skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, you too can by required by the compiler to implement cooperative multitasking by hand. In 2011.

Yes. It is an answer to the criticism made, and I acknowledge that. But it is not a very good answer to the objection. The better answer is "don't do that in Node.js", which is still not all that great (it's really easy to accidentally write something that blocks badly), but is better.
Did Madoff have the earnings?
I wish I could say it means a lot if you don't make it to the interview stage, because that would imply we're really good judges. But unfortunately we know we miss a lot of good applications. We have thousands of applications to read, and not much time to do it in. It's difficult for us to distinguish between applications that are genuinely weak, and those where the founders just don't present themselves very well.
I'm not sure I understand. Is Sprint planning on undercutting the "regular" subsidized cost of the iPhone? Because otherwise, unless they're going to do something that really stands out, it seems like a case of "the only way to beat them is to be exactly like them".
Nice. However I find 99,9% of notification popups, be it for email, instant messaging or sth. like Dropbox completely superfluous, distracting and thus bad for my productivity and general happiness. Same goes for every iPhone or Android push notification. I just wonder if I'm in a small minority, because everyone seems to like notifications..
It does in fact share memoization. Easy shared state is a key strength of the single-threaded model. :)

Re: Node.js, you're right. The core of the debate is whether the single-threaded, evented model is a legitimate theoretical approach to concurrency. That programming style is the same across Node.js, Tornado-web, EventMachine, etc. It translates literally to Tornado-web because the idioms are the same.
Free e-book every month from the University of Chicago Press
To answer your (possible rhetorical) question literally, the requirement here isn’t that it generate Fibonacci numbers efficiently, it’s that it implement the recursive algorithm efficiently.

It’s true that another algorithm will be much faster, but that deprives us of the opportunity to discuss how this implementation of the recursive algorithm delivers much higher performance than a naïve implementation.

The back story is that an abrasive blog post asserted that Node.js was a terrible platform for certain types of problems, and this algorithm was given as an example. The author here is simply showing that with care, Node.js will not be the problem.

For shits and giggles, here’s another Fib algorithm, chosen strictly for the pleasure of implementing it:

https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-12-...
I wasn't trying to manage him, just that specific example was for a client who waited for three weeks for logins. All I need was an update (requested politely 4-6 times prior) and received no responses.

Those emails aren't the only ones, usually he is couple words per email. But you are right, dropping a "life savings bombshell" on him wasn't right either.

I think we didn't set expectations clearly with him because he was a friend and we worked together on various client work I didn't think anything of it.
I don't know why people are so surprised with this acquisition. Adobe has wanted a piece of the mobile development world for some time (look at the export to iOS they released not too long ago). They already have a decent suite of development tools and this will only make them stronger. A write once, deploy to all strategy is quite appealing, and if Adobe can manage to wrap it all up in to a nice piece of development software, they'd have a real winner on their hands.
How likely are edits that I make to our application to be read? I've updated once or twice just to fix some glaring typo or to update on our progress (I feel like we make notable strides almost weekly). If our application has already been read, do updates get reflected in such a way that the readers know to re-read it?
I'm willing to pay for them, but I have a hard time understanding why I need a separate (more expensive) license to use them as webfonts when I already have the license to use them in the same capacity (but with much more difficulty) by CSS spriting everything. Feels like gouging.
As much as this whole Ted-gate thing has turned into a amped up argument of sorts, there has been a significant amount of knowledge for everyone shaken out of the trees about node.js as a result.

Take for example this implementation, how many people getting started with node knew about async or memoization?

Could be just me, but I learned a lot about what not to do and how to do certain things more efficiently with node as a result of the whole fiasco.

Thanks Ted :)
Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma
I'm surprised that on such a great and lively thread as this no one makes mention of the possibility that technological expansion follows a cycle of innovation and incorporation, and the possibility that Stephenson is lamenting that the latter doesn't measure up to the former.

This post leads me to wonder if Neal himself won't be surprised by what the next innovation phase has in store. Also, does the concern he expresses here have any parallels in Reamde?
I, for one, am looking forward to Adobe Air-powered Typekit Installation packages containing native OSX installers that spit out HTML snippets.
From everything I've read, and from talking to Japanese friends, it sounds like doctors in Japan are generally far worse than you would hope for.
Yeah, that's a good point. Time to brush up on my coding skills. Do you think you can sell and code in a startup and be great at both?
If you don't get in I'd say you should launch anyway. Listen to your customers, hustle, and you'll succeed regardless of YC.

I'd also highly suggest moving to the bay area. Meeting the right people and getting your name out there is just SO much easier (we just did this and it's night and day, regardless of Austin being a good startup town as well).

We're in the same boat, we just applied for Winter 2011 with what we think is a great team, solid idea, and some early traction. If we don't get in we'll still be focusing on launching, traction, and listening to our customers early on.
Easter Island has tropical climate. So yeah, we got 'em all.
Bureaucracy is a kind of process group think. It involves adherence to fixed, externally defined, rules. Each contributor is doing things in a way they think are cumbersome and difficult to change.

The alternative to fixed rules, is to discuss issues and tradeoffs, and trust developers to make good decisions based on knowledge.
Spine 1.0.0 is out (Backbone alternative)
> Tracking changes is trivial, since they're a part of the schema -- use version control.

It's not quite that simple. You can't just "install" the new schema onto an existing database with data like you can by just copying files. You have to write your own set of alter statements to keep things synchronized (sometimes with complicated data migrations to new tables).

It works ok for 1 or 2 databases since you just do it manually - but then you lose many of the benefits of automatic source control.

And if you have a large number of database servers - or many unrelated (client) installations - you need a much more complicated system, and it's far from trivial.

Putting the SQL commands in the code is a lot simpler. There are no security benefits to stored procedures vs bound SQL statements. Perhaps it's a bit faster, but I'm not so convinced, you are trading parsing time for execution time since the stored procedure is now a program instead of a data update command.
Why not have "time to submit" points work as follows:

The problem details aren't shown, only a brief description. User clicks a button "accept challenge", is given problem details, and the server starts recording time until a solution is submitted. Base points on that time difference.

Sure, there are loopholes (such as someone else posting the question on another website so you can create a solution before accepting the challenge). I think it's better than checking for new problems and get lucky by noticing a new challenge came out very recently and there are no submissions.
Thanks Brandon, I'd love for him to just be a bit more social and give us updates. I'd like for him to be a partner and turn this around.
Typekit is an excellent service for the price, but the main reason I've remained a committed customer and evangelist is their constant drive to improve. I love that they've worked so hard to improve font rendering on Windows (which I'm sure is a huge pain in the ass) and that they encourage foundries to hint their fonts (which improves rendering for everyone). I hope that this acquisition won't hinder that kind of initiative.
PayPal To Open A Pop-Up Store In New York To Showcase New Payments Technologies
Well, this would certainly fit my workflow. Because I'm not a 3D-programmer and this approach is a much better fit for the casual 2D-games I want to make.
This is an awesome project, if not because it makes the concept of exporting your data from these sites very transparent, and approachable for the average person.

If you're comfortable with releasing your code, it would be awesome to have some sort of "offline" mode where users could opt in to downloading your scripts and running them locally. That way you'd be affording ease of use and allaying anyone's security concerns. Of course releasing code opens up a whole other can of worms (maintainability, license), but until then I wouldn't feel comfortable running my exports through your sites, as much as I support the idea. Others might feel differently though, in which case the site has a ton of utility.
Your future is based on your status (pay being a part of that, but not all). Not only do you get behind, pay-wise, you can also end up being pigeon-holed as a... "grunt", for lack of a better word.

Users/abusers prey on the weak, and once you demonstrate willingness to take such behavior, they'll keep returning for more.

Look at it in the context of what is, these days, seen as a corporation's main mission: To maximize returns for owners. And in today's management environment, returns are measured across a quite short timespan (that often does not accomodate the timeframe required to foster employee growth and development).

If they demonstrate the ability to get your services for less, they will continue to try to do so.

I've had exactly one boss who was different. He brought me in, internally, from an underpaid, overburdend position (with a classic and widely acknowledged "user/abuser"), and he pushed for and gained 10% plus increases -- multiple, within a year -- for me in spite of a rather draconian pay freeze. He did this according to the original schedule he promised, and even surprised me with some additional increases I had not expected at those specific times.

Concurrently, my "status" in the company went from... "line worker" to multi-divisional talent, directly consulting (outside of my original, direct responsibilities) with the senior management of two divisions responsible for about $1 billion in aggregate revenue.

I worked my ass off in that position. And, senior management hijinks and HR BS aside, I enjoyed it. Working with this manager was a pleasure, because he would really challenge what you were doing, but once you demonstrated that it was correct, he'd simply trust you and let you get on with it -- also, despite being a manager, pitching in directly to confirm and cross-check results, supportively rather than suspiciously.

My point is that, in the end -- and the sooner the better -- you can basically ignore everything that management is saying and simply look at their actions. If they treat you poorly, expect more of the same. It's up to you to treat yourself better, because they sure aren't going to do it.

Secondly, good management does exist. Keep looking, or, as they say, "become the change you seek" (start your own business).
Just as a FYI - we don't have any disk limits (apart from fair use).

Let me ask you about a particular case then :). I am in a group that develops a natural language parser for Dutch. It's open source, but so far we have been hosting it in a private Subversion repository on our university servers. We do provide a read-only (somewhat hidden) git mirror of the tree, but we have considered publishing it as an public git repository, but were always worried that the repository is too large for hosting it externally.

The git repository has existed for one and a half year, and the bare repo is currently 1098 MB in size*. Would hosting such a repository on Bitbucket be considered fair-use?
> But for my private projects GitHub is totally useless and also expensive, which is why I have been hosting my own Git repo on an instance that I own - it's pretty easy to setup too.

Ditto. There's a number of projects that I just won't put online because I'd rather lose than share them. With Bitbucket it looks like I'll be able to stash them privately, for free.

I'm totally psyched that Bitbucket has given this good a plan as their base/free package.
Me too. Security through obscurity reasoning.
Ask HN: How do you stop people from trying to call you?
I just hate it when people are trying to lure me into giving them a call or skype'ing them. Has anyone figured out a way on how to avoid that?

My friends and family are already conditioned to text me in one way or another. But how do you guys do it with people in the typical "calling" age (i.e.30+). For example I am currently sending out PhD proposals and am getting quite frequently from potential advisors a response along a "looks interesting, call me" variation.
Hmmm...

$ time curl localhost:3000/1000000
curl: (52) Empty reply from server

real	1m0.392s
user	0m0.006s
sys	0m0.004s

This actually crashes the server because it runs out of memory:

$ node app.js
FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_2 Allocation failed - process out of memory
Usually they'll grandfather in unlimited plans that are in place before they kill them, though. I still have an "unlimited" data plan from Verizon, which, as I understand, will unfortunately not transfer over to an [EDIT: unlimited] LTE plan.

So, you should look into it, and if you're still planning to switch, you should probably try to do it before the iPhone comes out.
It is nice! Still very alpha though.

I post invites to http://simp.ly/publish/kkhBKb when I get ’em. Or request your own on ##chocolat (two hashes) on Freenode.
Fuck yes. It actually makes you even better as both, a programmer and a sales person.

Makes you a better salesperson becuase you know your product knowledge goes much through the roof, you know what is and isn't possible, and you can estimate how long things take to build and what it would cost to build them. (You are actually useful).

Makes you a btter coder because it is you who is married to the customer, so nothing is lost in translation.
I'd be interested to know why Adobe opted to buy the company (Nitobi) rather than the product (Phonegap). Was it already Apache licensed which tied Adobe's hands to lock it down? Or was it more of a talent acquisition?
Oracle NoSQL Database
Don't check for overflow. Simply use a data type so large that it would take centuries to overflow.

If you were doing a million increments per second it would take almost 600,000 years to overflow a 64 bit int.
Some of the points are definitely worth considering. It's also a great resource for links on NoSQL issues. I can't help feeling this was a project for an intern however. It wasn't proofread very well.

"embrace asynchrony" - really?

"Clearly the traditional 3-tier application development model scales well and the desired development model for established non-internet companies." - there's a missing word here somewhere to make this a sentence
I'm also applying with two friends. Even if we don't get in, we've already been changed due to the application.

Filling out the app made the idea more real for all of us, and in the process we discovered that our fourth founder really wasn't passionate about the idea, and isn't ready to leave his day job. Had we not gone through the application process, we probably would have lost a lot of steam in trying to work with a founder that wasn't fully committed.

Also, we've been in a mad rush to get a MVP up and running. The idea is about three weeks old at this point, and the MVP will be up in the next few days. Had we not been motivated by the looming deadline (and wanting to get the app in early) we might have just thought about the idea for months, instead of actually implementing it.

Finally, the idea we're applying with is kind of my baby. I went out and found my co-founders by pitching the idea to everyone I could find, taking feedback, refining, and pitching more. I'm a back-end guy, and I needed front-end co-founders. Now I have a UI ninja and an amazing designer working with me to build a product we all believe in. If it weren't for the application, I would have just fiddled around with the backend code on my own, which doesn't exactly create an engaging user experience.

It almost doesn't matter if we get accepted at this point (not to say that I wouldn't be elated), because we're in such a better spot than we were a month ago.
Depends when. Right now few of us are more than skimming applications, so it's unlikely anyone saw your earlier versions.
Hardly a day goes by anymore without Google committing some new outrage

I suggest you try this again without the axe-grinding editorial slant. By mentioning only a single company in a context which could be applied to several large firms, I can't help forming the strong impression that you work for a competitor.
you forgot some Apple history...RAZR was the first phone with iTunes..that software features was what sold the handsets
"instead of just giving developers a way to get textures from DOM elements"

I'm guessing this functionality is already in progress. Canvas has a bunch of draw operations on it and browser makers are already extending it with functions like drawWindow(). I'm guessing it won't be long before we see a Canvas.drawDOM() method
It’s tangential to this thread, but since it’s a topic close to my heart:

If you just implement this formula using doubles then it only gives the correct answer for input values up to about 70. Yes it’s pretty fast, but a static table of the first 70 Fibonacci numbers would be even faster. If you’re only interested in the first few dozen Fibonacci numbers then it doesn’t really matter what algorithm you use, as long as it isn’t naive recursion.

If you want to get correct answers for larger Fibonacci numbers, you need to work harder to use this equation. You need some sort of multiple-precision floating point arithmetic library, for example.

And once you’ve done that, the resulting algorithm is quite a lot slower than the best integer methods.

I wrote a big blog post about this back in July: http://bosker.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/computing-fibonacci-n...
The exporting scripts are pretty trivial just using the APIs each of these services expose. The hardest part is setting up the OAuth bits, which require a web server to host a callback endpoint. This makes it non-trivial for the average person to run the scripts and becomes a nightmare for support.

That said, I might open source it at some point just so that people can audit it and verify that I'm not doing anything malicious.
At the moment, they're the only major carrier to offer non-capped unlimited data, and their "simply everything" plans (unlimited talk/text/web) are as cheap or cheaper than the Verizon/AT&T equivalents.
Evolving the Start menu - Building Windows 8
I lived in Japan for around six months last year, and I estimate that I spent around $2,000 per month. I stayed in a nice dormitory-style guest house run by Oakhouse. Rent was about $750 per month, with no key money or anything like that. The bedrooms (bed, desk, and mini-fridge) are private, but the rest is shared, which led to me making friends with some really great people.

I wasn't in full-tourist mode, but I didn't go out of my way to save money. I found it fun to learn how to shop and cook most of my meals like a local might (lots of chicken curry and yakisoba), but I regularly went out for dinner with friends, and drinking binges on the weekends.

I lost quite a lot of money to Bank of America's ATM and currency conversion fees (I later got a Capital One money market account, which has better fees, and finally Schwab, which has none). I saved a tremendous amount of money by buying huge bags of chicken at Seiyu (Walmart), and learning what out-of-the-way big grocery stores my Japanese housemates shopped at. I could have saved a lot of money on train fare if I'd blown $100 on a cheap bike from Seiyu (or gotten a local to buy a bike at the ward sales they have every few years -- abandoned bicycles collected by the police are sold cheaply, but it's only open to ward residents).

Getting a cell phone is a huge hurdle now. You have to pay exorbitant rental fees, or have a foreign resident card (not available on a tourist 'visa'). Or, do what I did, and get a local friend to buy a prepaid phone in his or her name. That will have to be a very good friend. :-D
The second day Flash died
If you're not in it for the money, you're not an entrepreneur, you're a charity worker. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/daeken/status/120926390685151232
We want to fund founders that are going to be successful.

I love Y Combinator, and I'm proud to be a part of it, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently...

Many many organizations exist, whose purpose is to filter people who want to do something down to the few percent who are most likely to succeed at that thing, and then to help those people get even more likely to succeed at it.

But that seems like it's actually a kind of operating on diminishing returns. If I take someone who is 90% likely to succeed at something, and help them to become 95%, is that really a better use of my time than if I take someone who is at 50%, and bump them up to 80%?

From an investment point of view of course I can see why people would do the former. But I wonder if the world might be a better place if we could figure out how to do the latter?
RailsCast is an amazing service and I don't know if I could've ever learned Rails (and the RoR ecosystem) without it. Definitely a service worth paying for. I'm glad he's keeping the free episodes because it would be a shame if newbies shied away from trying it out because episodes were no longer free.
Good tips. I've seen a lot of the same myself. With all the brilliant engineers around, it's amazing no one considers simple problems like this.
Appcelerator Titanium can produce desktop apps for Mac OS (among many other platforms): http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-desktop-applic...
I have an unlimited data plan on Verizon, and was told last week it could transfer to LTE. (Didn't make the switch though; I opted for the Droid 3 and its physical keyboard.)
Aahz's law

The best way to get information on Usenet is not to ask a
question, but to post the wrong information.
I think that's a bit of a misread. Sometimes ravenous adoption comes from something that legitimately makes 90% of cases easier. Once I tried MongoDB, it effortlessly became my default for projects large and small going forward - SQL would be a lot of extra work. NoSQL scaling well explains companies adopting it, but it doesn't explain the masses of individual developers and tiny startups jumping to it. That's explained by it being really, really pleasant.
you realize that you're just making Ted's point for him from the opposite direction, right?

his point, when you look behind the trolling, is that node.js is not magical special sauce and that shitty coders who write poorly-scaling code will be shitty coders who write poorly-scaling code no matter what technology they use -- the "cancerous" properties of node arise simply because of the amount of groupthink that pitches the Next Big Thing as intrinsically better than everything that came before it.