skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually you don't want that either. Look at the iPhone app store - most applications are simplistic because anyone can write and sell an app and make tiny profit.

If there was a higher barrier to entry fewer number of developers would chase after the same pool of users, so they would make a bit more money and would be able to invest into making their applications more feature-rich.
pg, you are applying technology industry lessons to finance here. The phrase "financial innovation" has a long history of being very destructive to people's well-being. At the root of it, financial innovations turn out to be sophisticated ways of applying leverage (i.e debt).

The Federal Reserve also was massively complicit in the emergence of debt, so it is not a free market phenomenon. The Fed, in an attempt to fight the last bubble burst, kept interest rates low, and armed the speculators (hedge funds) with easy credit.

Basic ratios like debt to GDP have exhibited a strong long term tendency towards mean reversion. If that history proves right, we are in for one heck of a ride.
"The ruby version is single threaded and the test is on a 32 core workstation (counting CPU time Python is only 4x faster and OCaml is only 17x faster)"

I mentioned that on my blog. I also have an OCaml version that is 25x faster in CPU time (i.e., as fast as the top C++ entries), but barely faster regarding wall clock time. It takes a couple dozen extra lines.

Keep in mind that the Wide Finder 2 benchmark was about parallelism from the beginning; I said the Ruby version was naïve precisely because it wasn't parallel. The fact that the language did matter to this extent came as a relative surprise, because the most expensive operations in the Ruby version actually take place in its core classes, written in C. It's just that it's so slow everywhere else that the overall performance is still an order of magnitude worse.

"The author admits that there were multiple stabs at the OCaml version. What savings could come from optimizing the code in other languages?"

There are three OCaml versions, listed on the result table
http://wikis.sun.com/display/WideFinder/Results

AFAIK other entries received considerable optimization effort (I'd even go further and say that most involved more) --- several went through half a dozen revisions, even if the wiki doesn't reflect it.

You can take a look at the wide-finder mailing list to see how often each participant was using the T2K (we used the ML to reserve time slots): http://groups.google.com/group/wide-finder/topics?hl=en&...

wf2_multicore.ml was the first version I ran against the full dataset on the T2K, and did quite well (8 minutes). The 2(?) first runs crashed because I exhausted the memory space of the T2K, but the 3rd one completed successfully.

wf2_multicore2_block.ml took considerably more time because I switched from line-oriented to block-based IO --- basically the technique all the fast implementations used.
The Sellers’ Market for Startup Investing will Restart in ~12 Months
Early-stage investors won’t wait for the economy or housing or banking to recover. A bunch of rich people are frantic right now because their personal portfolios are getting hit. However, pretty soon they’ll remember that those portfolios only exist because they paid a startup to give away web-based email, sold AKAM at $300/share or some other highly speculative IT-investing activity.

At that moment, they’ll move back from fear to greed and start competing with each other to speculate — on us.
T-Mobile G1 coming to Walmart at a slashed price?
How about discussing the proposition on its merits, rather than pedigree?

It's not like there are ten new cloud platform come in every day and we have to make a snap decision. We can, in fact, afford to look at the offer itself.
Good News for People who Hate Bad News
I think you're being harsh there. SEO is a byproduct of creating a good website/webapp.

Think about your users first, and they will link to you. You'll get inbound links. Make your site easy to use and navigate, and it'll be search engine friendly. It's far more useful to spend time making a good product, than trying to game the search engines.
Your IP detection showed parks over 80 miles from my actual location. For these cases, have the radius be much larger, or have the Google Map show locations surrounding the target area.
Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?
Same issue for me, FF3 wanted to kill the script when loading CA.

MA was fine but the list was smaller .. maybe pagination?
Take comfort in the fact that you are still being 10x as productive as everyone else.
Sorry, but if I want to buy a laptop, I wouldn't buy one from Pepsi. Similarly, if I want something Internet related, I wouldn't get it from Microsoft. I just don't see any evidence they understand it. They have done an absolutely awful job in the last 10+ years.
Dissecting an Agile failure from Hell
I think that's good advice in any circumstances.

Well, unless the question is "I spend all my time sleeping and working out and I don't have time for a job and a life, what should I do?"

But that's not the question, so I agree.
Thanks guys, I will fix this.
The title is pretty bad. Nothing earth shattering there and nothing that is specific to programmers. It's just that often times the programmer gets stuck implementing it because they have the technical smarts. I've seen similarly bad designs come from most corners of the company and from completely tasteless visual designers. It's not just programmers who commit design crimes.

Nevertheless, generally good advice, except the bits about filling your page with "lorem ipsum", and about not using black for the main text. The off-black/off-white stuff looks good when you take an image of the page and stand back 10 feet, but for people like me (ie without perfect eyes) is a complete pain when actually reading it.
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert on reactor safety, but I do note that the article mentions that a pebble bed reactor is kept inside a big concrete building designed to withstand aircraft crashes.

I assume this means that an aircraft crash involving a pebble-bed reactor _not_ inside a big concrete building could be bad. The second layer of containment (two-meter thick walls) also sounds pretty difficult to make fly.
Just for the record, I'm not using Authgasm, not because I have any problem with it, I just chose to write the login stuff for my current project myself for various reasons I won't go into and had done so long before I came across this post.

I don't think I'm being militant about anything... Just carrying on what was a reasonably pleasant and honest conversation. Yes, part of my decision was to do with that my partner is a Window's user and I can't do anything about this at the moment. But the other part of the calculation that you overlook is that my current project is not one that requires over the top, secret squirrel encryption on stored passwords. This consideration came into it as well.

You sound bitter, man. Maybe you should take a nap and stop being so militant yourself.
it's a good read.

i don't think the meltdown is going to be QUITE as bad as he insists. must be that entrepreneural bias...
Your reply seems to be a spot-on agreement with my post, except that you don't realize it. Your choice of analogy is particularly amusing in that, right now, if you'd had your money under your mattress, you'd be better off than if you'd invested in one of these highly-leveraged and over-exposed financial vehicles that I'd mentioned. Mattressing one's money may have been the best idea of them all for a large class of investors.

That aside, the proper way to make the analogy you're making is not to compare investing in a CDS against putting money in or under your mattress, but rather to compare it with putting it in a certificate of deposit in your locally-owned bank or loaning it to a locally-owned business. Either of these would very likely have less return and a higher risk for you. However, you would be less susceptible to a global default cascade like the one that is happening now.

The reason that ...your own data center [would] be better... isn't that it's less likely to go down, but rather that, if everybody has their own data center, the chances of a global blackout go down drastically. This is precisely the analogue I was pointing out. If banks had stayed non-optimum and local, then (arguably) we would not be facing a (potential) global economic meltdown.

You may argue (rightly) that if you pursue these localist strategies when everyone else is pursuing these more profitable consolidated strategies, which carry this systemic risk of catastrophic failure, that you'd succumb to competition from others. This is the point of asking for regulation in the market, and (possibly) the case for asking for it here. At some point, almost by definition, the cloud computing market will commoditize. When that happens, the only way to cut costs will be do do without redundancy, if that is a legally available option.

The underlying problem is that people discount the cost/benefit of events that happen in the distant future, and the global catastrophes in these two systems always seems distant.

Finally, one may object that if redundancy is such a good idea, then it will happen naturally and never be eroded by market forces. In this case, then, there can really be no objection to legislation on the matter, because everyone will naturally comply anyways.
Article's definition of "angel investor" includes "friends and family" (which they claim make up 92%, in myth #5). Whereas I think of investors as: founders, friends/family, angel, VC rounds, IPO.

I think the other myths are more true of angels, if friends and family were excluded from the definition.
It's irrelevant to the real question here, but it's relevant to the assertion that what you did at thirteen (or in this case, eleven) shouldn't be held against you by employers.
Catching quakes with laptops
The Wide Finder 2 implies lots of IO activity, which proved to be relatively hard to optimize on the T2K, because it you can easily saturate a core by doing mere IO (i.e., a single core is barely able to cope with the sustained read rate of the disk).

This might be the most thought-provoking sentence I've read in weeks. It certainly calls the credibility of people who say "the future will be hundreds of cores per CPU".

Maybe this is fixable in OCaml somehow, but we might be seeing the limits of our multi-core panacea future sooner than we think because of realities like this.

edit: I haven't looked, but I wonder if the IO thread is just busy waited on the disk, and this perhaps isn't the limit. The fundamental question stays the same, I guess.
I wish you could get proper demographics of your visitors who decide to bounce. Right now you can figure out exactly who your users are, but there is no easy way to figure out what demographics don't get convinced by your message
MIT's OCW has a whole lot more! No social networking aspect though.

http://ocw.mit.edu
It is a very good app. Out of curiosity, what is your revenue model? I don't see ads being a good idea. Will be launching a paid version?
I think that this post along with similar ones I've seen (eg Guy Kawasaki) are misleading in a sense that they define the Universe of discourse more widely then the 'Myths.'

I imaging the majority of Angels described here just would not meet normal definitions.

Median investment $10,000, 92% friends & family, fewer than 5% go on to get VC money.

These are statistics about a (seemingly) very wide category of investors. Since most of these are not relevant to those that take these 'Myths' into consideration, these stats aren't really worth that much.

What would be interesting is to hear about the 10, 5 or 1% of those that are 'angels' in the sense that they do conform to the 'stereotype.' How many of them are in groups? How many of them are around? ...
My comment about "anything not being used by the NSA" is not silly, it's true. Hell the NSA developed the Sha functions. I am not one to take security lightly, and salted Sha256 is not taking security lightly. I am not sure what kind of apps you write, but for 99% of the apps in the world, salted Sha256 is plenty secure. If it was as big of a problem as you said it would be highly discouraged, which it is not. The leading authentication solution in rails uses Sha1. Regardless, if you are extra paranoid, you can use any type of encryption you want with authgasm. So the argument is moot. Lastly, authgasm is not about promoting sha256, its about a style of authentication in rails. The method of encryption is just an option, which is what the crypto_provider option is all about. If you don't understand the subject which you are discussing, why are you discussing it?

I actually looked into bycrypt and it's great. But it would be silly of me to use a linux only encryption solution in a library available to the ruby public.
Thumbs up for the Modest Mouse reference.

I realize the actual line is "people who love bad news" but close enough to make me smile.
I think that if there's truly a valuable market there that people will be able to charge a premium for quality products. Granted stuff like the Virtual Beer might not ever cost anything but I think well produced games might have quite a future, for example.

Apple certainly is not doing anyone any (long term) favors with the app store as it stands presently, as it doesn't feel like there's a good way to develop your own brand within the store. It would be funny if this was the invincible iPhone store's undoing. :)
It sounds like they're defining angels differently than is typically meant around here. This sounds more like a write-up of asking your rich uncle for a push. That said, it's nice to see it as a counterpoint to some of the conventional wisdom.
New Yahoo Developer Tools Coming Tomorrow
"Most airports are already out in the boonies."

No, most airports are within a few miles of major metropolitan areas because that's where people are located, and airports themselves are often significant bastions of human infrastructure.

Further, unlike an ordinary plane crash, a nuclear incident even confined within the bounds airport would close that airport for years, if not permanently. No major airport would risk shutting itself down forever.

Very well, small, remote airports may be qualified to service nuclear planes, but that defeats the purpose of massive transit of people between major urban centers.

"something to do with runways taking up space"

Don't troll.
LucidLogix raises $18 million for parallel graphics processing technology
How to handle secure http (https) via wsgi
Of course there is value in a good game, but who would develop it? There are too many games already and about 50 new games shipping every day. It's impossible to stand out on your own merit, no matter how good your game is, and therefore people will not be inclined to invest efforts.

It's the crisis of overproduction, bascially. It benefits noone.
Err, hmm?

http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/1199-econgen3.cfm

58 percent of the general public think that tax cuts are good for the economy, while 37 percent of economists do. So, the lesson learned is.....the general public is more qualified to set policy than experts.
The article says they found a striking correlation - I wonder how one gets to be one of the outlying data points (on the good side)?

What's the betting it can be affected with dietary changes?
Researchers determine neural representation of 3d objects in monkeys
The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film
The article says 1997.
Dupe (sort of): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345463
People have no idea what they want, until the crowd wants it!
Ugh, what is with the subscribers only, but on popular demand farce?
It really doesn't sound like you've read any of the other comments in this thread.
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Why do you think your application doesn't require "over the top" encryption on stored passwords? Who are your users?
I want to be able to resize the tool windows from any edge, not just the bottom right corner :-)
Whose Cloud Is It Anyway? Goodbye Ed
The cloud's best-kept secret
The side-comment didn't bother me. I'd guessed the target audience of the original comment before that was posted. I might be reading too much into it, but it came off as "you lazy kids and your damned expectations" kind of rant from someone who wanted to make sure no one was having too much fun, and that we all understood exactly where our place was in the world.
i would like to know

1. how many sites before mine they were at

2. how happy i made the user

3. how angry i made the user

4. a full detail of their computer specs. so i can set my expectations on site performance
First Peek: Tesla Model S, the all-electric 4-door sedan
yeah I think a blog without comments wouldve served his mission better, but this option includes a list to spam later
i feel that way about my current contract job, but i have a few other notes coming from the perspective of someone who has lead teams.

'risky code sucks up tons of time'

i don't think i have ever been on a project when expectations could realistically have been meet if i did not already do something just like that.

the current project i am on, i was hired to work on a flash widget, and i ended up working on a java applet that had to communicate with JS, and the struts backend. there was a ton to learn, and most of the time i spent looking stuff up on google.

on other programing jobs i always feel more productive when i am not spending my days on google.
Nice-sounding metaphor + leaky abstraction: maybe useful.

2817 words of take-your-breath-away verbosity: useless.
They sound like they're children grateful to their parents for letting them do things like these. Sure, there are employees who can't do this stuff, but neither of the two is an adult.
The Stock Market: The New Normal ?
"Bottom line: there is zero chance of a short or medium term-rebound. Zero."

The price of a security is its expected value, more or less. If the market thinks a security has zero chance of going up, the market must also think it has zero chance of going down.

The possibility of a rebound is priced into this market, and so is the possibility of further decline; the two should balance.

Even in really crazy markets with forced selling due to liquidation, this rule shouldn't get too far out of whack. If a security can only go up, people will buy it until it can go down again. If a security can only go down, people will sell it until it can go up again. If this guy really believes he has privileged info that the market can only go down from here, he should short-sell his way to a risk-free fortune.

But somehow, I doubt that, once this is pointed out to him, he will be anywhere near as confident with a few thousand dollars of his own money, as when he is helpfully advising entrepreneurs about their business strategy for years to come.
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed
My hope is... that date can be pushed back a bit.

You and me both - else I have just over 5 years til my brain peaks.
Have you tried blocking cookies from NY Times completely in the Prefs -> Privacy -> "Exceptions" area. Also, there is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1243 - which does the same thing as adding to Exceptions, but with a different way of adding sites to the rules afaik.

Also, there's the whole "Private Browsing..." mode in Safari, but I couldn't find something similar last time I hunted for something along those lines in Firefox built in.
as well as Vista...
Cross-platform, hardware accelerated, in-browser graphics plugin- Unity3D
Accessing NY times articles from a Google search will let you view the article without logging in.
How to Tell If Your CEO Is Clueless
http://unity3d.com/unity/

Was working at a Panera Bread here in Redmond and met a startup founder who's working on some seriously cool collaborative filmmaking tools- with hardware accelerated 3D graphics within the browser.

As far as in-browser gaming, clearly this is a paradigm shift. Anything that has to do with high quality video, clearly a big win. A true in-browser photo editing program could also be pretty slick- cloud-based Photoshop and Illustrator competitors are feasible, sans all the slowness that Flash-based editing apps bring forth. Higher quality music visualizations are a no-brainer.

That's off the top of my head, what else comes to mind?
This study is more rigorous than this title implies. It isn't about age vs. mental acuity; it's a test of myelin density vs. mental acuity. Myelin tends to disappear as we get older, after about age 39, so that is how these researchers got the connection to aging.
This article is just jam packed with good stuff. Thank you!
Yes. There two senses of the word "angel:" people who invest in private companies, and a narrower sense meaning people who invest in startups. A study of the former will yield a portrait of an investor very different from the latter, who are a tiny minority of the total.
IO was only (barely) disk-bound when you gave a full core to the reader (i.e.,
you have to be careful not to use HW threads on the same core). This is not a
problem specific to OCaml --- I reproduced it with a standalone program
written in C that simply read the file: as soon as you have more stuff running
on the same core (in different hardware threads), the IO performance drops.
See
http://groups.google.com/group/wide-finder/browse_thread/thr...

Also, and this came as quite a surprise, it turns out that mmap is slower than
read(2) on the T2K.
Maybe soon he'll discover that a prison isn't a big building: it's a series of cubes.
What's unfortunate is that these particular experiences repeat themselves so often.

Like most technical founders, I don't like selling stuff (I'm much rather crank out code), but as it turns out, that's an awfully important thing to do.
How do you watch hulu with xbmc? That sounds really cool...
I wonder if their Python support will run "real Django"...
I think I tried it and the NYT refused to show me pages.
Venture Capital deal syndication - Why it ought to take two to tango
Saving $30 is cool, but remember the majority cost of this phone (and other smartphones) is in the contract.
Yeah, but by switching around the words, he makes you wonder if he understood why the original album title was clever.

When you first heard the Modest Mouse album name, it begged a question: what's good news for people who love bad news, anyway? Bad news? Good news? Bad news that's good news? It was a clever bit of wordplay.
Microsoft Jumps on OpenID Bandwagon
does anyone feel like you could mad libs version of this article and run it every six months or so?