know the answer, it doesn't matter to you. Flip a coin.
pretty much the standards:
you need a collaboration suite (such as basecamp)

I advise git for the vcs. It's fast, good for your team's setup, and powerful.

Setup a test suite for your application.(unit tests, functional tests and integration)

Releases are tested against the suite.

If that works, it's pushed to a staging server whose database is a mirror of the production database server.

Then deploy when everything is fine.
I made a simple spamfilter in Erlang based on the bayesian approach, works really well already with just a few spamemails.
You're probably thinking of this article at Raganwald: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/07/certification-bring-it-o...

Rebuttal here:
http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2007/07/04/certification-pl...
Yes but that's not what an x4600 is. It is 32 x86 cores and 256G of main memory (and various other bits and pieces like quad gigE and a few disks) and it fits neatly into only 4U of rackspace. Sun makes x86 kit now, didn't you know?
Review of Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
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Have you missed the latest season of CSI or looking for its particular episode (For instance, ‘Fight or Flight’) or want CSI DVD of particular shows or you are not able to compete with your friends when they say they know everything about CSI?.
Or ECMAScript 4 translated to JS: http://ecmascript4.com/
A robot with a biological brain
Smartphone Is Expected via Google
Not bad. It compares pretty well to the tables at http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack
Who holds the key?
You see, I was about to make a snide little "too much jazz and hip styling and not enough, well, stuff I haven't seen before" comment, but when they put the "we need 21st century BASIC" wrapper around it, it sounds nice as a toy / prototype library.

I made an attempt a few years ago at making a python library that would try to achieve the same sorts of things (more of just a wrapper around pygame, really), but never really had the motivation to keep running with it. With some extra ease-of-use wrapping around cocos2d, I think the goal would be met.
It was in the context of drawing the diagonals on the polygon, so I thought of quadratic growth. I guess everyone interpreted it differently, and the author is justified in using 'exponential' in an informal way.
The article refers to beams of "hundreds of trillions of protons". That's very, very few in chemistry terms. Ten hundred trillion (which is the upper limit of the number which that phrase could be talking about) is 10^15. Avogadro's number is 6 x 10^23. So we're talking about 1.6 billionths of a mole of protons.

Let's assume that all turns into hydrogen -- that's as good a hypothesis as any. While randomly Googling for the value of the ideal gas constant (the R in PV=nRT; I note in passing that Google has rendered my prized copy of the CRC Handbook obsolete in a flash) I found the even handier sentence:

The molar volume of any gas at STP is known to be 22.414 L/mol

Which implies that we'll make about 4x10^(-5) milliliters of hydrogen at STP. About enough to fill a cube 330 microns on a side. And that's if we turn them into a gas, which isn't exactly dense.

The moral of this story is that statistical mechanics deals with very large numbers of particles. The second moral is that it's not the current in the proton beam that will kill you. It's the voltage, aka the energy of the protons. Which is not surprising -- if you want to simulate the Big Bang, you need a lot of bang.
"I built the gluon gun, but I've never been able to use it on a living soul!"

(I may be paraphrasing. It's been years since I heard that line delivered, and it was probably 2am at the time.)
Saving the world, one server at a time
testing + git + capistrano
Not wanting to be a wet blanket on this party but this system has a looong way to go. Too many of the queries I made either gave me dumb error messages or decided to answer a different question.

Try and search for the shortest river. No dice. Given that it knows about second, third and the like I tried to rephrase this as "last longest river". All I got back was the longest river, it dropped 'last'. It knows average but not mean. It reports 'average length of a river' as 1117.2391304347826087. That's a great deal of precision for something without a unit of measure. What is this in: meters, kilometres, centimetres, feet, inches, miles? Given that the data is from America I would expect this to be in miles but I suspect that it is probably in kilometres.

Has this really taken 18k lines of code?

Stay put and knock this thing into shape on the universities dime then start your own company.
Being into Django+AWS development at the moment (and using http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/ for a private cloud with AWS as an extension as AWS is not cost effective in many ways), I find this a good article to improve performance in a basic way. Many people seem to forget not all content needs to be dynamic and some basic modification can seriously improve performance.

It is great to see articles that include code snippets and architecture diagrams. People should use direct example more often instead of trying to describe things in words.

Lastly, I'd suggest using nginx (http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main) as I found it to be a serious improvement on lighttp for many of my projects.
The only place I have seen such ID "mangling" was when I had to do some work with an SAP portal - where the portal software was indeed doing some interesting things to HTML element Ids.

I have built several active ASP.NET sites and I am building another now and I can say categorically that no such problem exists in the mainstream.
I think calling REST a religion is pretty unfair, and an emotive response rather than being an argument against it.

In any situation if you want to refute something a well balanced argument is much more productive, rather than name calling.

The Lenski/Schlafly dialogue is a great example of this (http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog). Lenski gives a compelling argument by refuting Schlafly point by point, not by attacking his religion. While the language is emotive, Lenski backs it with real points, not with the style of rhetoric Schlafly uses.

So far I see very little real discussion in this thread about why RPC is better than REST architectures.
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I just found a couple boxes of old photos that I took in the 90s and would love to get them scanned in (by someone other than me). I look forward to trying this service!
It doesn't matter which DVCS you use, particularly since you haven't mentioned using CVS (thank god). Use whatever the designers will actually use. If they're already comfortable with SVN use SVN; the git-svn integration tools are not as great as an all-git setup, but I've been using them with great happiness. And there are quite a few competing GUI clients for SVN.

Pay Devguard or github or somebody to host your VCS. Don't waste your client's money setting it up yourself.

Given this sentence:

Unscheduled downtime of more than a couple minutes is unacceptable any time.

My first instinct would be to try and get the production server mirrored to a nigh-identical second box that you can, in a pinch, fail over to. Once you know how to do that you can clone one or the other of these redundant production servers to a staging server and test your new code on that.

For all of those tasks you use boxes that resemble your production box -- same Unix version, PHP4, MySQL 4. Slicehost VPS instances are cheap. Rental servers are cheap. But trying to get your motley collection of Macs and PCs to accurately simulate your deployment environment may cost a lot of time.

You can use your local machines for development if you want, then upload the results to the staging server for testing, but even that might be a big time sink, depending on the nature of your app. I've been working that way, but I've now been bitten more than once by bugs that are caused by slight differences in versions or modules between my Mac's PHP/MySQL setup and that on the production servers. I've begun to wonder whether it might be better to just get each developer a remote development VPS (or a directory on a shared development VPS), install identical clones of the development code and the database for each developer, and have everyone develop over a SSH connection, and/or via an intelligent sFTP client like Transmit for the Mac. This, I'm told, is how Flickr develops new code -- their production environment has too many moving parts to be worth simulating on a single local machine. But, of course, I'm an emacs user so the thought of editing files over SSH isn't that horrifying.

If you're going to be tinkering with mission-critical code that costs $N per minute every time you introduce a bug, you may need to move the writing of tests up in the calendar.

Don't forget the bug tracking! I'm not in love with Trac but it gets the job done -- again, pay somebody like Devguard to host it for you; don't waste time setting it up yourself. Or try Lighthouse or something else if you don't like Trac. Try out Basecamp.
Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment Exposes Serious Vista Problems
An extremely thorough review of the lies, damned lies, and statistics behind Vista. Note the analysis of Microsoft's comparison between Vista and OS X vulnerabilities: when counting OS X vulnerabilities, MSFT's shills include applications and third party libraries such as Safari and Java vulnerabilities. Meanwhile they excluded the same categories of vulnerabilities for Vista, ignoring IE and Java on their own platform.
I agree with the general point of this article.

I stopped buying things that were just things a while ago - if I can't (or won't) use it for something, I don't buy it.

My current personal possessions amount to little more than an adequate amount of clothes for the different seasons, a few musical instruments, a laptop, some books, and some furniture that was mostly found.

It works for me. I end up playing around with things that educate me in some fashion instead of spending money left-and-right, and the things that I do own don't sit around gathering dust.
I'm guessing some people need to justify expensive purchases by saying they are in fact getting more for their money besides just the cool factor. Me? I would pay for the design and operating system, so I'm happy to pay more for a mac.
1. I was writing and rewriting a rebuttal, but you're right... There is something cool about achieving self-reference without a name.

2. Really? If you feel like elaborating / providing link, I'd appreciate.
XML Backlash?
There is also http://code.google.com/p/macvim/, although it has to be built from source.
Fedora is still free, as are non-supported, white label builds of Red Hat Linux Enterprise.
How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar.
the URL is part of the UI, both to the user and to api consumers

This is not an explanation of REST. There are lots of designs that adhere to that general principle and yet don't follow REST at all.
The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is "Dead", What Does it Mean for Earth?
I've heard great things about nginx. In relation to this article, how would you implement the lua script presented in this article with nginx? I know that Perl can be embedded in the server, but I'm not sure if that would be the proper solution for deciding which files to serve statically and which to serve dynamically at the httpserver level.