skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not too sure that an is_float() guard will yield a performance increase in the BEAM interpreter. It will give an increase with HiPE though I am sure. As per strings and memory consumption: Yes, you can use binaries or even better: iolists, but I think, then, that the string type has to go. A good (immutable) string library based upon binaries in OTP would be nice.

Concurrency and parallelism: No, they are not the same. A concurrent problem is one where you want to cope with concurrent activities: web servers, phone switch exchanges, routers, etc. A parallel problem is one where you worry about how to split the problem across multiple CPUs/Nodes so that you utilize as many resources as possible while achieving the best speedup possible.

The latter is usually number crunching on big clusters of several hundred machines -- or number crunching on a grid of computers loosely spread all over the world. The first is about coming up with a nice model for computation that makes you model the problem in a logical and straightforward way.

Erlang has a very nice concurrency-model. Together with the rock-solid and stable VM you have a very good outset for solving concurrent problems. But -- you can implement concurrency well on a single CPU, the key point is that you have a nice model in which to work when trying to explain the problem to the computer.

In a parallel problem, it is crucial how you split the problem up. Some problems have subproblems independent of each other. These are called 'embarrassingly parallel' problems. All of these are map-reducible. But how about a problem which is not? Numerical solving of differential equations via successive over-relaxation is a classical problem because each subpart needs to communicate its findings to neighboring subparts. You are worrying about the speedup when adding more CPUs or by Gustafsson: keeping the time-frame constant and adding more CPUs - how much bigger a problem you can solve.

Erlang, being about 30 times slower than C on numerical computation, needs at least 30 times the speedup to compete. Depending on the problem, that can be achieved with, say 32 CPUs, or perhaps not at all (if the problem has no inherent parallelism), where the C program only uses a single CPU. That is the gap Erlang is currently competing with. If you take the de-facto standard, MPI, and use that on C, you pay a lot of development time for a message passing interface which even allow for asynchronous messaging (crucial for hiding the latency of computation).

I hope this makes the difference clear.
VALKYRIE Trailer (With Tom Cruise)
That is super cool! Esp seeing the day move!
I agree, the www subdomain looks awkward and unwieldy. They should make hackerne.ws the canonical name. Though they'll have to be sure to set their geographic target to the US in Google Webmaster Tools, unless Y Combinator has moved to Western Samoa? ;-)
Could we please get a meta tag for that feed?
You're being pretty rude, dissing Google for not doing "enough" good.

They're a corporation. They make money offering us products that we like. They've made a very GOOD set of products, and I still use several daily. That's the end of my relationship with them. If they're supporting gay marriage, that's great of them, I'm proud of them, but it doesn't affect my using their product. They are not obligated to do anything more, and your getting snotty about their not doing something OBLIGATED is pretty awful and self-righteous.

Gates and Buffett and Bono are doing good stuff. Be happy for them. Don't use them to denounce other companies.
Herbert Hoover's interventionism prolonged the depression. The government enables monopolies. The government is currently enabling every rich wall-streeter's favorite monopoly, The Federal Reserve. We don't need the bailout. We need these companies to fail and prices to fall on assets which were obviously overvalued.
I hear what you are trying to say - but I was questioning the approach, not the intent.
i do not reference the holocaust in reference to the first bubble. i reference Victor Frankl and his experience developing logotherapy during the Holocaust and I specifically mention the two things are not comparable. Fine if you don't agree with my position, but please don't make stuff up. best jason
Exactly. The difference between a public figure and a nobody is that the public figure made themselves public. Anybody CAN do it, it's just that nobody DOES.
Add this one from the New York Fed: "Understanding the Securitization of Subprime Mortgage Credit"

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr318.html
Yeah, they don't auto discovery so the browser can pick up the feed. The feed appears to be for the main page posts. It would be nice if they could have one for new posts as well.

You could setup a scraper and run an RSS feed off that. ;)
Is this legit? could we use it to make a warp drive?
Bad title. Time lapse implies a series of photographs, whereas this is a visualization of flight path data. Still very cool.
You shouldn't have changed the wording, because you were right: the free market contains the seeds of its own destruction: in a free market manufacturers are free to form a cartel and deny others the chance to enter into their market. Which is exactly what happens when there's no government around to regulate the free market into, uhm, being more free.
Small box connected to USB containing "several gigabytes of dedicated static RAM" that "takes over the low-level functions of the board" does not sound to me as something that is technically possible (and the SRAM part does not even sound reasonable).

In my opinion, if this thing works, it works on some trivial principle, my guess is that it is more or less flash drive with some form of hypervisor, or scam...
How much of ones time is it wise to spend on distro-specific stuff? Does the knowledge port well? Are the skills easily applicable in other contexts? I don't want positive features from my OS as much as a lack of negative features.
Think Kids Can't Do Science? Meet These Copenhagen 2008 Teen Science Winners And Be Amazed
I'd say it's a great advertisment for how much wealth that can be created in a relatively free economy. You don't see many mega yacht buyers from Cuba or North Korea.

And I think your thought of having the state stealing even more money from people is despicable.
The last two articles have an Austrian take on the root causes. I'd be curious what you think of the last one, I think it's the best overall explanation.
I never said "reference", I said "used as a leadin." Though, really its pretty well the same. I wanted to go check the document again to see if I was being unfair, but apparently it's a case of "...if you can't stand the heat." - "Post has been deleted by request of the author"
You make a lot of popular assumptions in your post that are not supported by reality. I would be skeptical of the value that you are getting for your tuition in "Money, Media, and Power".

>What we've seen happen in history is the massive consolidation of companies. Look at the media industry, for example.

The media market is fluid and competitive. The top players today are not the same top players of 10 or 20 years ago. The industry has also not become much more consolidated over the past few decades.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29001.html

>we all know that once a monopoly is established, a company has no incentive to innovate.

A sluggish monopoly is a ripe target for new competitors, as long as the government or other barriers to entry don't get in the way.

See Firefox/Internet Explorer.

> If America is going to be more capitalistic, the people with the money should be driving innovation, not stifling it. They need to act responsibly with their money, and that includes being philanthropic and charitable.

I have rarely seen innovation come from philanthropic or charitable acts. The vast increase in technology, efficiency, and productivity of the last 50 years can largely be attributed to selfish, for-profit actions.

>When they just hoard it all and it becomes a competition to see who can hold the biggest pot, I don't think you deserve to have it in the first place

In the process of "hoarding" wealth, they create value. See my previous point.

> It's actually driving the middle class out of existence.

Bullshit:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/08/26/new-income-and-pov...
I found this a nice overview. Herring: maybe you could cover some more detailed underground distros, I'd be interested in reading about that. Just for the record I mainly use Umbuntu because its so nice and plain simple.
I don't know what is the value, but it certainly looks nice.

http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/FPWeb_Final_3...
Judging by my referer logs when something on my site gets posted here, people do actually use this.
That is amazing. I like how there is a visible correlation between the time of day and the flow of traffic.
If it's really important for you: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

I didn't write the script, but feel free to name your first born "thorax". I don't think they'll like it.
Pssh. Ballmer has a submarine.
Chinese Spacewalk Astronauts return home to heroes' welcome
"This post has been deleted at the request of its author."

Was it really that bad? Calacanis can come across as a bit full of himself, but I've often gained an insight or two from his posts.
Why can't we divide by zero?
assuming the detected effect is real, which might be proven with subsequent experiments, could someone broadly detail what possible applications could result?
...So does Tom Perkins.

http://www.symaltesefalcon.com/submarine.asp
Good God, there's more than 14 of them? The Linux universe is prohibitively complicated for n00bs and casual users.

Disclaimer: I love my Ubuntu.
Long or Short Capital » The Bailout, A Play - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06
I'd like to add my favorite quotation from Dr. Faustus:

"What, weep'st thou? 'tis too late; despair! Farewell:
Fools that will laugh on earth must weep in hell."

Or

"What, bail'st thou? 'tis too late; despair! Farewell:
the fools that bubbles ride must weep in hell."
Not really. Trial and error implies intention: you know more or less what you want to accomplish, and you try over and over until something works, or you give up.
Oh god no. Let MDI die like it needs to, please!
because the math police will come after us.
Interesting - would be a useful feature if the quotes could be temporally co-related, to some specific time or event.

That way you'd see more Obama says, McCain says on specific events or aspects of the topics.
>It's actually driving the middle class out of existence, and I would say at that point the wealth isn't being distributed evenly enough.

I think you are using the term "middle class" in an atypical way.

Consider a person who has "a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded...his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs"

Would you categorize this person as middle class? I think most people would (I certainly do). (If not, please explain.)

It turns out the person I just described is the median poor American. Everyone is now middle class, even the poor.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
Probably the first open source Merb-based social network (GPL'd)
The main differences are typically in the default paths, the package system, (although they're all pretty similar fundamentally) default software and whatever GUIs they put on top of all of that.

I don't think it's a waste of time to start with the GUIs. Sooner or later, if you're doing anything interesting, you'll need to drop to the terminal and config files. The config files might live somewhere slightly different, and work slightly differently with respect to versioning/updates.

The implementation might vary, but what you gradually learn is primarily where to start digging, and that's transferrable between distros.
Gang Garrison - A sweded 8bit version of TF2
Really cool. You can see waves of red-eye flights arriving just as the sun comes up.
Writing A Simple Web Service With Merb
I really hope this sparks a new space race!
Google Bucket Tests User-Defined Blurb Length In Search Results
A Zen State of Blogging with Disqus and Webby
I'll assume sarcasm, but obviously there are many more than 14. That number of primaries to choose from really isn't bad though. The amount of 'major' distributions naturally remains at a sweet spot and the options are getting more and more fruitful with increased use.

The choice is what makes it great. No doubt that pollution/dilution can occur and does, but with distributions the 'good' ones rise to the top for a reason and from them people select what feels best.
Parkinson's Law (On Amazon reader, but the book is excellent)
Apple to Make iTunes 8 and iPod Completely Accessible to the Blind
It's always a bad idea to confuse intent with effect.

I've no doubt that fans of regulation want good things. However, the result of said regulation rarely matches those intentions.

Not to go all Dr. Phil, but insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result.

Media control regulations lock in big media. Note that we didn't even get a fourth network until TV started to lose marketshare. (Yes, no one owned more than 40 stations, but that restriction didn't affect media control.)
I took a couple of numerical analysis classes from this guy (Peter Alfeld) at the University of Utah and he is a very entertaining teacher.
Yeah, that seems to be the historical lesson: free markets don't stay free on their own, so there's a limited role for government to play in keeping them free, much as there's a role for referees in sport. To me this isn't particularly controversial. But "free" is one of those words that easily leads to pointless arguments because people are working from different definitions. To me, "free" doesn't imply no government involvement, precisely because of the paradox you mention [~]. It has more to do with competition and meritocracy (may the best man/woman/product win).

[~] Edit: by contrast, npk's comment implies that "free" means "absence of laws". A different definition.
Google Pagerank Update | TechJaws
> in a free market manufacturers are free to form a cartel and deny others the chance to enter into their market

How do they stop others from entering their market?

The typical means involves govt action....

When buying and selling is regulated, regulators are the first thing to be bought and sold.
Legitimate Web sites become Hackers Playground | TechJaws
UK: ID card design revealed by home secretary
The real number system is discontinuous over division.

Interestingly enough, you can divide by zero. But if you do, then you can't define integers.
over and over until something works

Indeed. ...Until something accidentally works.

.

Lower animals tend more to learn by accident. They might memorize or ritualize what works, but they do not resonate with why it works. Higher animals tend more to learn by developing mental-resonance with natural processes (i.e. they do resonate with why things work), saving the effort involved in accidental-discovery learning techniques such as trial-and-error.

The main indices of intelligence in animals are the speed of learning and the complexity of what can be learned, the integration of sensory information to achieve a goal, flexibility of behavior in the face of obstacles, insightful rather than trial-and-error problem-solving behavior, transfer of learning from one problem situation to somewhat different situations, and capacity to acquire abstract or relational concepts.

(Arthur Jensen. Bias in Mental Testing. http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Mental-Testing-Arthur-Jensen/dp/0... From the section "Animal Intelligence".)

.

Perhaps trial-and-error should be classed as a subset of accidental discovery -- e.g. there would be myriad ways of accidentally discovering, one of which would be the motivation-driven trial-and-error.

Place a chicken on one side of a limited-length chain-link fence, and food on the other side, and the chicken will use the sheer force of its hunger-drive to discover how to get to the food. It has a motivation to get to the food, but it cannot mentally-resonate with the spatial processes -- the distance, the fence, gravity, etc. -- that are keeping it and the food separate. It therefore applies its motivation to accidental discovery -- sepcifically, the motive-driven accidental-discovery technique of trial-and-error. E.g., it will scramble around in a panic until it accidentally discovers one of the two routes to the food -- a few feet to either side of its original location. This process might take many minutes or hours. The chicken might even die of hunger without discovering that walking a few feet around the fence will get it to the food.

In the same test, a dog will mentally-resonate with the spatial processes involved, and simply walk around the fence.

The chicken applies the accidental-discovery technique of trial-and-error. The dog theorizes, i.e. mentally-resonates, i.e. applies science.
Those interested should get hold of a copy of episode 1 of BBC's 'Britain from Above', it's a whole show visualizing everything from airtraffic to mobile phone usage.
For more on this, take a look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere
I'm still not convinced that you can't just say that x/0 equals infinity. Certainly, infinity is not a number..but it has the same properties as a transcendental number in the sense that it is impossible to describe it accurately with finitely many digits. You wouldn't be able to use this definition to build other theories, but it would be nice to have a settled definition. Saying that x/0 is undefined still seems to me like a bit of a hack.

I agree that 0/0 should be undefined. There are infinitely many possibilities for what it could be, depending on the context.
Computers tell a poker strategy
Now the music has stopped, and a lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand

Now that you mention it, hot potato and musical chairs at the same time could make a pretty good game. :)
Interesting that this involves a rotating superconductor. There have been a lot of predictions from various theoretical camps that quickly-rotating superconductors would have measurably-strange effects. Most of these camps have been on the fringes. I wonder if the measured deviance marries up with any of the predictions.
Edward Tufte would love it
Why exactly should I be limited to only one partner?
Applause lights
You shouldn't.

If we're going to redefine marriage as two people who love each other and want a long-term commitment, then there is no logical reason n=2 and 2 alone.
Whats the best server distro?
Pixar: Tall tales
Rules of Productivity
A couple of thoughts:

(1) Ask yourself why they need the business plan? If these people do not already know who you are and how you make money, you shouldn't waste your time running through hoops to explain it to them unless you have a specific agenda at this point. If they need to understand your business invite them to lunch. If they need a document for other purposes anything you write will be ineffective and a waste of your time unless you understand those purposes.

(2) If you have a profitable business with growth, more growth potential and decent press, you will have LOTS of investors interested in you. And if you need VC you should put effort into talking to multiple people at the same time rather than one at a time. The threat of their missing the opportunity you are giving them to make money is what will get you better terms, not anything in a document that will be outdated in a few weeks anyway.

There is a lot of money out there for profitable ventures, and you are hopefully making some directly as well and reducing your need for outside investment on a day-by-day basis.
Great post, Sridhar.
I explained this as:
Take a number, e.g. 5.
Then take a small number, like 0.1.
Add 0.1 to itself, and repeat, you'll eventually reach 5.

But if you take 0, and keep adding 0 to it, you'll never reach 5. So no amount of 0's will go in to 5.

That logic breaks down if you do 0/0 though. My students never picked up on that one but they believed me!
A worthy aim, but the whole idea of the "law" is Norvig's implied definition of what market penetration means. If 75% of the people in the world have never owned a smartphone, then doubling the number of smartphone owners is a big accomplishment, and doubling it again means you've introduced 100% of the world to smartphones. The number of phones you've sold is not the concern, it's the proportion of people whose needs have been satisfied. (At least, that's what Norvig cares about.)

Without going down the route of identifying a new market, once more than 50% of the population in question has had its needs met, that market is mature -- its growth has reached a point of inflection, and no amount of pushing on the part of the existing industry will make the product continue to change lives at the rate it used to. The opportunity that was there has already been identified and seized.

Now, if everyone in Finland has a personal cell phone, and another 25% also keep a separate cell phone for business use, it's suddenly worth redefining what the market is. Should the industry try to double market penetration of business-only cell phones, now? Why isn't one phone enough, and could a new product meet these separate needs better? Or alternately, some people keep two phones with different plans, and switch between them to keep the total bill down -- breaking that confusopoly is another business opportunity worth identifying, but tracking units/plans sold instead of actual market penetration by population will mask it.
One per page? I'm not enthusiastic enough to click through 14 times, especially when my fave (debian) was first.
Infinity is a much studied concept in mathematics; the problem is not that we don't know what infinity is but that we know it's not part of the set of integer numbers, real numbers, etc. But there are many ways to work with infinities, and even to include it in the number sets (for example, in the case of hyper-reals).
> You do not have the right, in MY country, to deny other human beings rights or protections that others have.

I suppose you don't believe in imprisoning criminals then?
But then, as far as business is concerned, hasn't it already been shown that the cool new technology was a replacement for cell phones? Assuming CoolTech isn't subsequently found to cause the sudden onset of rickets in its users (or whatever), the market for [stuff that stuff that satisfies the need for cell phones] is still saturated. The market won't start roaring again the way it was; cell phones can only cannibalize CoolTech's portion of the market.

The latent Apple analogy is making me uncomfortable now, so I'll stop here.