skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Memory usage" is pretty vague. If you're just talking about writing poor code that naturally requires more memory to store objects and such, it's not a big issue if you can scale linearly. What you really need to watch out for is memory leaking. This can cause processes to slow down dramatically and there's nothing you can do to scale it when that happens; your app server will take requests and probably even have RAM to spare, but the actual processing of the request will take forever and your site will be sloooow. This is especially relevant for long-running processes. I have accidently written memory leaks into programs before that, despite having more than enough RAM to grow, eventually slowed down to an absolute crawl. I'm talking 1 loop per second to begin with and by morning it's doing 1 loop every 4 hours.

Premature optimization? Avoid it. Writing good code? Don't avoid it because bad code is easier and memory is cheap. There are some times when it makes no logical sense to allow something to use tons of memory, despite how much you have available. For instance, if you request the same page from your site over and over again and the memory usage continues to increase, that's probably a bad thing. What is that process storing in local memory and not garbage-collecting after a request? It's HTTP so there should be no persistence at the web framework level (i.e. in Rails). It should manufacture a request, send it, and move on to the next one, shedding all the local variables made in the process. If your memory footprint is increasing while your real load is remaining the same, that's bad. If you're storing the same object in memory in 5 different places, that's bad -- but not that big a deal so long as they're all gone when the request has been served.

(Flamebait P.S. -- save memory, kill Rails.)
Most people also have yet to accept evolution and read Us Weekly more than US News.
I really love sites that require logging in.
It isn't necessarily confusion. Public utilities sell electricity basically at cost, and that reduces the cost of goods and services for the entire economy.

What people get confused about is that (to my knowledge) no public-run oil firm has managed to match the efficiency of private oil firms. Even heads of state seem to get confused (or prefer to be confused, to win popularity points).
Given the overwhelming evidence that nationalized health care is more efficient and humane (by definition, covering everyone), I really don't think you will get far arguing with the holdouts that have their fingers in their ears.
Many years ago I looked into the problem, but for the Canadian market. We couldn't find a service with an API, so we took one of those 15$/month paying services that gives you some Java software to "analyze" the data (Stockwatch). I used a packet sniffer (Etherreal?) and reversed out the protocol. I used Python for the actual software. They don't really mind you doing that if you're paying already, so it was fairly easy to do, even for me who had no experience.
i read that article too and loved it; my favorite is the ordering: dog and fiancee. priorities are set.
A way to apply an opacity to a container and not have it apply it its children.

http://www.dedestruct.com/2008/03/06/how-to-cross-browser-cs...
I would prefer that my $1500 TV is decoupled from a $229 media player.
Health care is not a human right. It is not my obligation to make sure that you survive.
Web Advertising Is Booming?
I really like how you can change your vote as many times as necessary on that site! A similar feature would be helpful here. Sometimes I read a comment that seems to make sense, upvote it, then a reply makes me want to recast my vote or cancel it!
How does Smalltalk bind to other languages such as C, in order to reuse code libraries? That's a pretty big question if it is to make a "comeback".

For instance, Objective-C adds quite a bit to C, and replaces C++ features, yet it can bind to either of those languages. And there's been work done to make the entire Python standard library usable in Ruby.
My reading of Dawkins' Selfish Gene suggests another angle that is not even mentioned in the article. Genes do not have any concept of our reproductive success. They are just structures that are copied. A gene whose structure is very resistant to mutation and is very easily copied has an advantage against other genes -- even ones that provide a fitness advantage to the organism.

Imagine you have 100 organisms sharing the same basic DNA, with one gene positively boosting reproductive fitness, that is easily mutated. They also all share another gene that confers no expressed behavior at all, but is very resistent to mutation. Over time most descendants will still be likely to carry the useless gene, yet the version of the beneficial gene they carry will drift and in time cease to be recognizable as the original gene at all.

I read the book several years ago, so please feel free to tear the example apart (and hopefully replace it with something more accurate!).
They have had a few in-depth analysis articles, or at least somewhat close. I was suggesting that it was one direction that they could have gone in instead of being the typical mainstream "report shit as it hits the fan".
How to Record a Podcast with People in Multiple Locations
Baltimore marathon at 11th october 2008
If your application can tolerate a day's delay then perhaps you should look into just grabbing the XML files from Yahoo! Finance. They let you download the history of any of their stocks and use in your own code.

For example: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=AAPL&a=08&b=7&c=..., and click on the download Spreadsheet link at the bottom

updown.com, an investing startup that really likes advertising to me on Facebook, uses these guys

http://www.quotemedia.com/

They seem to offer live quotes, but I cannot personally vouch for their services.
You are all missing the key point of Mark's whole reasoning. DON'T BUY STOCKS BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE WILL BUY THEM. BUY STOCKS YOU WANT TO OWN, forever if need be. Why? Because they pay dividends! Mark doesn't care if the Dow goes to zero or infinity, he's got an acceptable yield on his stocks and that's all that matters.
docs.google.com!!!

But in all seriousness, Open Office is such an awesome product, I just hope 3.0 works well on the Mac.
I haven't run the numbers. I don't work at the financial software startup anymore, so I don't have (easy) access to the data. However, a few spot checks of stocks that were too expensive in 2006 indicated that some were getting very reasonably priced.
Mortgages & Real Estate Investing
When purchasing an investment property in British Columbia talk with Kelleway Mortgage Architects for the most up-to-date information first. They can help you moving in the right direction towards success.
Maybe I'm a little biased but I'm going to pick the USA, and in particular, probably California. Here are 3 major reasons:

1. Perfect weather

2. Silicon Valley

3. We have a good portion of the top technical schools in the world (Stanford, Cal-Tech, Harvey Mudd, UC Berk, UCLA, USC), I think proportionally more than any other area at least.

But ultimately it depends on what you want to do. I personally go to UCLA, it's an awesome school, the faculty is great, the curriculum is challenging, and everyone is very friendly. I would recommend it, contact me if you want more information, charlesju[at]g-m-a-i-l(dot)com
> for something useful such as building High Speed Rail in California

According to http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/images/chsr/20080121152955... , the system can't pay back the bonds that are currently on the ballot, bonds that cover less than half of the projected construction costs. Since such projections almost always overestimate revenues and underestimate construction costs, the real gap will be even larger.

Some of the tricks used to get the revenues up include high-rises in Fresno and other central CA cities over the train station. That makes a lot of sense in NYC where land is at a premium, but Fresno?

There's a reason why the ballot statement says that the operating costs "[operating] costs would be at least partially offset by revenue from fares paid by passengers" and doesn't mention interest and principle.

I can't find a breakdown for the operating costs on this version of the project. The last time I saw such a breakdown, the projected salaries and benefits of the folks running the trains exceeded the projected revenues....

If high-speed rail in CA made financial sense, why wouldn't a for-profit enterprise be interested in doing it?
I agree that OO is making a big comeback, especially with the explosive fervor behind these new web frameworks (Rails, Django, etc).

It seems to me that the biggest case for Smalltalk is that it was the foundation for Ruby, and Rails is definitely pushing Ruby into the top tier.

In other news, Alan Kay = badass. He came to my class and talked about how he was trying to use LISP to code TCP/IP in 80 lines.
Hmm, my best research shows that Wikipedia's uptime is 99.8% [1], and AWS' SLA gives 99.9% [2].

[1] http://uptime.pingdom.com/site/month_summary/site_name/en.wi...

[2] http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/media-coverage/2007/10/10/wi...
If you're building a fairly standard web app you probably shouldn't be worrying at this stage. Keeping memory usage low does not mean a significant speedup necessarily. It means your memory usage will be low. Sometimes you trade one thing for another depending on what you're doing.

When the app is written, if you run a load test (or you can let your users be your load test, like Twitter), there will be a bottleneck for some n of users. Remove this bottleneck, which could be cpu, database, memory, connections, bandwidth, etc., and there will be a new bottleneck at some > n users. Rinse, lather, repeat.

If you optimize now, you're most certainly optimizing the wrong thing. When I load tested my first production rails app, I found cpu was the first bottleneck I hit, not memory.
He never explains how it's making a comeback.
While going through TAOCP is good advice, I think the quote stands on its own.
The problem is that the credit fueled series of booms and busts that started in the 1980s might end here. At the end of the day growth of credit and money supply must be backed by productivity growth. I don't have the numbers right now, but be assured that credit and money supply growth hugely outpaced productivity growth since the 80s.

So basically that means we've been financing bubbles. In my view, it's up for debate whether a succession of booms and busts is necessarily worse than a more steady development. But since this latest bust turns out to be rather violent there will be a political reaction. If that reaction is to end the boom and bust economy then stock markets might not rise much for the next 10 or 20 years.

I'm not saying they won't snap back some from the current very low levels, but after that I wouldn't bet on the next huge upswing.
Even if the article is accurate, the alternative is McCain.
The problem with enforcement is, it doesn't scale. In Joel's case, Joel and Michael are the ones monitoring the sales department (probably not more than a few guys) and Joel's interests are perfectly aligned with the company, so that's fine. But the second there's a layer of management in between, the Sales Manager (who is also getting paid on commission)has an incentive to let the sales people cheat as much as he is capable of hiding from the higher-ups. So I guess the approach is: use incentives, but only if the sales team has to report directly to people who own equity in the company?

I mean, I guess you could set up a system where you track each sales person's stats to make sure that their customer return vs exit ratio (or some other metric) doesn't fall below company average, and maybe that's what you have to do, but all that is is a better approximation of proper incentives. How much overhead is necessary until you have it right, and how much is that overhead going to cost you?
Wait, I'm not sure that's right. Are you suggesting Amazon shouldn't have an affiliate program?
Gates dethroned as tech's richest get thumped
On one hand, this seems like it's linkbait to a poorly researched article. On the other hand... see hand number one.
CSI: Miami: Raging Cannibal
Horatio and the CSI team are pit against Miami’s Russian mob after a barbaric double homicide in the Everglades.
Bleach: Grey Shadow, the Secret of the Doll
While Ichigo is lying on the ground unable to move, Koga is reminded of the time Jin had him care for a young Bount named Cain Nao. Meanwhile Rukia
1. Swap Ctrl and Alt -- use your thumb to push control, like you would to push the Command Key in a mac.

2. Make CapsLock an extra Esc.

Your vim and emacs editing will never be the same.
We support Ruby btw, not just Rails. We'd love to expand to more languages, the big question is which ones do we focus on next due to the time+cost it takes.
The article at livescience.com is rather lame -- but the REAL article, which is not linked anywhere, is very interesting and freely available (Go Genome Biology!):

Abstract:

http://genome.cshlp.org/cgi/content/abstract/gr.080184.108v1

Full article in PDF:

http://genome.cshlp.org/cgi/reprint/gr.080184.108v1.pdf
If any fellow HN readers want an invite, you can send me a direct message on twitter or wherever.

Right now we support open source Ruby projects, so if you fit that group let us know.
I think that's not a fair definition.

A start-up which doesn't have any concrete and realistic plans for how they'll make money is not a business, granted, but there are plenty of ways to create a business that is solid and yet requires a development period before it starts turning a profit or even making any money.

A start-up which cannot make money should not be called a business. A start-up which has a clear plan for how they'll make money (e.g. by charging for an SaaS product) but hasn't finished building it yet can be called a business, and the creation of a formal business affords many protections that are useful to a business... and so a business should definitely be created to represent those kinds of start-ups.
I think the bit about top-down, breadth-first search is erroneously regarded as a crucial concept of the paper this author cites. That is an excerpt from the introductory portion of the paper, and does not appear to be the rule in terms of being a problem-solving approach.

Particularly interesting is a part in the paper that describes how expert engineers would quickly abandon alternatives that incur higher cognitive cost. It is possible that breadth-first search happens before this, which is not surprising (in fact, is expected, if you think in terms of Ericsson's explanation). The crucial move is what heuristic the expert uses to prune their decision tree, in a rapid, economical, sensible, and ultimately practical fashion.

So in fact, the blog post's claim of "Both product developers and designers have a tendency to jump on the first great idea they generate and head down one path, instead of patiently exploring the space of possible solutions" can't really be called a characterization of novice product devs/designers -- because you may observe the exact same behavior (i.e., observable behavior) in experts.

The Lawson study cited in Nigel Cross's paper said the recurring theme in expert designers was their claim to be keeping multiple concepts in parallel. This is a reiteration of Ericsson's theories (long term working memory). The key difference, as it seems, is, unsurprisingly, exposure and experience.

IMHO, "pragmatists" vs. "realists" is a suboptimal generalization.
Woah.

Well, I did a physics degree a few years ago, and all this stuff flew about a mile over my head.
Penney's game [as described in Knuth's Croncrete Math]
Agreed. It is precisely the experience that allows the expert to maintain the "big picture" in their head without incurring a penalizing cognitive load -- an ability that novices lack.
This is quite useful, as I'm building a custom CMS for my company right now. I thought we'd go with a heavily restricted tinyMCE,but it looks like WidgEditor is more along the lines of what I need. Small, light, and with just the right amount of features.
elitist much?
betterexplained kicks absolute ass. Resources at comparable standards are extremely rare. Your slinkset may very well be recursive: [Posts betterexplained.com]
If high-speed rail in CA made financial sense, why wouldn't a for-profit enterprise be interested in doing it?

Because there are externalities which a private company can't benefit from, but that people benefit from.
Humans are successful because we don't leave our dead, sick, wounded or crippled behind. We won because, instead of doing like other animals and letting the weak or old die alone, we continue to help them and learn from them.

We help other humans who are too weak to be helped. It's part of our primal human nature. When you say that it's not your obligation to make sure I survive, you are saying you want to try it the animal way. The way that failed.
Well, at least including x86 macs...

This is the first time that the killer apps that would make me want to buy a new computer are all open source. The new open office, the new gimp, etc.
What I'd suggest for pasting Word content, regardless of editor, is to add a button that first puts the Word content through the server-side wvHtml tool, which extracts clean HTML from Word's awful formatting. I know TinyMCE has a plugin API for adding a new button for this to the editing options, and I'm sure the others do too.
Not for MS.

The probability of MS getting nationalized or going bankrupt is 90%. So it's 0.9 * 0 + 0.1 * 3 = 0.3 = -70%.

Whoops.
Haha. Yeah. That's why i inserted the word 'almost' before 'risk-free'
In Defense of Piracy
www.paulgraham.com/progbot.html
Astronomers get best view yet of infant stars at feeding time
They're actually on RC4 now:

http://download.openoffice.org/680/
I must say sir. That is brilliant. $15/mth for a pseudo realtime quote API is dirt cheap.
I hope this is the punch in the face everyone here at Hacker news needed.

Stop listening to the sideline douchebags, that have just been waiting for their "I told you so moment" or the mainstream blogs that write about it because they know its easy pageviews.

If you believe people really want what your creating,then define your value (or potential value), and don't be swayed by the ups and downs of the nah sayers.The best investors know this, and I pretty sure good entrepreurs know this as well.

"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful"
MySpace could be in Trouble | TechJaws
SEO No-No’s | TechJaws
But these have to be embedded by the webmasters, why doesn't someone make a rich text editor plugin for firefox, which would transform a regular textbox on any website to a decent editor (emacs, vim, etc.)
Congrats to the OOo guys on providing a native Mac port! This is a step in the right direction.

However, this is a feeble effort compared to the far superior NeoOffice port. Slow, ugly; it looks like it was thrown together very quickly. I 'm crossing my fingers that at some point OpenOffice treats the Mac platform as a first-class citizen. Until then, I'll stick with NeoOffice.
I agree with most of that, but it was really annoying to read.

One would think that if one has time to make every third word a link, put some words in red, and illustrate everything with random pieces of clip art, one could make the effort to capitalize the first letter of each sentence.
The Beef:

An interviewer [...] would be videotaped conducting an interview via a long-distance phone call to the interviewee in another part of the world. This interviewee [...] would be videotaped as he was being interviewed. This videotape would then be sent to the interviewer’s city and synchronized with the videotape of the interviewer [...] and the higher-quality sound of the videotapes would be used instead of the telephone audio.
"As the saying goes — hardware is cheap, your time isn't."

Don' t many small companies find that they have more time than money?
Just got some pricing info from Zuora... the subscription service is 2% of invoiced amounts with a $1,000 monthly minimum. Expensive!
Wrong. Humans are successful (when we are successful) because we use our inherent ingenuity to serve our individual ends and wants without infringing on those ends and wants of others. Maybe these desires include caring for others, which is often the case, but requiring someone to care for another is to strip that person of their natural freedom.

Learn to make distinctions between what is common and what is general.
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OpenOffice.org is a great product, but it's never going to be taken seriously mainstream with a name like "openoffice.org"
The uninsured do not have "free" options. The "taxpayer supported" mechanism kicks in only after you've been bankrupted. There's a difference between uninsured and broke.
Uncov is back
I'm sure there's a team of Verizon folks somewhere trying to figure out a way :)
Goodness, no. What kind of weird keyboard did that? Everyone knows that the appropriate position for Ctrl is to the left of 'A', and that Alt/Meta belongs below '/' where you can find it with the pinkie of your right hand. This was the layout for the Sun Type 2 (?) keyboard, and the standard for emacs users from time immemorial.
During Tough Times, The Echo Chamber Can Be Your Best Friend
It's happened a time or three that one of the uninitiated has gandered at my bookshelf during a dinner party and picked up "Inside Smalltalk" only to be sorely disappointed.
For one thing, Wikipedia is international. They have servers in South Korea, the US, and the Netherlands. While EC2 offers three data centers, they're all located on the US east coast. It's a consideration when you're running a site as large as Wikipedia that aims for a lot of international traffic.
But it will probably compound and net result will be more like 0.999 * 0.998 = 0.997
I'm a bit naïve about Macs... Can someone explain to me why many open source programs need to be "ported" to a Mac? Isn't it just a make -> make install?
You have a very fundamental misunderstanding of biology. Really fundamental. You think a desire such as "caring for others" is somehow a personal choice? Or that God implanted it in us? Caring for others is a biological neccessity of our type of animal - it's why we live, it's why life continues.

There is no such thing as natural freedom. We are born in a collective, we die in a collective and we are nothing without our collective. Humans and monkeys are group first, individual second, and have always been that way. That's why people form 'teams' and have a 'group of friends', have 'families'. It's all small groups which together form larger groups, and the overall aim of each group is to make itself survive, but at the very top, the overall aim is to make the entire human race survive.

Don't believe you are special. That you have 'natural freedoms'. That you have some inherent ingenuity. That's just sillyness.

What would you do with all your ingenuity if you were the only person on earth? Humans have this illusion of being individualistic, and that they work for themselves first. It's not true. People work for the entire society, because without other humans, nobody can survive, no matter how 'ingenious' he is.