skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A major difference is that cinema owners, airlines, sports teams etc. aim to maximize their users, and each additional user doesn't diminish the experience of other users (well to some extent, but not enough to make a huge difference to the demand).

A lot of spare capacity in server farms seems to be due to the need to cater for demand spikes, so that the experience doesn't degrade. Each additional user will, after a certain point, harm the experience of the previous users. A stronger analogy would be a power utility.

It would be quite difficult, I think, to do what you propose without being able to predict demand spikes well in advance and with a high degree of accuracy. Even if we could do that there's another issue: a power utlility can sell power to certain types of consumers at off peak times to soak up spare capacity, but electricity has many uses. A web-app isn't likely to have many non-core uses that would appeal to specific users at off-peak times.

Cloud providers can use this sort of strategy, but I don't think it would be useful for individual web apps, unless you are selling something very generic. The best way to deal with this issue, from the perspective of an individual web app, if it bothers one, would probably be simply to use a cloud solution, and let them deal with the excess capacity issues.
I like all the talk surrounding Postgresql recently, does anyone have any experience with moving from MSSQL to Postgresql?

I am not asking if one is better than the other because it depends what I am using it for but what about performance / reliability?
seems too good
> Visual Basic 3?

Never used it, couldn't say. But, I did find some online tutorial type stuff for VB6: http://www.vb6.us/tutorials/little-more-advanced-hello-world...

I think we're going to get mired in semantics and splitting hairs. After all, "get name of me" doesn't objectively make any more sense than "lblHello.Caption". Still, I find HyperCard's interface much cleaner in general, and key phrases like "Private" and "Option Explicit" are to me huge red flags for a beginner language.

So, you're right that VB3 could be used for a "make a calculator" lesson in the first week of a programming class. But, so far, I think I'd rather do it in HyperCard.
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I can assure you that this was in the United States.
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Hypercard was very interesting to me, enough so that I bought my first programming book, Danny Goodman's The Complete Hypercard Handbook. I loved tinkering about with Hypercard on my very first computer, a Powerbook 100 that I bought new in 1992.

I was sad when Apple decided to only include Hypercard Player with new Macs, which I also think ultimately helped contribute to its death. People liked Hypercard but not enough to pay money for it. By the time Steve killed it, it was a lumbering zombie of its former self.
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For me it was Adblock blocking your http://switchcam.com/assets/js/utils/logging.js script. Things work fine once I let that script load.
It's funny you mention a personal wiki. I think the first thing I used Hypercard for was to create a catalog of my comic book collection.

(All of the work that went into it was lost due to an accident, which taught me a hard lesson about the need for backups.)
No, it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't apply here. We aren't estimating the count of anything. We know he has two kids, we know there are two genders, and we know there are seven days. All other relevant counts can be calculated directly from these, no estimation required.

I already showed the probability that we would receive the message the way we did, assuming we're sampling fathers with two children, and its pretty low. If we drop the sampling assumption, it would go even lower. But that's irrelevant to the actual question, because we've already won that lottery. I've also shown the probability that we would get the statement we got given that the father had at least one son born on a Tuesday, but again, we already won that lottery.

If you still insist, can you please stop talking in hand-wavy fake math and show some actual concrete numbers? To start, if each of the 27 possibilities are not equally likely, what are the actual probabilities and why?
OK, so everyone agrees that it’s less discoverable, but how many actually used the old bar? I have only clicked an item in that bar once. When I realized that it opened a new tab I never clicked any of the items again.

I’m not clear on how this new selection will work, but if it lets me switch between GMail and Google Reader from one menu and remain in one browser tab, I’m happy, even if a bar would have been a little quicker for switching.
I'm pretty sure Network Link Conditioner is the same.
This is true, and I'm often peeved by exactly the same conflation. However, in cases like Clojure, where there's (as far as I know) really only a single implementation out there to be used, it's easy to blur the lines. Python is getting less so thanks to PyPy, though my perception of that is that thus far it's more on an "awareness" level than it actually being in widespread production use (though hopefully as it matures we'll see more of the latter).

The languages mentioned in this blog post present an interesting sort of in-between case though, since at some level you could almost regard them as being a collection of implementations of the same language (Lisp), rather than as actually distinct languages. I realize that's stretching some definitions a bit, but I think there's kind of a continuous spectrum there between "different language" and "different implementation of the same language". I mean, GCC implements extensions to C that aren't in the C standard and aren't (to my knowledge) supported in, say, MSVC; some refer to this as "GNU C", though I'd guess most non-language-lawyers looking at it would probably still call it "C" anyway.

On the whole though, I agree with you.
"But what I certainly wouldn't do is attempt to write a physics simulation in python"

Depends on whether performance is a hard requirement or not - I've written engineering simulations of parts of power stations (including one nuclear plant) in Lisp and they weren't particularly fast but nobody bothered because they weren't used interactively.

Eventually I did write Lisp to generate C++ code for the same models when we did want better performance and it worked really well - but I only did that as an optional step when someone needed the extra performance.
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I am getting more and more tried about this kind of arguments, I am studding Scala and I like it, It can be right for some things and wrong for others, it's just another tool in my toolbox like Java, JavaScript, Ruby... You gotta have tools, and be able to choose between a Hammer and a screwdriver when needed, that's the real "Hacker"
The website has some layout problems when viewed from the iPhone, and, more importantly, it appears to only have a description, but no Download button or a pricing information.
> Programmers don't make software that crashes for fun, you know.

I didn't say otherwise. Not sure why you brought this up.

You implied that this would motivate programmers to make software which doesn't crash, as if software which doesn't crash is pretty much a choice they could make but aren't making. I'm saying programmers are already trying to make software which doesn't crash and it's just not that easy - If a user seeing an error message isn't helping, how will the motivation of a user seeing a debugger change things?

I guess I still don't understand why "crash to debugger" would be worse than current behavior.

It would be worse in terms of user experience; I'm sceptical that it would help a tenth as much as it is implied it would help - crashes being so deep, so numerous, so subtle, and so often due to some interplay between "working" systems.

So, wait for a debugger to load, then close it again, would be the default action. And that would be annoying.
I'm intrigued: what massive negotiating power does spotify have to force labels / artists onto their platform? Is there a market failure here? What keeps the pricing unfair?

Why not just pull your music from spotify if you don't want it "sold" there?

(Written as a spotify premium subscriber who loves the service, but assumed that the music was legitimately obtained through a negotiation with the labels and / or artists).
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History of Node.js by Ryan Dahl [video]
Font rendering was pretty horrible in chrome
You mean like this guy? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3292555

Scala vs. Clojure is not something to discuss for this use case, I guess. As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293261 points out in that other thread, you won't write (recognizable) Scala (or Java. Or Clojure) code anymore if you want the best performance.
Hi bigohms
I totally agree with what you said ; I suck at getting my message across.

I am doing exactly what you said I should be doing "Perhaps a subscribable video playlist based on topics (like good alerts) not channels (like YouTube)". Could you be so kind as to just check my website and help me tweak my message.
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Doesn't work under Firefox 7, Safari 5.1 or IE8 either.
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Can you fix his code and paste it? Why not have him run the bench and post it as an update?
I think it's meant for mobile users (the domain is m.microsoft.com).

Probably it is optimized for iOS and Android.
"A fool and his money are soon parted." (Thomas Tusser, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tusser)
This is not the correct C program, this is a C program for the compiler with tail call optimization (or with the stack large enough for it to work). There's no TCO in the C standard.
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Font rendering is very nice for me (Chrome 15, OSX Lion).

What are you using?
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'Log4j for loggin' ? I would rethink that. Log4j , venerable as it may be, is getting long in the tooth .
The one small benefit of owning a Pure Google phone (Nexus One) none of this crap sneaks in. Otherwise this is just a Security and Privacy Nightmare. The disadvantage is no Ice cream Sandwich :(
"From my experience, generating a good UI (V) takes orders of magnitude more than implementing M and C."

yeah, because picking the right font has always been way more of a task than domain modeling..
(yes, i know that ui / ux isn't a breeze, but this depiction is just insane.)
Guy Steele said it better though. He wants not the fastest language, but the fastest way to get to the solution. It may mean that the language isn't as fast to run, but faster to program.
Yes, but how is moving the navigation bar to a drop down doing that? I understand your point, but unless I am missing something its just a random complaint against Google, in this case.
My understanding is that the platform has been pitched primarily as a "proof of concept" type thing to artists and labels with assurances that if enough people subscribe/stream the service and your music you can get paid out. My guess is that the forecasts and hopes aren't stacking up in payouts to the labels/artists quite how they hoped and the result is frustrating these individuals.

I'm sure there's a lot more at play here but this is what I've understood from the research I've done.
It's not about that. It's about "Oooo, shiny new music toy that's included for free with Facebook. Awesome! Now I don't have to buy music ever again!"

This inevitably erodes purchases from any other online outlet, which leads to less money flowing to artists. This is made worse by the fact that Spotify's royalty rate is absolutely abysmal. This is well known, and leads to less money flowing to artists.

Spotify is such a good thing for the consumer of music. I say that as a consumer of music who was a Premium Spotify subscriber until last week. But as an artist, it's just another mechanism for record labels to whittle down the money they owe you for your working for them. That's why I cancelled my subscription last week.

This is the key bit to me -

"...I actually prefer illegal downloading over Spotify because when you get music illegally it’s at least implicit in the transaction that what you’re doing is potentially harmful to the artist. But with Spotify, your conscience is clear because you’re either enduring ads or paying to use the service and access the music."
Yes, it's acedic to measure the worth of oneself and peers by money alone. But given that men and women are both in it for money, competing for equality/inequality measured by sex, it's necessary for the runners up to aim for the leaders as moving targets.
Wait until Firefox hits the version 10.0[1]. The article has a good point too. Chrome got it right with version numbering that doesn't appear important.

[1] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/
Why is that desktop browsers don't support tap events with mouse, while mobile browsers simulate "onclick"?
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I agree with your main point but think Clojure is not a good example as there are 3 "official" implementations: the JVM one, the CLR one and ClojureScript.
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A language can't be fast; a language is a notation. Only implementations can be fast or, perhaps, generate fast code.

Theoretically, maybe. But it is nearly impossible to come up with an implementation for Ruby, that is as performant as a compiled C program (and retains the characteristics of Ruby).

So, it is definitely true that it easier to compile some languages to fast machine or byte code than other languages. As a consequence, people will call Ruby slow, and C fast.
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You do get to preview songs on iTunes - can't remember how long it is, but it's certainly long enough for me.

It appears that previews can now be up to 90 seconds:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/02/itunes-previews/
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If programming suddenly became worth $0.00029 per line of code written, would you still do it for a living?
Ask HN: Github sms gateway, useful?
Ask HN: Would you pay for a graphic novel-like portrait avatar?
I'm trying to help an amazingly talented digital artist monetize his works. So, would you pay for a graphic novel-esque portrait for your twitter / facebook? Maybe depicted as your favorite character? If so, how much? Depending on the response, my buddy wants to seed his work (for free) and see what happens.

As always, any thoughts / feedback / advice would be appreciated.

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> psql template1? It doesn't make as much sense to me.

What doesn't make sense about it? It opens a postgres shell to the `template1` database, that's all...

And there should be very little reason to connect to `template1`: it is the default template for creating a database (it's copied to the new db file basically), so the only point in connecting to it is e.g. creating a few common tables or enabling extensions so that all the databases you create have them by default.

I've yet to ever need that.
There's something along those lines in the works, I don't see a name: http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/

It combines a few high-resolution still images with a low-res video to improve the video quality:

Static scene: http://vimeo.com/1513129
Dynamic: http://vimeo.com/2937785

(Looks a bit old (3 years) so I don't know if it's still in development)
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I think the author would be better off giving it away for free, earning goodwill and making a name for his dev shop, then releasing other apps to all the people who now are aware of him.
Yes a google phone is probably best from a privacy perspective, as you have full control over the phone, but AFAIK if you buy a pure Samsung, or other brand, phone, without "carrier customization", you're also free of this shit. It's the (US?) carriers that push this trojan on it.

Feel free to prove me wrong though...
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I don't think there is one, mysql only creates empty databases it does not have a concept of db templates.
If we forget about PHP for a while, I really like this way of constructing objects by using dictionaries (or environments or hash tables) and closures.

In fact, I would prefer that in a dynamic language, it would be the only way of constructing objects. I don't see much point in having classes in a language like Javascript, PHP or Python and I almost never use inheritance in these languages. Stuff like instanceof is a bad match for duck typing. Single dispatch method invocation adds very little value to a language that is already ducktyped.
This also works on 10.5 and 10.6
No, I said crash less. I completely avoid any debates about "perfect" software, they're pointless.

Maybe I misunderstood you. When you said, "I think that would drive anyone insane", I assumed that for some reason we were talking about a greater quantity of crashes. (Might've been the "any program ... any error" bit beforehand.)

Here, let's assume we're stuck with two options, and for both options, we'll assume that the initial rate of crashes is the same:

1. Program crashes. There is an unhelpful error message, or no error message, or it hangs. User reports the error, or doesn't, and reboots.

2. Program crashes. Debugger immediately loads. User can contact support, or not. Support may receive actually useful information about the cause of the error. User reboots.

I don't really see why the debugger scenario is worse in terms of user experience, and I'm a loud and vocal advocate for improving UX. To me, it's clear that there are strong benefits and no additional drawbacks to having a drop-to-debugger policy for broken software, because even if an end user can't do anything with it, we might be able to, and even if we can't, the end user is no worse off. You specifically say "wait for a debugger to load", but I remember MacsBug being pretty darn snappy. I can't think of a reason why it would be necessary to wait for one to load, certainly to wait any longer than you have to wait for an unhelpful error message as it is.

And, if dropping to a debugger was really a terrible, terrible thing, then yes, I think application developers would put more effort into preventing it. I don't expect software to magically become flawless, but we run into plenty of errors that appear to be caused by a programmer making an effort vs. reward tradeoff in favor of letting the bug go.

I mean, you and I both gave examples of frustrating software problems without even trying hard. There are countless others. Either these problems are an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of complex systems, as you seem to be saying, or they are examples of people putting in less effort than they could. If it's the former, we are well and truly fucked, because software is only getting more complicated, not less. If it's the latter, then I don't think it's fair to argue against efforts to make software crash less. You can't have it both ways.

Anyway, I think we're getting sidetracked, and this little discussion isn't fixing any bugs. Suffice to say, I don't think that mocking the author for daring to suggest that programs should error-drop into a debugger is a very powerful criticism. I for one would really appreciate it if they did that, so I guess I'm as nuts as he is.
ZoP doesn't say that there should be only one way to do something, it say there should be one obvious way to do it. That doesn't preclude alternate, equally or - preferably - less obvious ways. Many languages could stand close to that aphorism.
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Heh, reminds me of the old Windows 95 demo disks that used to be given out with magazines which gave a pretty convincing, interactive demo of Win95. Neat, works incredibly well!
Or sell it, and earn good will because he sells good products?
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As a non-US-citizen I honestly don't see any major problem with that. com/net/org domains are handled by US companies and it's therefore clear for me that they fall under US jursidiction. If I want a domain that the US cannot take away from me I just get one under a local TLD (which the US does not have access to).
Yeah, now that you can't see anything but camera phones while you're actually at the concert, you can watch it from youtube when you get home.

Thankfully this isn't too much of a problem at heavy metal gigs. No-one wants to take their smartphone to the moshpit :D
"When you pursue something difficult, eventually you have to make a choice between being balanced, normal, and conventional, and being different, weird, and exceptional. I chose the latter."

Wow. You are not a normal writer. More writing needs to come from the heart like this. I don't even care about video games and loved this article.
If you don't think it's different, wait for publishers to pull albums from Spotify. This happens all the time. poof gone. Does this happen to your CDs?
this is a beautiful piece of software! Thanks simon!
It seems to me that there is a major market opportunity in a co-operatively owned version of this sort of service, one that placed getting $ to the artist as it's highest goal. A more or less P2P exchange that let consumers stream/discover to their heart's content, but after a certain number of plays prodded them to buy. It'd be open only to artists without label/licensing encumbrances, and would therefore be able to funnel most of the money back to the artist themselves.

It seems really obvious if not simple, but the chief goal isn't to make piles of money for whomever builds it. That's the only reason I can see that it doesn't already exist.

Semi-side note - It irks the shit out of me that even something as cool as Spotify is still just a means of propping up the same old major label system.
I'd like to have something like this for Linux. Anyone got any tips how to set something like this up? Command line and kernel option hacking preferred to GUI gadgets.

I would need to test my virtual-connection-over-UDP code with packet loss, latency and incorrect packet order delivery and I really wouldn't want to write code inside my app to test.
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Weird, my comment really seems to be attached to the wrong parent. Sorry about that.

If you mean my definition is outdated, you mean that there is no such thing as ownership in the future anymore? Ownership is outdated?
It works in Safari if you set the User Agent to iOS (in the developer menu)
I'm not sure it's intrinsic to JIT. LuaJIT's footprint is no larger than the normal Lua VM last I looked.

It has more to do with how you pack your data and how much pressure you put on the GC (thus requiring more memory).