skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
XBit did a good calling out what AMD is doing here that is different (and in its infancy, disappointing with traditional benchmarks).

AMD has decided to step back from the brink of maximum-speed per core, to maximum-cores-per-chip.

If you look at the Anand benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-...

you'll see in very multi-threaded applications (like compression or encoding) the AMD CPU actually keeps pace with the 2600k; in other applications where it is more important to have faster single threads of execution, the Intel 2600k pulls ahead by a drastic amount though.

These are the early days, but if AMD gets this down to 22nm next year and puts 16 cores on a desktop PC -- each core may be only running at 4Ghz, but in a scientific computing or server environment where you have 16, 4Ghz cores as opposed to 4, 6Ghz cores on some equivalent Intel can make a big difference.

The new Bulldozer platform looks to be a strategic company gamble on all fronts (more cores, less speed per core) that could win AMD big in the server space (which is exploding) and in scientific computing environments.

I'm not saying the numbers aren't disappointing, I was hoping to see some big ones in there to. I'm only pointing out that this isn't quite apples to apples, and when it is (e.g. straight multithreaded benchmarking) the comparisons look OK.

All that said, I'm sure Intel has something waiting in the wings (e.g. 2800k) to shit all over this party and beyond that we have tri-gate IvyBridge CPUs next year that will hopefully bring a much-needed* leap to CPU performance.

* "needed" as defined by "my impatient ass likes fast things.
Your app is nice, but it's nothing like Siri.

My dumb phone is an '07 Motorola Razr on Verizon's OS (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_RAZR#Verizon_Wireless_...). It has a button on the side that I press and a computerized voice says "Say a command:" and lists the options:

1. Call <Name> <Loc>
2. Call <Number>
3. Send Text <Name or #>
4. Send Picture <Name or #>
5. Lookup <Name>
6. Go to <App>
7. Check <Item>

It only understands these 7 commands. The voice processing wouldn't be good enough to compose a text message, #3 just sets that up for you to key in, but it's doing the job on a 50 MHz single-core ARM9 CPU instead of uploading it to a server somewhere. I have no beliefs that the above task is anything like Siri.

Siri is not about turning speech into text. That's been done already, everyone else has a button on their phone that does this, and you're offering them this familiar (and often broken or bad) functionality in an app for Android (Note: I'm not implying that your app is broken or bad). As long as your app is like what people are used to, you'll have a hard time of sales. Once you cross over to the functionality of the well-marketed and Apple-branded Siri, you'll do much better. Based on the description of your features, you're not there yet.
uh... he lost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeis...
Anyone know how to do a restore without backing up first? Like a lot of others, the restore is failing for me when it communicates with Apple and every time I retry, it does a backup that lasts about 30 minutes. I'd love to just keep retrying without doing the backup each time.
Too bad the display is glossy. I tried it for over a year, but I can work much better on a matte screen.
Excellent stuff, as others have mentioned, I thought of Tufte meets Web.

The "Tools & Implementation" section had me thinking of the pure data sound programming environment - the way you drag the numerical parameters in the code (cheekily reminiscent of processing) that draws the circles to change values.

tangle.js is referenced in the html of the page, and I shall certainly be looking into that for maths visualisations at a more humble level.
"I need to write a server-side program that does complicated business logic and database queries and stuff. Why can’t I use JavaScript? I demand JavaScript!

I don’t want that silly, ugly, badly designed public static main void nonsense, but just a clean, powerful JavaScript function!

Failing that, I demand a language that allows me to write Java programs in JavaScript, and I demand it now!"

RTFM

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/sc...
Why you should measure project length
IOS 5 Update Problems
Whoops. Google Engineer Accidentally Makes His 'Plus Sucks' Rant Public.
Thank you for a well-thought out response that comes to a non-popular conclusion.
'Worst customer ever' stiffs bartender
I can't help but feel that, while this is inspirational to all those slow starters, there are very obvious places where he could have catalyzed his business much much sooner and without the need to jump in full time or quit his job.

Of course, one would say hind site is 20/20. But for a lot of serial entrepreneurs they'd rather fail fast than drag something out. This post could just have easily been about how someone spent 10 years chasing a different business model that wasn't viable. You just so happened to nail it.
Like riding bikes? Here's a wheel.
Commenter was an obvious troll.
The Facebook market valuation bubble, and a better valuation methodology
You're not replying to my comment so much as you're using it as a coat rack to hang more random news stories about Monsanto on.

Obviously, the practice of suing farmers for (ostensibly) abusing licensed seed is controversial. Obviously you're going to find a lot of stories with a lot of angry farmers and angry farmers' advocates.

But you're not actually making a point with those citations, unless I'm missing it. Help me understand what this has to do with whether Monsanto is right or not?

Schmeisser, by the way, is a uniquely bad example: he didn't just make unauthorized copies (accidentally or not) of Roundup-ready seeds; he also used Roundup to control weeds on the Roundup-ready crops.
"most hated aspects of the company (genetic manipulation of seeds)"

1. Genetic manipulation of seeds is going to feed the world. And at the rate our population is growing, we're going to need it.

2. They weren't talking about genetic insertions, instead they said "Genome Analysis". Genome analysis helps plant breeders find plants that already have advantageous genes and try to quantify their effect of these genes.

3. I don't particularly like Monsanto (I worked for a competitor) but I'm not sure Monsanto is "one of the world's most hated companies" outside hacker and hippie circles.
Thinner is more expensive. And SSDs.
> they're not only admitting to power one of the most hated aspects of the company (genetic manipulation of seeds), but they're actually touting it as a win for the company.

It is a win for Cloudant. A huge win. They're a data company, not a biological warfare company. Their product will be used in an incredibly data-intensive application to do some really cool analysis. That's awesome for a data startup, and something to be proud of.

If I were a maker of a light-weight, high-strength alloy, should I be ashamed if Lockheed Martin wants to use it in their newest fighter jet? Of course not. I should be stoked that my product is getting such a high-profile endorsement, and excited about what it means for future development.

This announcement lends huge credibility to BigCouch, and will likely lead to future deals. They'd be idiots and incredibly poor businessmen if they didn't announce it with some fanfare.
It's a page of text, not a webapp.
So you would rather every YC company shared your politics, and vote up stories about how they made business decisions to boost those politics.
> wouldn't be surprised.

There is much we don't know. There are many processes of ongoing genetic transfer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

Next time ask for clarification.
Yeah , he's pretty epic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyuzNP_UP4w
1. I'm from India, and most of the kids are still living with parents at the age of 20. So stop worrying about it.

2. Find out exactly what you want to do. It might take some time, but you gotta continue the search. Meanwhile at least find a part time job to pay your bills. If you're smart enough to have a good job in the first place, you'll at least find a part time job in a restaurant.

3. No one else can make things happen for you but you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, prep up the gun, and start shooting.

There's no gurantee that you'll be the next Steve Jobs, but not doing anything about your current situation is a sure shot way of failure.

All the best.
The main problem I have with Monsanto is that in many areas they are they only game in town. In some cases even following the rules will get you sued http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110927/01185716104/monsan... So yes Monsanto win most of their cases, it does not make them ethical.
Bad move. A step backward for humanity. All efforts should be made to make knowledge available easily and on large scale.
What kind of leap? The jump to an i52400 has been enormous for me. It's hard to imagine another similar one over the core 2 duo I was on before.

Do you think AMD are going to be ready for memristor based memory?
Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but metrically shown as advancing.

That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that people can rank themselves (and we do).

This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics' which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.
I think 'never' is way too strong a statement. As mentioned in other comments 100+ student lectures are pretty much as impersonal, the only difference is you can rewind an online lecture, and usually have it taught by one of the best in the field.

Additionally I've supplemented poor university teachers with excellent online classes to much success. Personally I think the future of education should be something like students taking Stanford's ai class with local teachers acting as TAs and adding a few supplements + classroom interaction. You read Norvig's textbook, why not have him teach the material if you can?

Having taken far more than my fair share of classes, my experience is that, aside from project heavy courses, only upper level grad classes are really something you couldn't replace with a mass-audience, online course. And these are just training wheels for researching closely with a professor or research team anyway.

For lower to mid level undergraduate courses I actually feel that online classes (given that they are top tier classes) are better. A good teacher is much, much more important in earlier learning than later (a smart grad student should have no difficultly learning advanced material even with an awful teacher)
First, Cringley is simply wrong on many of his points. I don't think he's kept up with this stuff very closely, but that isn't the main point I want to make.

I think everyone is missing a major point in these sort of debates. The JVM uses a shit ton of memory, and this makes it expensive to host. If someone is a poor student that is trying out different ideas for websites, then they can do it much cheaper if they don't use the JVM.

There is a reason there aren't a bunch of shared hosting providers offering jvm support, and if you look at VPN prices I'll bet money that the two things you look at are the memory allocated to your VPS and the price.

Even on the development front, I just had to order a new laptop at work because we're using the JVM and I need to run 3 JVM web services at a time every now and then, plus an IDE and I simply can't do that with 4 gigs of ram which is the max for my current laptop. The JVM process for a hello world servlet, after being hit by a number of requests, will need about 100MB of ram, for a hello world string response!

The JVM is great in certain circumstances, but it's terrible as a cheap platform for people trying to bootstrap and test the viability of ideas. I can run 3 or more ruby, python, or php sites on a $20/month VPS. I can't do that with the JVM, and I'll always bet on the bottom up technologies.

Also, he's assuming that modern times are like the past, and that you can't easily mix interpreted and compiled languages, but on the JVM this isn't so. You can use JRuby and rails, and code the hotspots in java. Hell, you can even code some of the urls in pure java and leave the less significant bits in rails. To make the situation even better, you can start off with C ruby on a cheap vps and if you're idea takes off convert it to JRuby and then start replacing the bottlenecks in java, scala, or whatever.
I know socialists hate it, because they hate capitalism. I don't think libertarians hate it, because they don't hate capitalism.

However, as libertarianism has become popular, more and more there are socialists (leftists, "democrats" and "liberals") who are deciding they are "libertarians" without understanding what libertarianism is.

Libertairans -- and this is what defines the movement-- are people who agree with the Non Aggression Principle. (aka NAP) In fact, to be a Libertarian Party Member, and get your card, you had to sign a pledge that you subscribed to the NAP.

Show us how Monsanto is violating the NAP, and a libertarian will agree that Monsanto should be held accountable for the crime.

Libertarianism isn't really so much about hating, or loving various companies. It is really about enforcing the NAP against anyone who would violate another's rights using violence.

Sometimes this includes companies as well, but we're pretty resistant to the piling on that a lot of people do. (e.g.: "I hate monsanto, therefore cloudand is evil").
Mass infections on IIS sites (using SQL injection)
X.commerce "Fabric" (Ebay, PayPal, Magento)
Occupy It News | Curated News Service Covering the Occupy Movements
Google's "stubby" technology hasn't been talked of publicly before has it ?????
Perhaps they are caching their results?

You could try modifying the URL a bit to try and trick in into thinking it's new (add a '?' or '/', pass some useless variables)
Performance feature page is amusing with all the "Fruit Brand" and "A Brand" comparisons: http://zenbook.asus.com/product/?c=4
It is time like this that me more certain why frameworks like RingoJS or Helma.org is way way ahead of it's time. It use a dynamic scripting language (javascript), but sitting on top of JVM. The code are compile to byecode.

It has the best of both worlds. (Dynamic language and speed of java).
Is it just me... or could we organize a purchase / invite chain chain and let an unlimited number of people get a 25$ item for free..
Hey I'm in that class! lol. (Actually I'm in all three of those online Stanford courses this quater, DB, Machine Learning, and A.I.)
How is this better than google voice commands?
I don't have time to get into that discussion, but if you google "the most evil company in the world" you'll see they're fighting it out with De Beers and one or two others for the top spot. There's also plenty on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

They're basically 80s/90s Microsoft at its worst, but in agriculture of both the developed and developing world (the latter being particularly heinous).
"Suicide. Everyone responded as they should. But if you meant it, this post wouldn't exist because you'd be hanging from a rafter right now. Just a thought."

You obviously mean well, but this statement bespeaks ignorance about suicide prevention. Most but not all suicides are preceded by warning signs, and talking about it openly automatically places the speaker in the high risk category.

The intent to kill one's self begins with ideation and grows from there. At first, idle thoughts about killing yourself begin to drift through your mind at random. Driving down the freeway, out of fucking nowhere, you imagine yourself veering into oncoming traffic. Or maybe you're in the kitchen taking an Advil and the thought comes to your mind, unbidden, to just down the whole god damn bottle and chase it down with vodka.

These images are like demons, and they are not easy to exorcise. As the imagery and impulses grow more intense and vivid, some victims will say something to offer a clue to those around them or to ask for help. The problem is that this warning often doesn't seem serious because the victim is so torn between two conflicting desires: 1) the desire to end suffering, and 2) the desire to live.

You see, the crux is this: just because someone doesn't want to die doesn't mean that they won't kill themselves. If they're talking about it, then you should treat it as though they're asking for help. I missed the same warning sign because I thought just as you did, that those serious about suicide would be dead rather than talking about it. I was wrong. The only thing that saved her was luck. Luck and a responsive ER.

Take it seriously.
I don't think it's going to change that fast. While unemployment remains high, a degree from Khan academy (so to speak) is not likely to get anyone out of the resume pile and into a job. There's a shortage of STEM talent in the US so the tech world is a bit more open-minded about what constitutes a viable education, but in many fields you simply can't work without a qualification from an accredited institution.

Take law, for example. In CA, NY, and a few other states, would-be lawyers can study via apprenticeship, distance learning, or some combination of the two; although this can be a career handicap compared to attending a decent brick-and-mortar school, it doesn't impede one's ability to sit the bar exam and receive a law license. But in Texas (a large and growing legal market), it does - you can be admitted as an attorney to some other state bar and to federal bar, but if you got your law degree by correspondence then you won't be given a TX law license. Of course this won't last; eventually some attorney with a non-traditional legal education will win some landmark case in a federal appeals court, and barriers like this will be scrapped because nothing succeeds like success, and no state bar wants prevent a big client from hiring the star lawyer of the moment due to some ancient admittance rule. But right now there's much more supply than demand, so employers have little or no incentive to take a risk.

Of course, many jobs do not require same sort of rigorous standards that exist in the professions; you could make an economic argument that all credentialism is a kind of rent-seeking. But it's not going away until there's some alternative measure of skill that adequately predicts performance. Again, it's a bit easier in tech; you can sample the results of someone's work on their web page, and often it either works or it doesn't. It's less obvious how to do that in other fields.
Forgive me for being dense, but is 22" insufficient or were you just suggesting that you didn't believe Amazon? Here in Memphis I've seen devs work on setups ranging from 13" to 24" depending on the team.
Even if all your databases are running at LUDICROUS SPEED thanks to SSDs, his argument is still irrelevant. That same LUDICROUS SPEED can be applied to technologies which can be used to mitigate the computational times of slower languages (e.g. caching)

Faster permanent storage will only help to close the ENROMOUS GAP between disk access latency, RAM access latency, and CPU cache access latency, which has continued to grow over time.

As Cliff Click said: RAM is the new disk. The real place languages like Ruby are suffering is through excessive object creation and mutation which blows the CPU cache. That would be a cogent argument. SSDs = LUDICROUS SPEED does not.
Ask HN: what cloud services do you want?
Welcome to the quick-and-easy, single-page, no-patents-pending, not-got-much-rat-in-it Cloud Backend Services Survey!

A brief introduction: I'm Steve Newman, co-founder of Writely (now part of Google Docs) and ex-Google engineer. It seems to me that the Internet is on the cusp of a golden age of interdependent services. In particular, hosted (aka "cloud") services that are used as building blocks. This is an exciting field and what we've seen to date is just a warm-up.

I'd like to do my part to advance the state of the art, and to start with I'm gathering information on the status quo -- what services are you using, what is your experience, what would you like to see. If you're reading this, you're the kind of person I need help from. I've posted a short-and-sweet survey at http://app.fluidsurveys.com/s/backend-services/, or just respond here in the comment thread.

Since I'm asking the community for help, I'd like to give back as well. I'll do that in two ways:

1. By publishing the survey results on my blog (http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com).

2. By donating to the EFF! For each survey response up to 200, I'll donate $2.50. If I get 200 responses, the donation will jump to $1000. (Disclaimer: the EFF has not endorsed this offer; they don't even know about it. I'll just write them a check.)
More like accurate reporting? It makes sense that when you load an external Javascript file on the top or middle of the page would reduce your website's speed.
I really like BigCouch - a great open source project. Awesome, really.

That said, I think that Cloudant should have kept a low profile as far as bragging about a big deal with Monsanto, a company that I personally dislike more than any other corporation on this planet. Awful company!!

That said, I don't blame Cloudant for accepting the business, but they should have just put it in their Edgar SEC filings, and not done any press releases. I hope that they did not actively market Monsanto, and that Monsanto liked BigCouch and approached them. That would make it more palatable for me.
RIAA isn't even in the same universe. You can certainly debate how many innocent lives Monsanto's,BP,Halliburton and Xe Services have on their concision, but I think it's safe to say that everybody agrees it's greater than zero. I doubt even the most rabid RIAA hater would try to argue that the RIAA had actual blood on their hands. RIAA fucks some bands out of money and use lawsuits to shake down people on dubious legal grounds, that's a far far cry from actually letting people die.
Touchless interaction. Google Voice Actions requires you to interact with the phone via touch in most instances.
Both Steve Wozniak and Bill Joy went to Berkeley. These are the most famous ones that come to mind, but there are a ton of other ones--we have a very strong startup culture here.

As for "moguls" rather than founders, I think the current CEOs of both Intel and Qualcomm are from here, as well as Eric Schmidt.
I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, they're quite large, gaudy, and bloody repetitive.
Have you guys used the new interface? It sounds like you're coming up with imaginary solutions that are already deployed. The nav does shrink up on many pages, and every single update we've pushed out over the past 2 years has brought the administrative chrome smaller and the source code up

I'm happy to provide older screenshots for reference if you don't believe me :) In a way it makes me really happy — people see more white space and assume they've lost useful real estate. But the truth is they got more space and more real estate.
Healthy food in an airport.
Social Media Crunch Time
how dare people want to learn stuff.