skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that these debates often come down to an either-or proposition: "put off optimization indefinitely" or "optimize to the max the whole way through." But it should never be so black and white. From a business view, both approaches are wrong, as they tend to entail unnecessary costs.

The OP is right that if you completely ignore performance as you code, you'll be doing things so blatantly wrong everywhere that it's difficult or impossible to fix. But, Knuth is right too: It's counterproductive to spend 10 times as long developing version 0.1 just to make sure it's the fastest 0.1 there could possibly be. This is because your early code is likely to change a great deal over the course of the project. You'll refactor, you'll add and remove features, and you'll realize you were wrong about where the bottlenecks are. Much of your early optimization effort will have been wasted.

After much programming experience, including trying both extremes, I've learned that a middle road is the most cost-effecive. The real quote from Knuth, so says Wikipedia, is: "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." He's not saying to ignore performance. He's not arguing that you should blindly accept obviously unperformant architectures, such as the OP's example of iterating over a huge array when a hash would clearly be better. He's saying you shouldn't obsess over the "small efficiencies," the time-consuming rewrites of every little, rarely-called function to shave off 5% of execution time. At least not early in a project. I think Knuth would support doing that for a highly mature product, at least in some cases. Indeed, much of Knuth's most well-known work is entirely focused on performance. He's just telling people not to be overzealous.

So how does all this translate into everyday practice? I think a lot of it has to do with instincts and experience, which let you estimate the labor costs and performance benefits of individual optimizations. For example, as a web programmer, this ethos leads to decisions like this:

- I WILL prevent a given method from loading the same database records twice, even if loading them twice is the easy way.
- I WON'T rewrite the SQL that my ORM generates in most cases.
- I WON'T worry about the performance difference between calling an object's instance variable accessor vs reading the instance variable directly.
The millions of hijacked Windows XP machines ready to a botnet's bidding might beg to differ.

Let us never forget that Microsoft Windows is responsible for, among much else, the transfer of critical trade secrets, diplomatic communications, and weapons technologies to our competitors and enemies. If China wins World War 3 in 50 years, Windows, albeit indirectly, will be significantly responsible.

Windows 7 may be more secure, but XP is still a major drain on society.
A four day old story that is a re-wording of the Google blog post but with errors added in.

How the hell does this get voted up?
To make yourself more desirable to employers, I'd have personal projects that demonstrate your abilities.

I'm a freelance writer slash "creative". I've been that way for over five years. I also have creative projects and those have been generating revenue and opportunities for me.

It's not easy. I was homeless for several weeks about a year ago. Couldn't cover the rent. But I've done factory work for many years and I'd choose this any day.
Geez. I know America is nowhere close to being a socialist country, but one cannot be so oblivious to the fact that something here is rotten from the foundation. Have we lost all solidarity? Hell, even basic decency?

Yes, maybe this specific person is not a good example. Maybe he has suffered mental health issues or substance abuse (though I find the accusation appalling). Maybe he does suffer a severe lack of skills.

But the fact that a highly-educated person had to sell all his assets in order to support his parents, and consequentially is now job and homeless, says something about society.

So, yes, it is societies problem. No one is to guarantee that tomorrow that person will not be you or me. And from that perspective, things look a hell of a lot different.
Not hard comparing to what? Its still pretty hard... even jonesforth is kinda hard to get for most developers.
There's a lot of people out there in really bad situations that aren't likely to get better. It really bums me out when I consider what it would be like to be 55 and homeless in Cleveland.

Still, the article mentions he sold all his stuff and spent his savings on paying for his parent's house. First, that means he doesn't have to live on the streets currently (his parents have a house), and second he should have just let his parents go bk then help them get set up again. That's for starters, and there's probably a few other things he could do that would make a big difference in getting it together.
How do you read momment? I read it the same way as moment. Do you read it like mom-ment?
OhMyDollz
There is nothing about REST in this post.
Service is not open for the public yet, but will be soon. However, there are many invites available on twitter and elsewhere.

Here's one: http://www.vox.io/r/KZZwni

You'll get 0.5€ of free credit which should be enough to test the service and see if you like it or not. Note that you need a real (existing) number for validation purposes (you'll receive an SMS with validation code), unless account is validated, calling isn't possible.

Apart from regular calls there are also other features like syncing with google contacts, anonymous calling (service generates a link and you can email it to someone and they can call you without registration), CLI.
Definitely an interesting idea, I can now apply all those functions I learned from calculus ages ago!

One suggestion, provide a list of "standard" functions, on a normal 4-quadrant Cartesian plane, showing how they look on the graph. It'd definitely lower the barrier to entry.
Yeah, that's what I don't get. Everyone says "hey, all these unemployed could work at McDonald's". The last time they had that massive hiring event millions showed up to fill 50000 positions.

No one wants to admit that nearly every business except tech is sitting on cash and just working their existing employees to the bone because they can (and because it's more profitable). The real hiring is overseas, as it should be.

People like the guy in the video and 99ers may need to start their own businesses if they can't find anything. Necessity is the mother of invention (and entrepreneurship).
> why isn't there a Super Awesome Open Source Game Engine that's the heart of all 3D games?

Unreal is the closest thing, but there's still lots of new/strange/innovative stuff going on in rendering, which means that lots of bits are hard to reuse. Rage, for instance, has a pretty nifty virtual-memory for textures scheme, which no one else has really done.
All things equal, the most desirable computer will always be the first to go.
I'm sure hundreds of second and third tier VCs piled on with ridiculous valuations in the hopes that they could add a "hot" company to their website. If this article is correct, Dropbox did the right thing and decided to go with smarter money.
At least care to dig around before making such a sweeping statement.

-This was not uncompensated market research statement.
-We are 30 days away from first wave of access invites.
-We don't do nothing.

PS: I just went through your comments and it made me realise why you would make such a statement.
Only if you define 'money' as the only value you could ever obtain from anything.
I admit, my post was an overreaction. My concern, and the reason I've stopped reading TC, was that we're in a culture that celebrates VC funding as some sort of business success. It's a milestone, but it's not success (in my eyes, anyway). Real success, which Dropbox certainly has reached, is when you build a sustainable company where your customers pay you for providing value, not investors. Investors eventually want their money back.

That said, my comments were definitely not targeted at Dropbox and I applaud that team for building a great product and providing great value.
I suspect ultimate causality was sloppy thinking resulting in both the office layout and the multiple security issues, though it's also quite likely that this was something of a cascade failure.
I hope they manage an appropriate change of address.

Maybe ∞, Mobius Strip? (Any torus-related puns must be strictly grounded in toplology)
Zero day hackers and the malicious Chinese hacker spies also use prepared exploits, so you can infer something about the relative easiness of finding exploitable holes.
It seems down for me right now.
I have no idea what you mean. I did the stay-at-home parent thing. So I had no income of my own for a long time. I don't regret it and I still have a very close relationship to my now adult children but it did hurt my earning capacity.
21 million seems pretty easy to achieve to me worldwide; every one of my social circles and peer groups, both technical and non-technical, in the US and South America, seem to use dropbox. my parents love it. my wife is non-technical to a fault and can't live without it; she just paid for the upgrade to 100gb because it represents safetey to her of her photos. even my under 10 year old son knows that saving in dropbox means he won't lose his homework assignment.

i think they have a huge, huge opportunity.
I think there's something to be said for the ease of patching with a scripting language, though. If you need to update a quest, just ship a few new lua files and it's done - seems much easier than messing with a binary.
I'd agree with these findings.

Windows 7 especially does seem fairly safe and secure. The only time I've had a virus on my current computer is when I've actively downloaded files and run them without properly scanning them first (which is 100% my own fault of course; not a wise idea to download when rushing!)

I know some non-tech-savvy users who literally have 200+ programs installed and 3+ of those spammy toolbars on their IE installs. When you've got people who will download anything and everything they see, it's no surprise they get loads of viruses - and then blame Windows when thing go awry.

I agree that the architecture of Unix-based OSes is probably more secure than Windows 7 overall, although this doesn't mean that W7 is insecure.
Yes, I do - it's OpenGLES2 using the imx drivers. I think it's PowerVR device. glmark2-es2 works (though I think there is an artifact with the z-buffer).

They have forums at power-developer.org - very nice bunch of folks.

It's sell Ubuntu 10.10, until they get their drivers up to 11.04, but on the site there are many other different distress, and even people experimenting with armhf (hard floating point).
To write fast code it requires a programmer and if you have
a programmer why not just do it in C++ where it will be
several times faster?

Why should I as a programmer not profit from extremely fast design/implement/test/fix/repeat iterations? I'm not saying scripting/high level languages like Lua, Python or Ruby should always be preferred. But it's equally wrong to assert that C-oid languages are always the superior choice. It's much more a question of knowing when to use what and why, which in my opinion makes an important part of being a good programmer.
We just released the first-ever comprehensive search engine for people seeking long term care services. PatientsHaveChoices.com aggregates data about each provider from multiple sources, and transforms it into meaningful information. It allows end-users to shop and compare providers, ultimately making an educated choice. Let me know how I can help.
BS.
Kaspersky and others biggest market is on Windows. They thrive on sold Windows copies.
Well, they don't just have the $240/yr plan. And file sharing isn't quite as sophisticated as you might think - it passes the grandparents test.

I wish Dropbox would have a smaller priced tier (like $5/mo). The free plan is more than ample for my needs, but I like to pay for premium service from companies I use to support them. But $10/mo is a bit steep in comparison to, say, the value I get out of Netflix streaming for $10/mo.
I think the issue is that of you open up your EC2 instance's security group to your Heroku app, you're opening it up to any Heroku app.
I feel a strong urge to say one more thing.

I live in Israel, and right now the majority of the Israeli people are uprising [1] (democratically and peacefully) against the absurd cost of living that we have been suffering for the past 20 years. Thankfully, our macro economy numbers are good, and people have jobs - but raising a child or buying a house is nothing short of impossible nowadays.

Over the past month the entire Israeli public has been asking itself "Why do we deserve this? If our country is doing so well, why are we struggling from paycheck to paycheck? If things are so good, why is everything so bad?"

Eventually, people will begin to ask questions, and demand answers from their government. Once that happens - and by looking at recent global events, it will - prepare for radical economical and political change.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_housing_protests_in_Israel
Tricking the perfect code machine
The last article said it was mainly so they could use green energy like solar and geo-thermal.
Thanks!

Appears too late for me to delete my submission.
AOL web site broken into, defaced
The reality it is the reliance on tools and sucky education. I wrote a compiler for taking a less-sucky C#/C hybrid compiler to PHP (why php? so I could get things done and hack it when needed): See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226480

Reality: taking it to production was nice, but debugging and other tools are not available. I spent a lot of time making it possible to debug the PHP and trace that back to C#. This was less than idea.

Then IDE support. While I can happy without an IDE, most people can hardly function.

Trying to educate people on it was (a) marketing fail [web devs hate static typing], and (b) too hard for people to grasp (functional programming + new stuff = fail sauce).
#666 text on a #FFF background is unreadable. Why do people do this?
It's going to be hard, but open source is really your best friend here.

Personally I'd suggest finding a new project that's up and running with a very committed founder, and put a lot of effort into contributions.

If you pick something like openphoto, you'll be able to make a difference, make a good track record of work done by yourself, and if openphoto takes off, then you'd be in the perfect position to get hired to work on it.
Do you have something against folks who double major in their bachelor's then?
Google+ Now Available For iPad and iPod Touch
This is about making an HTTP request and parsing the response in python. It has absolutely nothing to do with REST.
Always avoid premature optimization and every optimization before you can run benchmark is premature.

But, hey, don't do anything stupid. Like pulling whole dataset over the net from database just to calculate some sum or average or do a join or iterate to find something.
Use authentication - communication inside us-east can't be sniffed even by instances you control.
Thanks a lot. Used that link, signed up. Got 0.5 EUR (which is a lot, with these rates. Nice!) and tried a first call.

Call was excellent on my side, very bad on the other side. "GTalk's better", "Lots of noise" and it got dropped after roughly 1:30 with both parties not hearing anything. I hang up after 20 more seconds and verified the results via GTalk with the other side.

First impression: Generous credit on sign up, slick and cool interface, but - yeah - first call was a miss so far. :( In other words: I'd love to love it. Will try again later/tomorrow.
You would also have to find flash-experienced people willing to work the way console game developers work. They actually might feel a little bit under appreciated for the stuff they do, and not feel very rewarding at work, especially when they have to constraint themselves with memory, cpu, gpu, i/o issues that might not be visible on the desktop.

Also at some point certain integration between the engine and scaleform is needed, and you would have to lose a programmer there supporting it.

We tried it, and the consensus was it's not of use to us. I wasn't the one evaluating it, so I can't tell for sure. But resource budgeting (memory, cpu, video memory (ps3)) is very debated thing in the console game development, and everyone wants more budget for his need (audio, animation, builders, ui, etc.)

We also gave a try of an early flash middleware for Dreamcast for NHL2K2 (2000) - there were only 16mb of RAM, and flash was taking significant amount (no scaleform relation). We actually got some pretty good menus, and for a video sports game you need very detailed UI for rosters, trades, etc. We also got people to do it back then.

But then the problem was during gameplay. While in the main menu we had the memory to pull it off with flash, during gameplay all memory was for vertex buffers, textures, game data, sound, animations, etc. We were thinking of swapping out game data (and reloading later) when the PAUSE button is hit (and the menu appears), so flash would have enough memory - but it turned out to have some bad latency - few to couple of seconds. Ideally PAUSE ON/OFF should take no time (otherwise it's annoying).

Another thing was that we still had to render the rest of the HUD (scores, replays, etc.) not using flash - so we had to support TWO technologies for UI.

Hence we turned our backs on it. It was nice, but not for our game.
I'm probably missing something, but the exploit was all about filling up a Starbucks gift card. It was touted as "Enough to buy an iPad", but at no point was one actually bought. The $500 card is now being eBayed for charity, which (for profit), would be one way to close the loop and get cash out, but surely that applies to any business operating a gift-card scheme.

Are you normally able to redeem these cards for cash? My (limited) experience is not only no, but sometimes the amount is rounded up to the nearest $currency_denomination as well.
I really hate the go back to school argument. It sounds to me like this: Hey, you know that degree that is doing absolutely nothing for you right now even though you loaded yourself with debt to get it in the first place? Well, the problem is that degree, which you're still paying for, that's the old model. What you need to do is upgrade to a better degree by taking on more debt. Then you'll really be able to get a job (for reals this time!), and if not, there's always a PHD...

Also, a 0% loan is still a loan, you have to repay the principle, and if you overpay for an education (itself overpriced for the same reasons houses were overpriced), you'll still have to pay that back.

Start with the library, that's free.
This on its own won't help me. I need to call land lines and mobiles. If this would be just about a very restricted set of people I probably could direct them to use some technology. But - it's not. I need to call people that are 'offline'.
Microsoft Files Three New Patents
You can actually see the lua usage by peeking into the .ipa iPhone packages (they are just .zip files). Maybe android and other systems are not much different.

I've seen at least the lua levels described there.
Jonathan's Card 2.0
As an aside, are you from Edessa?
Maybe he has suffered mental health issues or substance abuse

Given the severe lack of social services in the US for mental health or addiction, I wouldn't fault him for either of those.
The article can be found here through Google News[1].

1 - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Britain+burns+the+colour+of...
well on most SEO conferences there is the agreement that a good search optimized site gets at least 90 % from its search traffic via google in the us market.

in other western markets (i.e. germany) google has a market share of 98% plus and we are fine with it.

said that, one of my sites only gets 28% of its search traffic in the us market via google, but it has a penalty on most of its pages (everything but the startpage and its blog is banned from google and with good reason) so its an outlier.
By that same token, Windows was responsible for commoditizing the hardware by keeping the OEMs in competition with each other, leading to free fall of computer prices and thus putting a computer on almost every desktop and in most laps around the world. Even Apple moved to the x86 platform to take advantage of the scale and prices.

If you think Apple hardware is overpriced now, imagine if they didn't have any competition from Sony, Dell, HP, Acer, etc.

Back to your argument.
Lets see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/technology/02google.html?p...

>She highlighted a fake document titled “Draft US-China Joint Statement” that was circulated among people with e-mail accounts at the State Department, the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Gmail. Clicking to download the document directed users instead to a fake Gmail log-in page that captured their passwords.

So that attack wouldn't have worked if the user was on an iPad or Droid or a Macbook Air or running the most hardened Linux computer. Right?

Zero days have been found in every browser/OS combo around. It's hard to see how OS X would fare better in a very targeted attack as Safari/OS X is usually one of the first to fall in PWN2OWN where the reward is a Macbook (not a win in a World War).

Stop getting your news only from places like Boyocott Novell, Groklaw,Slashdot, HN and the comments there. It warps your mind.
All I can say is, trig functions are overpowered.
For me, it depends on whether the project is for fun (just something I need) or a chance at a sustainable business.

If I want to test whether the project could turn into a sustainable business, I'll take a few days and create something minimal. This allows me to get the solution "out of my head" and ensure I actually want to work on it. In parallel, I'll start defining potential market segments and the problems the project could solve (C-P-S). This starts the process of customer development and trying to determine problem/solution fit. I'll then tailor the project based on actual metrics and user interviews.
Scaleform is great at enabling web- and interactive advertising-trained graphic designers to make video game UI art. It's not as great at being efficient, or truly integrated into your game.
I wanted to create an audiojournal so i could store my longer thoughts that would be tedious to type. For example, a dream journal. So I created an autohotkey script that would accept tags and then open up audacity and record whatever I had to say. The script exports it as an mp3 and appends the mp3 to a playlist. In this way, I can listen to all my audio notes on a particular subject, like review from my biochemistry class. I posted it on the forum, with a bunch of other scripts I use:
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=465918#46591...
Exactly, a perfect example of this is how society values cleaning ladies much more highly than brain surgeons or CEOs.

Usually you have to pay brain surgeons and CEOs orders of magnitude more money to take those jobs, when normally they might prefer to live off the glory of cleaning up after slobs.
Secure meaning there is a private back-end network or there is some form of tunneling/encryption end-points available and enabled by default for instances?

Here's the current AWS security guide that I was able to find:

http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/AWS_Security_Whitepaper...
Agree 100%. Whether a job description, Web page, brochure or any other vehicle, real communications say what they mean and don't use euphemisms. These generic descriptions are probably copied and that's pure laziness.