skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very interesting article, as I'd heard references to SPDY before, but didn't know what it was.

However, I am bothered by the fact that this is a piece on performance yet it contains no hard data. Without quantifying the scale of the improvement, I have no idea if this is a 2% optimization, or a 15% one.

Also, does it matter if only one side of a connection has slow start enabled? IE, does it require symmetrical SPDY, or would I see improvements on my server and desktop if I made this change?

(Side note: the requirement for performance data is analogous to ROI data in business.)
Another response:

Kurzweil also ignores economics. The advance of technology is driven in part by economic forces. Computing power may stagnate not because we have reached physical limits but because present-day computers are good enough for what 98% of the market wants.

I see this trend developing. If anything, the trend in consumer computing is toward less powerful but lower-power and more portable computing devices. My current laptop -- a Macbook Air -- is actually slower than my previous laptop. But it is more portable and uses less energy. And it does everything I want. I don't need more power right now.

The only areas driving the performance end are gaming, high performance computing, and high-capacity data centers. How long will those go until they too are basically satiated?

We've seen this in other areas. The envelope for aviation maxed out in the 1970s with things like the U2. Space flight seems to just now be emerging from a long coma with things like SpaceX, but on closer examination SpaceX is just reviving 1960s ideas and doing them at a lower cost with modern control systems and materials technology.

My other reply about energy deals with supply-side limits to growth. This response deals with demand limits to growth.
This article is mean spirited, too serious and not well written.

Bad programmers I have known generally:

- Are oblivious and clueless. They just lack cleverness.

- They lack problem solving abilities and willingness to solve problems.

- They are usually slow witted.

- They are very conventional-minded - external approval means a lot to them.

- They are willing and ready to work too hard at programming for a result.

- They lack abstract reasoning skills.

And most bad programmers don't like Star Trek or science fiction, but I can't figure out why other than simple correlation with the mindset of a programmer.

The first set of six "real" causes pretty much encapsulate 99% of the mediocrity I've witnessed in industry in this field. Bad programmers usually have two or more of these problems. Even one of them is a serious problem if you are looking for a great developer.

All other badness, such as "meal ticket" thinking, usually radiates outward from these things.

I say this because if you lack the quickness and the desire to seek simple and elegant solutions, the work becomes like drudgery and your work reflects the other deficiencies that the article described.

A specific example: if you care too much what non programmers think (including your managers) and if you are a bit of a toady, you will not take the time to learn what is going on in-depth, and you will look for quick solutions. So it's important to strategically ignore your bosses from time to time and if you are trying to be politically popular, software development isn't a good place for this.

Another example: if you "want" to work very, very hard, you will not seek ways to simplify the code. You will instead cope with growing complexity and spaghetti.

I question the article writer's programmer instincts because he did not figure out a much more efficient and concise way of expressing the same things. Above all else, a real programmer figures out how to say it just once - not repeatedly cast in different ways.
Awesome!!

And, seriously, why the downvotes on the grandparent comment?

On a ketogenic diet, I've lost 40 lbs of fat in 18 months, and my wife has lost ~100 lbs during the same time period. Eating fat doesn't make you fat.
Stuxnet Returns? Duqu: Researchers Warn of Similar Cyber Attack
429 looks to me as if it might be addressing aggressive http pipelining, but I was under the impression that most browsers have pipelining turned off.
What are the big advances in linear programming that happened since 1988?

As api mentions in the comments here on HN there are areas of work where progress stopped. For example passenger jet speed was once thought to continue at a rapid rate such that LA to Europe flights would be a few hours. Skyscraper height was thought to continue, with advances in various technologies and engineering methods making it desirable. Both hit realities that signficantly slowed down their progress.

I tend to side with Allen on this. While we're bright people, I don't know if I see us able to keep increasing computing power while keeping actual power consumption reasonably low.
Your first sentence is basically what I think is happening, so I'll soften the language to be less abrasive. I don't think it's a fundamentally different claim-- they're saying it's open source while not releasing the source. It's dishonest.

Your stat about the 98% of Android devices is somewhat convincing. 3.0 and 4.0 aren't a fork for tablets though, are they? Future phones will use 3.0 and/or 4.0, right?
I don't believe that (see the devil's advocate tags...). But, some people obviously do.
My new startup: A Hacker Alarm for Email
A good talk. Leave it to a lisper though to call testing and type-checking "guardrail programming". Hickey says instead you should reason about your programming without acknowledging that testing and type-checking are ways to have executable documentation of your reasoning about your program. Testing does in fact feedback into complexity - if something is hard to test it may be due to complexity that you realize you should get rid of.
Siri and Voice Actions
Louisiana Makes It Illegal To Use Cash For Secondhand Sales
Working as a Rails Contributor -- About my experience
Largely. Two things killed that off -- the jet age (meaning that travelling to another continent is now easy) and the greater connection of the third world to the first world.

Open borders for a rich country just aren't practical any more, if they want to remain a rich country. Like osmosis, open borders mean that people will flow from countries crappier than the US to the US until the US ceases to be less crappy than any other country.
What passenger jet speed and skyscrapers really hit is economics: demand limits to growth.

Most super-tall skyscrapers are economic disasters. There seems to be a maximum economically rational height to a skyscraper, and it's already been reached. You can build higher, but if you do you're wasting your money.

A human-level or beyond AI would probably be like the Burj Khalifa: an economic disaster. Why build it when screwing and popping out babies is far cheaper and already works? If you want to exceed human intelligence, it would be a lot cheaper to augment human brains with external digital assistants (like what you're using now) or implants than to re-engineer an entirely new embodiment.
The screenshot is of an older version of HN. pg, Did the change occur as a result of showing up on Contrast Rebellion?

There's a fair amount of merit to downvoted comments having their contrast lowered.
Android 4.0 ‘still not strong enough’ to compete with iPad, vendors fear
I wonder if other JVM languages, e.g., Scala, would have the same performance in the "Hello World" test cited in the article.
While I was studying in the UK I met several Latin Americans who told me were living there as good as they could until 10 years (I think, maybe less) have passed. It seems after you are there (in any way) for 10 years, you can somehow claim the residency.

The straight facts may be different, but that was the general idea of what I understood.
Gadhafi is Dead
Actually the E3 visa lets you hang around more or less indefinitely, but it explicitly does not allow you to apply for permanent residency.
(author here) I have the same question. We'd love someone to do it (esp. a Scala pro) and send us a pull request.
I've noticed it in big and small companies alike. I think it's b/c when someone is checking email his/her mind is not in the proper state to pause and type a detailed reply to a 10 paragraph message.

It's purely a consequence of all the demands on peoples' attention and the ambiguity with which most people write/think. Face to face or even telephone interaction allows for ongoing verification of mutual understanding. For an example of how long and detailed emails sent/read by smart, capable people can create much confusion, ill-will and chaos, check out LKML :)
Announcing the iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011
iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour 2011
The point is that if physical law is deterministic, then none of these experiments are going to tell you anything about free will that you didn't already know. Yes, they tell you that people are confused when they say "I decided to do X" when, in fact, the normal decision making part of the brain wasn't involved with doing X because X was actually artificially stimulated by the experimenter's electric probe. But if you believe in determinism already, what does this tell you about the possibility of free will? Given determinism, we already know that all actions and choices can be traced back to previous causal events, so we already know people are confused when they think that their choices are somehow not caused by previous events but come from their soul or whatever.

So none of the empirical facts are under dispute. The question then is a purely philosophical one: is there a sensible notion of free will given determinism? Should (normative claim!) we treat people like they have free will, i.e. punish/reward them for their actions?
Today is World Statistics Day
Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed?

Storage capacity.

The brain is relatively slow. Ignoring microtubules, we're just dumb chemical reactions. But we are a lot of dumb chemical reactions. A human brain is ~ 100 billion neurons with each neuron having 100 to 7000 connections to other neurons.

So, just estimating here, 100 giganeurons * 1000 connections = 100 trillion neuron connections.

To simulate that, we use matrices of floats for each connection. So 100 trillion 4 byte floats = 400 terabytes of memory (with lots of hand-wavy assumptions). The fanciest GPUs we have today top out around 3 GB of memory (but they have 1k great run-in-lockstep cores) and the largest whole non-proprietary system I've seen tops out at 1 TB of local RAM: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/quotes/212240?confirmation=1...

We can simulate parts (vision and hearing have advanced on neural networks in the past 5 years), but higher level cognition/motivation is still an unknown quantity.
Hopefully this will get more people interested in Clojure; more and better content should follow.
Chinese government defends its Internet policies as open and clear
Startup Quote: Bob Parsons, Founder, Go Daddy
What a feeling indeed. The photo with the black sky and the Earth's curvature made me, inexplicably, pump my fist in the air and say "Yeah!"

This is pretty awesome.
Maybe, but you can't complain if you choose to disobey the rules and they catch you.

Especially when the rules are just "dumb" rather than "immoral". That is to say, the United States is morally entitled to set rules about who can and can't stay in their country, and the rules at the moment are quite dumb.
I spent a good chunk of time last fall reading through them and it's a fascinating look at how games were made at the time. It's very well done.
i used to use class names to store data types (category is a perfect example). there's a really great reason to do this: you can style your objects based on that type of data without relying on CSS attribute selectors.

that said, i quickly learned that it's better to use data- attributes and copy them into the class when necessary. otherwise you end up with utilities like getCategoryFromClassName()
Actually, if you get a phone with the AMOLED screens, you can read in direct sunlight. I have a Nexus S, and I do that every single day. I take it out of my pocket the moment I step outside, the screen automatically jumps to full brightness, and I have no problems at all using the phone to read emails, set up GPS while I'm walking to my car, or compose text messages. I can even do this with my sunglasses on.
I thought becoming a Japanese citizen was impossible for foreigners.
Maybe it's just me, but it took me a second to figure out what I was looking at. "HTML Lists" didn't pop out at me right away as specifically meaning <ul> and <ol> for some reason. You should put the source code by your examples so people see what little they put in for the output they see, and it'll clarify (at least to someone like me) exactly what is going on here.

EDIT: I see now that your front page is an example, with source code. That wasn't obvious to me.
The Importance of "I Get It" Factor for Start-Ups Tech
You spammed Metafilter with this and it didn't go well:
http://projects.metafilter.com/3317/Hacker-Alarm-for-Webbase...

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/21097/Peddle-Your-Wares-Elsew...

And it got your account banned:
http://www.metafilter.com/user/137273
Anything that is measured and watched, improves.

- Bob Parsons (@DrBobParsons)

http://startupquote.com/post/11697249030
I think you look into too much the word "book".

The books you're thinking is a type of content. But if you look at book as a delivery technology (a stack of paper together) then its perfectly reasonable to have generated books, just like you have generated pdf reports with generated charts and graphs.

To make the kind of book you and I think of as content (novels, investigative journalism, etc...) using a pure AI/machine approach is still a bit away.

Personally, I'm experimenting AI + human solution to create the kind of books most people would want to read.

You are probably referring to this man.

"Philip M. Parker (born June 20, 1960) holds the INSEAD Chair Professorship of Management Science at INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France). He has patented a method to automatically produce a set of similar books from a template which is filled with data from database and internet searches.[1] At Amazon.com, Parker is listed as the author of 107,000 books that his program created and overall he claims to have produced 200,000 different titles.[2][3] This would make him one of the most prolific authors in the world. Parker publishes the automated books through ICON Group International, using several ICON group subheadings. Via EdgeMaven Media, he also provides applications for firms from different business domains to create their own computer-authored content material.[4][5]"

See:
* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_M._Parker
Four Maps of Occupy Wall Street's Global Impact
"tl;dr" does have a little more character, but it's a lazy and dim-witted kind many of us disrespect.
Austin, TX: Friday Night Hacks Winner & Recap
Put a working example or at least a screenshot on that first page. I don't have time to download a zip file and blah blah blah to see what you made. Make it easy.
> They don't seem to care about contributions from the community

Google accepts a lot of patches from the community. Many of the major custom ROMs regularly submit patches. Things aren't perfect at the moment since all this infrastructure was hosted at kernel.org and is still down, so I can't link you directly to examples of public patch submissions and code review, unfortunately. But I can tell you they used Gerrit for that code review.
Is this justice or revenge?
None of the empirical facts relevant to the question of free will are disputed. See my response to joeyo.
Websites 'should carry libel risk for anonymous posts'
Asus Padfone(Smartphone and Tablet Hybrid) coming in early 2012
A few weeks ago I was in a shore town that I had never been to before for a wedding.

Before driving to the rehearsal dinner I had to pick up some supplies, so I Yelped for the nearest grocery store. One more touch pulled up turn-by-turn directions.

I didn't know exactly how to get to the rehearsal dinner location, but someone had texted me the address and I could just plug that in on my phone and it could navigate me.

I didn't have anything to listen to in the car, so I just downloaded a podcast and listened to it while I drove.

My girlfriend called me along the way to see when I would be at the location. The call paused the podcast; when I ended the call it resumed it immediately. Since I could talk to her on speakerphone I wasn't really distracted from driving.

I got to the rehearsal dinner early so I checked some HN articles in Google Reader before everyone else showed up.

As other people have said here, a smartphone is incredibly useful when you get out of your house.
I totally agree. Advisers should be more like Asian parents. "Western" parents (much like "Western" advisers) start with the premisse that their children's self-esteem is fragile and therefore constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are. While Asian parents start with the premisse that their children's self-esteem will build up with improving performance hence are consistently critical and pushing their kids to improve. here's a link to different parenting styles - http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/01/asian-vs-western.... I think advisers might learn a thing or two about "parenting" startups from it
I can not be happy about the death of another human being, but I feel Gadhafi has done horrible things and was a great threat to the people he tyrannized.

I hope that Libya finds piece & prosperity.
You mentioned "reasonable safeguards" but I don't see how any legal safeguards can be both reasonable and effective - If they're able to stop me from sending someone a copyrighted file then they're necessarily able to monitor and control every channel of digital communication that's available to me. I don't think we'll actually end up with crazy DRM and a dystopia It's just that that's the logical conclusion of the industry and government's current approach. Until we take a stand against this things will get worse before they get better.

When the law is aligned with the market people will choose to pay for things. The only safeguard content producers will have is people's sense of reciprocity. This transition will take time but its a transition that can and should be supported by people in the tech startup space.
> The two models being the "development in public" model (Chrome, Firefox, Rails, etc) and the "release finished code" model (Android, most GPL components of closed source software, etc).

There is a spectrum here, not two distinct models of open source.

Projects like Python, Firefox, Linux (kernel), etc. are open source and developed in an open community manner. Decisions are made in the open, long-term plans are well-known, and anyone can participate.

Projects like Chromium are less open, some development is behind closed doors, the project is controlled by a single corporation, the decision making process is not transparent, etc.

Near the edge of the other side are projects like Android, which are basically developed in a closed way, then "dumped over the fence" when finished (which makes them open source at that stage).
I completely agree with Brin -- I can't stand Yegge's rants because they take far too long to get to the point.
I got bit by this using the Emacs package manager. It follows redirects, so it ended up trying to fetch a package and getting back a bunch of HTML with a 200 response code, which it tried to byte-compile with about as spectacular a failure as you would imagine.
Yes. I forgot to qualify that. By being along the Southeast U.S. seaboard, we're physically located close to some of the highest-bandwidth backbones in the world. I live about 30 miles from the Mid-Atlantic Broadband fiber backbone, one of the most advanced fiber backbones on the planet. So it's not like we're lost somewhere in the middle of Utah; there's plenty of bandwidth nearby. This is a local political problem -- no doubt we needed a big pipe, but to take all that time and money and build a pipe that doesn't even help those close-by? My opinion is that when these planners thought "economic growth" they thought about bringing in a new factory or large business. Therefore they spent the money in that manner. But the economy is growing in a different manner entirely. As the article mentions, we have an impedance mismatch between the way the old structures and institutions think things are supposed to work and the way they are actually working.
The list above the code is a working example of the code.
It is a working example on the first page? :)
http://opensource.apple.com/release/ios-50/
can you recommend a few?
The "natives" are immigrants too, just from slightly earlier.

We're all Africans.
Hotpoint dishwashers and Finish run ‘WIN a Maid for a year’ competition
In addition to the new Facebook page, entitled 'Hotpoint Helping Hands', Hotpoint and Finish are running a competition to win a cleaner for a year, along with special offers and all the reasons you need to ditch the marigold gloves.
I'm thinking that ultimately, you're testing two different things here. Language speed is part of it, but also the performance of your web server library.

I'm not saying it's unfair or meaningless, but it's worth bearing in mind that, for instance, the node.js web server is mostly written in native code, while the clojure web server is written in Clojure. For a large program, I imagine that node would get slower and slower, and Clojure and Scala would get faster and faster.
Besides, complaints about the length of Yegge's rants are already a long-running joke, dating back to the beginning of his public blog (and possibly earlier, behind someone's firewall).
Think I have to put a headline describing the list! Wait 5min :)
Being attached to the rig it could never go dead silent.
OSC Access: Build OSC into Ruby objects
Coffee itself is high margin, but the coffee business is not a high margin business.

You have to employ people to make coffee manually, and quickly. You have to buy a machine to aid them in this, and keep it in good maintenance.

Additionally, you have to supply perishables like milk to go in the coffee.

You have to keep them in your shop buying coffee, or incite them to buy coffee here when they're hungry instead of going to go to dunkin dounuts.

You can do this with nice decor, or by placing yourself in an already attractive location, or taking a margin loss on selling bake goods in order to bring in coffee customers.

In any case, your high margins for coffee product have rapidly vanished.
For good data and research on this topic, check the work done by the SPDY team (I linked it in the article, but its easy to miss):

http://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/viewer?a=v&pid=sit...

http://www.chromium.org/spdy/An_Argument_For_Changing_TCP_Sl...

As for slow-start question: CWND is set on the server (on the sender side). You can increase your advertised window, but that will have no effect since it's the server that ramps up the bandwidth, not the client.

If you do control both the server and the client then you will definitely see a difference.
Good job, I'm impressed! I have a couple of questions regarding the business model though:

Charging $2, after PayPal have taken their fees you get ~$1.60. International shipping via USPS for a postcard over to here (UK) is $0.98. That means you have ~$0.60 to make the cards and make a profit - it isn't much. Would you mind sharing how much it costs you to have the cards printed?

This leads me onto my next question, you cards are unique right (a message and address on the back), so how do you get this past the printers? I understand most do bulk discounts, but isn't this for identical prints?

P.S. I also ordered a card :)