skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes there is a big advantage to keeping your memory consumption low with ruby apps. Ruby's garbage collector is not the best and has to walk all the objects in the process when it GC's. The more memory your process uses the longer and more often GC will happen. This will degrade performance the more memory you use. In fact I've seen really leaky apps spend most of their wall clock time in the garbage collector.

Sure, throwing more ec2 instances at the problem is one solution, but if you care about your apps performance you will try to optimize for smaller memory footprint.
Golly, that was a good year: All You Zombies, plus Flowers for Algernon plus Casey Agonistes!
1) Build your app how you would normally build it (obviously dont expect to put massive objects into memory for every request — just dont worry about the small things)

2) Go back and refactor the things that really stick out as bulky

3) Deploy

4) Continue your release cycles and refactor stuff as you come across them

.

As the saying goes — hardware is cheap, your time isn't.
Even FCK occasionally has issues with pasting content from Word. Plus it's slow to load. It has improved over time, though, and is generally a reliable component. Considering the insane constraints rich text editors must operate under, it does an admirable job.

I tried creating a home-grown editor once. It was hard. Making one that's simple, predictable, and end-user friendly is nigh impossible.
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How about the Linux Kernel?
- Well-documented.
- Always good to know.
- Good, well-organised code.
- Real-life C code.
I was wondering about this. When I first heard his tax plan I didn't think much one way or another. Then I thought, wait! I'm trying to raise money from the super rich!
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Interesting parallel: Y Combinator is a breadth-first search through the possible solution space. It galvanizes a number of potential solutions (similar to following a number of promising concept designs) and eventually is successful.

So, in my experience, concept designs are best used when two wildly varying ideas are able to combine. Do two failed startups take their ideas, mesh them together, and produce one new totally innovative one?

I'd like to hear stories about that.
you'll need to spend much more per month for raw streaming market data
Interestingly, the average of not-so-good-looking people is pretty good-looking.

Looking more into details the set of pictures, none is really cute and there is a lot of people with pretty strange, asymmetric faces. They look kind of retouched, no?
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I dunno... I already wrote TC off as a waste of my time along with things like valleywag quite some time ago, so I could easily be ignorantly biased, but for me I'd describe them as mainly being "good" at link-baity bullshit titles + wild trollish theories about what could happen presented as fact press release style to stir up interest... I'm sure they have some value, but it all comes down to that magical signal-to-noise ratio question... and this article here doesn't appear so bad but also doesn't seem very good either....
i use IB as my broker too. I don't think they offer data sales separately.
try quotemedia, esignal etc.
This is probably more than you are looking for, but the fftw code ( www.fftw.org ) is a pretty amazingly designed piece of C code that does some very advanced stuff. However, if you trying to get off to a good start, you might want simplistic examples.

One thing I think helps you become a better programmer, is to read your own code carefully a long time after you have written it.
Yeah, I don't know. I think TC is pretty good at giving you breaking startup news. I think you could pretty much read nothing but the headlines and get about 95% of full value out of it, while saving yourself about 90% of the time involved.
It's not the mechanics behind the site that is important, it is the concept. Betterexplained is a site providing valuable insights, and http://links.betterexplained.com promises to become a great resource for understanding the world.

Hackers care about curiosity, learning and understanding, hence the interest.
I'm guessing slow news week. It's been all finance stuff and layoffs.
Only behind your backs, sheesh! <3
Well, I'd say that whether or not life during WWII might was worse than during the depression is a very complex question, and you'd get very different answers from different people at the time. It was clearly a lot better for some, a lot worse for some, etc.

Even if it was worse overall, it gave us an economy and nation afterward that was far better than before the Great Depression. It is, of course, impossible to say where we'd be without it today, but things like the GI Bill greatly educating the American workforce or women entering it significantly undoubtedly changed us for the better.

The ramifications of that war are so complex that we're still finding new ones, but I was just pointing out that it is generally considered the end of the Depression, and much of the reason for our following prosperity.
If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

Quite the contrary; I want TC to report start-up news. That's it. I don't want any editorials, op-eds, or analysis. Why? Because, as many many articles including this one prove, they are nearly always completely ignorant of the situation and say ridiculously stupid shit as a result.

They do that well, as you said, but it's when they go beyond the bare necessities and actual facts into the realm of "analysis" that the writers (and editors and everyone else between an article and my face) fall flat on their asses and cause my blood pressure to rise in the process.

"Shit, I can't swim. I know I can't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass outta the pool."
Here is my experience. I used Rails for one project of mine that requires processing of millions of data rows. Because the Rails ORM create an object for each data row, we end up using a lot of memory. We had to get a 2GB memory server to hold up the project. Even after we avoided the ORM (which removes the pleasure of coding in Rails), the memory usage was still high.

Sure, we could process the data rows outside of Rails in C but because the processing of data rows is an integral part of the project, that would mean coding 80% in C and 20% in rails. Not exactly an enjoyable experience.

So we rewrote it in PHP and avoid objects and use just functions and hashes/arrays. And it worked very well for us. The site render time drops from 0.8s to 0.03s. Memory usage rarely exceeds 100MB.
Wikipedia simplifies IT infrastructure by moving to one Linux vendor
They better improve their shared-file networking before releasing this. I can't even stream an XVID movie from a shared folder on my desktop to my laptop without it skipping every few seconds, and it doesn't matter what share protocol I'm using... or even if I'm using wireless. Apple just appears to hate my 802.11n router.
DJIA lost 18% in their worst week ever.
even PG?
You do know that you can connect to databases and do stuff in Ruby without AR, right?
The Well Funded Layoff
Another point on the health care bit. At present, medicare and medicaid spend a combined > $600 billion and rising at 6% annually. In their market (medical insurance) they are the largest players. Absolutely. As a result, other insurance companies structure their plans within those offered by these two entities. They have to, if they want to offer supplementary services to these large markets and have any influence with hospitals (hospitals and doctors do not want to work with multiple completely different systems of paperwork unless they have to).

If we want real innovation in the health care sector, the personal tax deduction will help but ultimately, we need to get rid of these two bloated freaks. Too bad that that is one sacred cow that no politician is going to touch with a 9 foot stick.
An almost risk-free way to money in the stock market is to put most of your money in fixed income while apportioning a small % in long dated options.

Eg. you think Morgan Stanley is dirt cheap at current levels ($10) and you are willing to invest $100,000 in them.

Action 1: You bought $100,000 worth of MS shares at $10 each

Action 2: You bought $90,000 in bonds that yields 11%. You bought $10,000 worth of Jan 2010 MS 5 call options at $7 each.

Scenario 1: MS gets nationalized or goes bankrupt
Action 1: You would have lost almost all of your $100,000 investment.
Action 2: If you hold out until your bond mature, you'll get back your $100,000 principal after 1 year. Your options is worthless.

Scenario 2: MS goes up to $30
Action 1: Your investment is now worth $300,000
Action 2: You get $100,000 from your bonds and your $7 options is now worth $18. So your investment is worth $125,000.

So Action 1 is very volatile and risky. Your profit range from -100% to 200%.

Action 2 allows you to sleep soundly at night, even during current market conditions. Your profit range from 0% to 25%.
Hey not bad at all. In the worst case, you'll have at least preserved your capital.
I think it's a great idea; was hoping this sort of TV would be Apple's surprise announcement for last MacWorld:

http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2008/01/appletv-thats-really-tv-a...
There's a reason why those trailing P/E are lows. The E will decrease drastically in the future. You have to make really good guesstimate on what the E will be in the future before you can determine whether it is cheap.

There's a lot of danger in picking stocks based on P/E. You have to look at their debt ratios and short term financing requirements. You should avoid highly profitable firms that use crazy leverages in achieving these high returns.
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil." -Donald Knuth

That said, watch your 'n's. If you scale linearly, you can keep throwing servers at the problem. If you end up with some critical piece of your code that's, say, quadratic in run-time or memory consumption, you can't. And when you get there: profile, don't guess. Monte-Carlo code optimization is the beginning of the end for an otherwise clean code-base.
It's a great idea - and my favorite band (the Evangenitals) seems to have discovered it already - I picked up their second album free (every time I go to one of their gigs, I get so carried away with the music, I forget).
I wholeheartedly agree! I have been thinking about this issue for several months, and even posted a short rant here:

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/04/too-much-suckage.ht...
5 Web 2.0 Businesses That Will Thrive in a Down Economy
I tried in vain to find a valid argument in this article. Instead, it was nearly wall-to-wall non sequiturs and faulty generalizations.

There's some arm waving about how increasing the income tax on high wage earners will act as a disincentive to angel investors. Am I misunderstanding tax law, or aren't capital gains (e.g., from startup investments) separate from income for tax purposes?

Then, when Obama's "socialized medicine" plan would actually help, the author rails against it because it has 'failed everywhere it's been tried.' (Except where it has succeeded. And also, the dismal failures mentioned are anecdotal scaremongering.) The solution is held out in front of the author and he rejects it on unrelated, partisan grounds!

Maybe he makes sense to himself, but his oversimplifications haven't adequately made the case for the article title or his two supporting gripes.
I've been hot for eInk since Wired ran a feature on it eleven years ago, when I was fourteen:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.01/negroponte.html

Unfortunately, it seems like all that eInk has really done in the mass-market consumer space is save battery life for eBook readers. I'm still waiting for the eInk product I can many-to-one my bookshelf into and read like a real book, but this doesn't seem to be anywhere close to reality.

imho eInk has Second Life status in reality:media hype ratio.
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Yes. That's what we did. But the memory usage was still higher than the PHP option.
I don't think TC even cares if their analysis is sensible.

For them, the value is long comment-threads and inlinks/clickthroughs. And bad analysis often gets more such attention... so bad analysis is what they prefer to provide.
Usual republican fearmongering. as Marc Cuban said "No self respected businessman/ entrepenour wakes up a day and says I am not going to build a business and try to make millions b/c my marginal tax rate is %35 instead of %25".

If that extra money taxed gets used for something useful such as building High Speed Rail in California, or jump-starting alternative fuels technology, then it is a win win situation for the economy and for people.

If that extra tax money gets spend in useless wars such as the one in Iraq, that is plain economic destruction.

That's why picking the right president is so important, and makes the huge difference between economic prosperity, or economic destruction.

While I may say, that Bush's tax cut, and flood of money (with low interest rates), left the rich flush with money, who invested in short-sighted and useless economic destructive market. For every house that is in foreclosure, every house/street/building that is left half build, that is all economic loss to all.

While it is a good idea to let markets decide private investments in the long run, sometimes it is necessary for the government to step in, and invest in things that are not profitable in the short term, but have huge positive economic impact in the long run. And if pinching some money away from the private market is necessary, so be it.
Some Texas Optimism for Tech Startups
_Please_ don't make more links to private betas, wait until they go public.
The problem in both cited cases was that the employee had the ability to give discounts. This is shocking. At most major retailers, only supervisors have that ability, and even there, they show up in audit forms that someone would see.

Neither is really a case of an incentive being gamed so much as lax security procedures. Simple auditing can sniff those out, and they're clearly violations of company rules over which the employee can be disciplined and probably fired, as per Joel's incentive plan.

On the whole, not a very good article.
I see it over and over in engineering, novices get tangled in the details, and don't step back to look at the bigger picture.

Ineffective programmers sweat the little details, and tend either tend to spend too much time on them, or solve them in such a way (usually isolated), that it hurts the design of the whole system, and shoot themselves in the foot for later one.
Usually this is manifested in spaghetti code, or over-complicated engineering of things that should be simple.

While an experienced programmer, sees them as details that have to be solved, but without loosing touch of the bigger picture.
When you're experienced at something you might not know a solution to a problem in that area, but you will often know what isn't the solution.

Understanding what something isn't is as important as understanding what something is - in my experience anyway.
This is a great idea, this kind of "big picture" articles are worth much more than news "bits and pieces".
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"Average faces are deleted from the temporary gallery after 10 minutes, so please do not link to your creation." (yours is already gone)
This is simply ridiculous. The author clearly hasn't filled out IRS Form 1120S lately, or any other tax form that actually might be applicable to entrepreneurs. Furthermore, I don't really care if angel investors and venture capitalists have to pay more taxes on their successful investments. There's a difference between investing and inventing.

In regard to health care, adding more tax incentives (read loopholes), thereby increasing the complexity of the laws, and making the market for health insurance "more competitive," when the lack of competition is not the problem in the first place, will make matters far worse. Health care is not a commodity that lends itself to a market. It's a human right, which lends itself far better to [competent] government.

A while back I wrote about some of these issues here:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=11
This is generally true, but I was under the impression that Google gave unusually generous grants as a form of compensation.
If your $600bn figure is correct...

US incomplete health care is $600bn/305m people = $2,000 per person.

UK national health service is $120bn/60m people = $2,000 per person.

The US needs a really hard look at why it is getting such a bad deal. You already have socialised medicine (anyone can go to the ER and it gets amortised over private insurance patients - essentially taxing the rich) but that cost is on top of the $2k/person you pay for an inferior national program!
Smalltalk is making a comeback - Gartner analyst
It's even stranger: Genetics does not know about 'goodness'.
Interesting to see yet another company starting out with ruby on rails and then rewriting the whole thing in PHP when it has to scale. There seems to be a pattern to it...
"I found that nearly everything was fairly valued"

Does this still hold in light of the stock market crash this last week?
How about leaving text as it is and add some useful features?
Actually the expert does not have to step back to see the bigger picture, because he already has it from his experience.
Anyone truly believe that the change from "less taxes for people making < $250K (read: entrepreneurs)" and "if you create value we won't tax you on that" (read: successful entrepreneurs) is going to _dissuade_ anyone from trying?

This is the same "as long as you make the rich richer they'll spill some on everybody else" thinking that, frankly, has no actual merit in fact (Before you downmod me on this, lookup the some actual data!)

This guy should read a biography on Henry Ford.
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While that graph is interesting (and I've seen it referenced a number of times in a number of places), I've always found the scale misleading. Almost the whole bottom of it (0-50) is chopped off...so what looks like a logarithmic leap, is really merely doubling. While doubling is dramatic, and certainly a sign of something amiss (either tremendous inflation, or something else that is distorting value), it's not the astronomical rise the chart feels like when you first see it.
Uhm.. What? Someone can't call themselves a startup when they take all the risk of actually, err you know, starting something up? Taking the risk, forgoing income and pursuing their passion?
Inviting the adressbook
Everybody wants his users to spread the word about his application. If it's a good one, they usually do it on their own. Sometimes it seems to help to gently nudge users by offering them to load their freemail adressbook so they just have to select from their contacts and massmail invitations for you. While I would never use such a feature, it has apparently become standard for social applications.

Anyone like to share his experience about how this is accepted?
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I wouldn't use it either, but there must be some who do. Otherwise I couldn't explain that you can already buy the feature (e.g. http://www.getmycontacts.com)
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Current Share Price of the Company = 5 x Book value Per Share of the Company.

Current Market Capitalization of the Company = 10 x Quarterly Revenue/Sales of the Company.

Anything beyond this could be irrational or manipulation.
aka http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Sometime back I read Americans prefer Mobility and Opportunities.
Well, if you don't make money it's not a business, its a hobby in my opinion. I have hobbies that I put my time, effort and money into, but I certainly don't classify them as startups. Thousands do this for open source & freeware projects, it doesn't mean they are startups either.

I know it's not the popular opinion, but making money is important, and having a plan to make money & testing it before you launch is a critical part of a business. Perhaps it's one thing people will learn, that a project isn't a business until you have paying customers.

Getting bought may not be a viable business model anymore, if it ever was.
It's a slippery slope - it certainly helps getting users to join, but it has implications on privacy and trust. That being said I think that most users will probably see it as a service and not a threat. The thing to notice here is that YC users and techies see the problems with this approach, but normal users don't. They just see the service, not the implications of it. So if you don't abuse it I think there are certainly cases where it makes sense to do.
Current Share Price of the Company = 5 x Book value Per Share of the Company.

Current Market Capitalization of the Company = 10 x Quarterly Revenue/Sales of the Company.

Anything beyond is either irrational or manipulation.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I think the point is more that starting up a traditional business involves much higher costs, effort and risks versus setting up some website or web-service, which pretty much any Joe Schmuck can do these days.

And I completely agree with him. I realize I might be pissing against the wind, with the "startup"-focus on hacker news and all, but lots of these so-called startups I see here, I would consider spare-time hobby projects, and even if they find a way to capitalize on them, I still wouldn't call it a full business.

If your business can be summarized as a server, located in some data-center somewhere, working out the stuff on its own, calling it a full fledged business is a bit over the top no matter how much time you spent writing the initial code.