skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep wanting to try it, too. But Lua + LuaJIT is so good that I find I never really need that last ninety-ninth percentile speedup.

One of the things that I have found marvelous and counterintuitive about LuaJIT is Mike Pall's recurring warning to unlearn optimization idioms you might have picked up to accelerate standard Lua (which is already quite fast).

For example, the Lua language has a keyword 'local' to give you a shortcut optimization for identifier lookups in the global namespace. Using a local alias for a global function in a tight loop inside a standard Lua program can and often does result in a nice, juicy speedup.

LuaJIT, however, has highly optimized heuristics for i386, x86_64 and PPC ASM that will perform far better optimizations for you if you leave your clever aliasing out and just run a naive, plain vanilla Lua version. See [0]:"No, please don't do this."

He has also provided a new mechanism to dynamically wire C libraries and ad-hoc data structures directly into the LuaJIT runtime [1].

If there is scope for me to use assembler in this ecosystem somewhere, I can't see it yet. :)

[0] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-01/msg00978.html

[1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00455.html
http://www.returninfinity.com/about.html

OR RAX,RAX

instead of

CMP RAX,0

God said they did it the way Hollywood might do it. Once I misspelled "course" as "coarse" on my resume!

God says...
sprang help loads proper offensive mistresses riotous
Almighty fallen heinous Now dawned entreated far turnest
whoever fortunate profession instruct ordinarily forego
nourishing waking students habits Oratory twins By fatness
fostering avert interpreter placing reformed intended
lowering glorify cloaked
We had not considered that, just given the steep road ahead for those building full social networks, but you're absolutely right that it could work if focused on good connections over mass connections, or thinking about a Path-like experience on the web.

With the problem of returning every day, do you think this could be at least partially solved using the comments feature to drive conversation?

Thanks for the feedback, definitely appreciate it.
Ask HN: Business Cards -- Designers / Printers
Asked many years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163191

I'm in a position where I need to print business cards. Two questions:

1) Who do you use to design business cards? Alternatively, if you design business cards, I'd definitely consider using your services

2) Who do you use to print business cards? I'm more interested in quality than price (I fully expect quality business cards to cost a pretty penny)
Introducing the people widget
This is all an (informed) guess, but here's how I imagine it happened:

2005-ish MapQuest, Google Maps, etc. were all using Navteq and TeleAtlas as their data providers. Google was probably paying millions of dollars per year for licensing Navteq and TeleAtlas' entire data sets. They were probably dumping hundreds of expensive engineer-hours into merging these datasets, applying updates every quarter, dealing with customer feedback, etc.

In 2006 or so they probably did some napkin-math and saw that a) owning their own data would let them do whatever the heck they wanted with their maps (I bet Navteq wanted much more money for the ability to sell ads on top of their data) and b) over time, it would be cheaper to spend a few million shipping cars and paying drivers to collect their own data than handle the increasingly-unreliable commercial data vendors (remember that at the time the commercial vendors didn't have any competition and so weren't doing much more than driving new roads every few months). Also, for the most part geo-data is a one-time cost. The majority of the world's road network stays the same and further updates can be applied using customer feedback (MapMaker) or aerial imagery. Oh, they also had this handset project coming out called "Android" that needed access to a non-GPS method of determining location, so they strapped some wifi cards onto the cars.

I don't think there's any question that the millions of dollars they spent to collect and index the physical data of the world was worth it. It improved every single one of their core products: Maps, Earth, Ads, Local, Places, etc. all sprouted from this data that they collected. Also, the huge leap they took is slowly being replicated by the commercial vendors (Navteq started driving their version of StreetView a few months after Google announced their first city).
Hack at Loopt on the future of local data and deals
Point 1 is rendered unnecessary by point 2.

Point 3 can be a reality now if you want it (http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1379) and will be a reality for most people soon enough.

Point 4 is not actually a necessity (unless you're driving). I've tried to make a point not to carry my driver's license in my wallet (the plastic doesn't own you) except for special occasions. It can be annoying at times, but I've never had a situation where I needed my license for something unplanned (as opposed to forgetting I'd need to prove identity/age at pre-planned activities).
TW;DR!!

For a variety of reasons, I keep my browser windows about 900 pixels wide. Your site requires a honking 1280 to get rid of the horizontal scrollbar -- and can't be read in 900 without scrolling horizontally for every line (i.e. the menu on the left is much too wide).

(OT, I know, but it's a pet peeve of mine. It's been known for years how to use CSS to make pages stretch or squish, within reason, to the user's window width. 900 is not too narrow!)

EDITED to add: yeah, I'm willing to spend some karma points on this, if that's what happens. Wide sites are getting more common, and this is one of the worst I've seen.
It's bullshit. I have dozens of websites ranking #1 for various keywords, and they are all whoisguard protected.
You want coverage you've got to secure money, TC will write and or badmouth about you if you get backing from serious folks.
Try here too http://blog.inspiredmark.com/tagged/interface :)
Can anyone recommend a shredder that's really, really good? I love my ScanSnap, but I can't find a shredder of comparable quality to handle the leftovers.

I have seen the junk they have at OfficeMax, and it's just not adequate. I'm looking for something that is heavy-duty enough that I can shred at least 10 sheets at a time, and won't break or burn out for a very long time. It would be nice if it was quiet-ish, but I'm flexible on this point.
Microsoft Windows Tablet 7 OS to break Cover next Week: Rumor
This is an elementary mistake. Bitcoins can be subdivided almost indefinitely.

OK, it is fine for a random person to make a serious argument that a professional economist is making a mistake - if you do that, I suggest you back it up. But before someone accuses a professional of an "elementary mistake", that someone ought to do some substantial research into the field (I'm not a professional but I did do my undergraduate work in it).

The problem with deflation is NOT that bitcoins can't be subdivided. NOT what you're saying. Got it?

The problem with a deflating currency is that when a currency holder has a strong belief that their currency will be worth more tomorrow than today, they have a strong incentive to hold that currency rather than spend it. This only sounds good. In reality, it, deflation, is severe drag on demand in the economy - we saw this in 1930's America. Money has two uses - medium of exchange and store-of-value. If bitcoins err too much on the store of value side, this interferes with their medium of exchange function. A functioning economy requires its currency to circulate constantly as Goods and labor circulate constant. Interrupt the circulation of currency and real production processes get interrupted - a bad thing.

Of course, bitcoins are terrible as long term store of value also for the #5 reason in the link - when people are buying and holding bitcoin 'cause they expect them to increase in value (store of value "component") and at some point bitcoins go down, their value will be hit hard and permanently because nothing backs them other than people's optimism (even fiat currency is back by a state). IE, if confidence is lost in Bitcoins, someone could issuing Bitcoin2.0's and then how to you decide what is real?

(Certainly following the rules defines current bitcoins but people follow these rules because they have confidence in the entire setup. If an event which caused people to lose their bitcoin confidence, like bitcoins suddenly losing value, then people willingness to accept the particular bitcoins will decline concomitantly).
It's stuff like this that gives SEO such a bad rap.

No data to back up the claim. Not even a visual.

I ate a burrito for lunch today and traffic is through the roof! Must be the burrito!

Sigh.
Geez, I'm out of touch - last I knew they were point particles (and not just in abstract).
Dunno. I've found with __builtin_expect() in GCC, the code corresponding to an unlikely branch is placed at the end of the interpreter body, even after all the other instructions, which is probably as good as you can do icache-wise. I'd have to check again, but such annotations could inform register allocation as well.
Samsung Galaxy S II Release Date Announced For India
I'll be interested to see a longitudinal study in 6-12 months.

FogBugz is a complex B2B product fueled by recurring revenue (either subscriptions or maintenance).

It's not diet pills or a self-help book.

Most (all?) companies find that the long-form, "Tim-Ferris-style" landing page converts better for impulse sales. But does that work well for non-consumer products?

My fear would be that if you 2x or 3x the top of the funnel with landing page optimizations, you run the risk of attracting the wrong kind of customers. Customers who initially signup and pay, but don't become long-term repeat customers at the same ratio as those who converted on the old landing page.

I would be curious, Patrick, if you're planning on looking at the lifetime value of these conversions, or if the scope of your project with Fog Creek was limited to lifting the number of initial installs.

(Oh, and like everyone else said: great job, great writeup, and thanks for sharing!)
Music gear I/O dock for iPad
Two methods for voxel detail enhancement
With how long it took Google Voice to be accepted by Apple, I'm not too optimistic there will be one soon.
17% of Americans consider themselves Geeks
But first you'd have to figure-out how to solve the problem.

"Everyone" keeps a record to keep everyone else honest. If only some people kept records, they'd become the authorities and this would stand in the way of the system being decentralized.
Are you sure it isn't this:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=width+of+human+hair+%2F...
Sure. Public/private keys for all users. Private key encrypted with a user's pin that is not known to us, and encrypted private key stored on servers. All of this happens at the user's browser. We don't don't have access to your private keys, so, can't decrypt posts on the server.
NYSE claims photo of trading floor violates their trademark rights
Google launches Rapportive/Xobni-like widget for Gmail
this has got me a bit confused and the absurdity of trying to put a blanket policy on something as global as the net and something somewhat not-geo-specific as domains and sites, confounds me

they should start by banning foreign hosting of uk ccTLDs...
I really can't get my head around how Rosetta Stone could possibly be a protected term with regards to any kind of language comparison or translation. I mean, people know where they got the name from, right?
William of Ockham
The underlying issue there is 'civil forfeiture' in general. My view is that this practice is unconstitutional for any sort of property, and it's causing a lot of problems with the motivation of individuals in law enforcement. Automobiles, cash, and real estate have been being seized with no due process, no warrant and even no arrest for years. Domain names are just a new twist in that story.
Oh! Chicken, beef or steak? And from what store?! :)

Totally agree.
Awesome.

Although I think Paul should've polled the audience on some of the ideas to see who would be interested. Especially the airport guy. It's not what normally happens during office hours. But hey, why not take advantage of the situation?
Yes, I see where you're coming from. Let me refine my point. Niches will probably get smaller and smaller. Facebook may lose market-power to smaller, more focused networks. I'm just not sure if that will weaken Facebook to the point that Facebook stops being "the" social network. Facebook is still the ultimate place for global connectivity. Perhaps Facebook will remain Facebook, but people will stop using it as their main social outlet.

Like you said, this could result in dominant players within a vertical space. But, how large will these vertical spaces be? I don't know. If i knew, I'd be a millionaire. (I'm not.)

Thanks for the mind candy though.
"Click the Wikipedia link if you didn't, it's kind of interesting how they did it."

I just did. Apparently you don't know anything about how privatization was done in other post-communist countries.

The voucher scheme was used in Russia, with disastrous results (http://cog.kent.edu/lib/Ellerman5.htm) and is remembered as one of the biggest scams of the "wild 90s."

One thing you also don't seem to know is that Mongolia was governed by the incumbent communist party during the time the privatization took place (they won 85% of the vote in the 1990 elections and continued to govern without major opposition until 1996). This is why the following bit of information from the Wikipedia article is very informative:

"Government Resolution No. 170 announced that the state would retain a stake of 50% in some large enterprises; mining, energy, transportation, communications, and water supply companies were excluded from the privatisation scheme entirely."

The communist government kept those enterprises from the same fate they suffered in Russia by preventing their privatization. This is very similar to what happened in Belarus.

PS - Many sectors in the UK underwent privatization in the 1980s. I don't see how that is irrelevant.
> How much good does this do you once the government has sold off the national infrastructure ...

It does a lot of good if you vote in a government that buys back said infrastructure. "Sold" does not equal "destroyed".

But let me address your more general point as I understand it. There is no system that will protect you from a government that makes terrible decisions that destroy the country. What is your solution? Don't allow the government to sell anything? That's like banning knives because knives can be used for murder. Or perhaps have a committee that decides what can be sold? Well the government is already such a committee.

The only "solution" I see is to decide the government owns everything, so nothing important can be sold by mistake. Well the evidence of the previous century suggests that this creates much worse problems than it solves. This system has been tried, and it failed.

Governments, and people in general, make terrible decisions. Some of them outright disastrous. The best you can hope for is a system that lets you minimize the damage. Today it seems that democracy and capitalism is the best combination we have for minimizing the pain inflicted by people upon themselves.
Thunderbird has excellent support for encryption with its "Enigmail" plugin. It's the most secure and seamless encryption I can imagine. For example, it has options like "always encrypt when replying to an encrypted message", and "always verify before sending".

I suppose with Gmail I could use GPG via copy and paste, or perhaps the now abandoned "FireGPG" plugin for Firefox. Anyone else here use encryption?
Take a look at Moo - they've a nice API too.
http://www.moo.com/
How to Set Up an Anonymous Texting Service – Now w/ Ruby & Heroku
If AT&T buys T-Mobile, US back to "Bell East and Bell West"
Twitter now lets you view other people’s Twitter streams
Clickable: http://www.twotruths.me/
Well. Goat or no goat, for many software companies, this is the right decision; a salesperson will do a better job of closing an enterprise sale than a web page will, especially when the web page invites prospects to disqualify themselves because of their immediate reaction to pricing.
Ah yes, I didn't really finish my point, that a few years ago, going cashless would really not work at all, whereas now it is generally workable with a few exceptions. Nearly all retail and dining places take cards for any amounts. I figure this kind of thing will follow the same path.
Protecting the foundations of Linux – an interview with Jim Zemlin
Customers for specific products don't usually end up on the home page. Fans of Fog Creek / Joel's blog / etc do. Slotting them straight into a FogBugz trial is not necessarily our #1 interest -- for example, we want to continue being known as a great place for engineers to work, because that is core to the brand and to hiring efforts. Also, one of my major areas of focus is making fogcreek.com valuable to people who have no interest in a commercial relationship with FC. For example, if y'all were to appreciate and link to stuff we write about running a software company, that would be a Very Good Thing for our ability to sell people other than y'all on bug tracking software.

Luckily, Google does a pretty good job these days of sending you to internal pages for entrances when appropriate to demonstrated user intent.
I didn't see it linked in the article nor mentioned here already but several of the problems with `super` have been discussed in "Python's Super is nifty, but you can't use it"[1] for quite some time.

[1]: http://fuhm.net/super-harmful/
Good point, perhaps combine the free trial with the pricing page like Skype does http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/prices/
I wonder how close you'd get to that by running the interpreter with gcc's or llvm's profiling on, and then recompiling with profile-guided optimization. If it's just a matter of compilers having heuristics tuned towards the wrong kind of workload, PGO ought to re-tune them appropriately, if enough of the heuristics in question actually look at the profiling data.
Barf. Sad, to see Hacker News being used as a marketing channel.
With that decay rate, the difference between exponential and linear decay is going to be tough to pick out just by looking at the graph.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+e^%28x*ln%28.75%29...

edit: fixed decay constant
What makes you think I am complacent?
JotNot is only $1 now, rather than the $7 he paid. Which is cheap enough I'm going to buy it just for the heck of it.
Why do they all go through Mathematics?
People investigating bug-tracking software may well not be "normal people" in the relevant sense. (Count me into the "will not try until I know the cost of saying yes" pigeonhole, too.)
I'm more excited for the Google virtual prepaid card. For some reason, a lot of credit cards don't offer one time use credit card numbers for online spending. I know Citi does and at one time paypal did
Or on your wrist!
Canada, no; These countries, some:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_...
Mobjectify = Prototype tool + theme creator for jQuery Mobile
I am pretty sure the legal wrangling on that one would go on for years. Plus, Tim Cook is pretty much running Apple.
Amazon Launches "Mac Downloads" Store
Thanks, Colin. Appreciate it.
if you decide to quit your pursuit of building a startup after the 3 months in an incubator, then you probably wouldn't of succeeded even within a big incubator.
Users may prune their own bookmarks when they discover the links broken – especially when considering some of the pre-Pinboard systems (like in-browser bookmarking) from which the earliest data in this analysis comes. So I suspect this underestimates link-rot.
Microsoft needs that. Someone who can see the individual parts of Microsoft and combine them in a way no one’s ever thought of before.

What would keep this someone from just taking the page from the Jack Gerstner playbook for IBM?
What does it matter? They'll work with the same merchant machines, which means more merchants supporting NFS payments.
Isn't there anyone left at Microsoft who could run the company? I know there has been some serious house cleaning / fleeing, but isn't there someone who could take over?
There's a new formulation of register allocation that's computationally tractable: http://compilers.cs.ucla.edu/fernando/projects/puzzles/exper...
You must not live in NY. If you want to go to a bar, you will probably need an ID. And if you want to get on the subway, you won't be able to pay with NFC for probably many years to come.
Loggly Introduces User Defined, Variable Pricing
Just one caveat that the clusterfuck in the mortgage market is not a product of 'capitalism', but rather perverse state incentives.
Totally lost my passion for firefox. It's so clunky and slow now, and Chrome is just so fast & sexy. I used to use it solely because of FireBug, but now Chrome's Developer Tools are just as good, and in my opinion, better than FBug.
I might slightly agree with you to a certain extent, but with the strong exception that it is not meaningful to draw opinions on multi-million nations based on individual immigrants or expats.

I'm from Bulgaria and, for example, one of the most incapable senior manager-expatriate I've ever saw in my country is British. I guess somebody in UK might have been really happy to have him overseas.

But I don't hold this against the Brits ;) They are truly a great nation.

On Turkey and EU - I can't say they deserve more or less the EU-membership. It's really a complex topic and AFAIK both France and Germany, have huge reservations. (BTW I don't think slogans about multiparty democracy really mean anything in the real geopolitical play between the world powers. Your own American experience shows that just two parties are enough and they are both at the mercy of the Federal Reserve - a private banking money-printing institution! - internally, and do more or less the same thing as international state policy, externally).

It even might amuse you that Russia and Turkey currently are in very good international economic and political relations (despite some rethorics). Russia is building several! nuclear power reactors in Turkey and they enjoy also huge mutual benefitial trade in other sectors - construction industry, tourism, gas, agriculture, etc. However strange it might seem to you, actually Russia plays a certain interesting role in the modern economic development of Turkey.

Things are just not black-and-white and defy simplistic explanations.
LuaJIT is freakishly fast for a certain (not small) set of problems [0].

[0]: http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html
That's exactly the same argument that was made about content, back in the days of PlayNet, AOL, Prodigy, and the like. Yet, somehow, open websites won; you could also make the same argument about email.

Why isn't it possible that social networks will be like the web, and that all these proprietary services will wither away in the face of an open protocol? I'm not saying that's inevitable; I just wonder why everyone believes that the converse is inevitable.
I don't view startups trying to get on Hacker News as a bad thing. Especially if the startup is providing information on how they solved a problem (Like I mentioned in the article about "Stadium Pitches").
In terms of usability, the one-tap pay systems that are rolling out (certainly in the UK) for low value transactions (no PIN or signature required) with bank-issued debit/credit cards is a huge leap forward with respect of speed of transaction.
woha - sounds nice. very important: you can convert time before January 1, 1970 - the most tools online are not able to do this.

and yeah, the bookmarklet is very usefull!