skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, you loadtested with ab, whereas the author launched his feature on the Google homepage.
no it doesn't, posts just disappear from the wall, you disappear from friends, although there were some bugs and sometimes you appeared as an empty avatar in some lists, such as page admins, etc.

still it's not about announcing lack of a specific communication channel (most of 'friends' don't care anyway), as I glanced at a few of them it's more about making a scene (facebook would be a good place for that. zing!).
This is a good point, and touches on what calebbrown said above, that apps are concrete, which makes it easier to pay for (psychologically). Perhaps the powers that be recognize this, or perhaps it's just a matter of the biz end of then interent starting to trend towards paid material. Money drives motivation here. This scares me a little, because it tells me we really are going to move into a world of apps....
Yes, I could see that. However, that still doesn't mean it should be opt-in for everybody. For most programs--particularly text editors--going full screen is basically minimizing.

I really like how KDE handles this: by default, full screen is like maximizing and turning off the borders/title bar (the window might also cover the panel on the bottom, but I have that hidden so I don't know). However, programs are free to do whatever they want in full-screen mode; Chrome, for example, treats it just like F11.

This lets me have the best of both worlds--if software does something special, it can; if it doesn't, I can still have it full screen, which is especially useful for programs like Emacs (which is its own window manager, really ;)).
Of course, less the quite possibly considerable difference between market rate and the reduced rate the engineer is being paid. If you go by Fred Wilson's numbers [1]: $10k per month per engineer, the engineers are probably accepting a $60K/year salary. That's an enormous pay cut for me at least, and well below market for virtually all engineers. So certainly the founders are taking very little money, but the engineer may well be making a $4k/mo investment as well...

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/12/burn-rates-how-much.html
There were a small number of great CD-ROMs back then. The Voyager Company did as much as was possible given the crappy hardware that existed.

Anyhow, I could come up with an equally harsh assessment of web apps as you did of native apps:

* web app discoverability sucks (seriously how much money is spent on SEO?)

* web apps constantly change on you or disappear when the shop is bought out

* web app development can be a multilayered nightmare of browser bugs and code shims

* you pretty much need to sell your soul to a bank or Paypal to sell anything on the web (let's see how Stripe works out long term before we declare victory there)

* many apps lack basic features like site-wide search, working back/forwards buttons, working bookmarking due to bad Ajax use, incoherent and inconsistent UI, etc.

Now, I happen to like web app development better than native app development, but I'm not a big fan of triumphalism in any of its stripes. Heck, the vast majority of websites out there would work just fine (or better) as paper brochures or a rolodex.

The web will continue changing and evolving and the browser will only be one of many ways that it will be consumed. Native apps will be integrated with web services more and more over time.

Apple has done a spectacular job of monetizing small apps, Google is building a good infrastructure for ad-sponsored apps, I wouldn't discount their long term potential.
Posting this anonymously because I don't want to seem like I'm plugging myself and my management would probably get angry.

I'm a standup as well, not quite as large as CK but a number of tv spots under my belt etc.

But it's absolutely right. There's barely anything.

You're average split goes a bit something like this:

Depends where you are. On average a theatre takes around 30%. A bit less in Australia (eg Melbourne Comedy Festival) which takes about 20%-25%. A bit more in European theatres (eg Edinburgh Fringe Festival) around 40%-45%.

Booking / Ticketing fee is around $3-$8 per ticket. For the average show ticket price that's about 10%.

Management takes a flat 15%-25%.

Depending on the scale of marketing, on average it's around 15% of the show budget. The industry wisdom is at least 10% of every ticket should be spent on getting people.

If there is a huge promoter behind you, they sometimes take a stake in the show, usually around 30% - 60% and includes the marketing budget. It's not that you're trying to convince people. It's more like, if they don't know you're there, they won't come.

Then all the travel / accomodation costs.

That's if you're doing theatre shows. The other side of the coin is college campuses, corporate entertainment, which pay a flat rate. The largest gig I did was opened in a 30k seat stadium and I made $4,000.... so not a lot.

Plus you're always touring, unable to maintain relationships, getting heckled (few careers involve being openly sworn at by masses, it's not healthy for self-esteem), feeling like a self-promoting whore and constantly wanting to die because you're whole career is shouting into darkness.

That doesn't even include the opportunity cost. It takes 10 years to get to the point where you can reliably book a 1000 seat theatre. That's assuming anybody comes in the first place... Until then you're making nothing.

It's not uncommon to see someone sell out a show and walk away with very little.

Whilst what CK did is amazing. I don't think it can be done by most standups. I think it would have turned out differently if he didn't have a tv show airing already, basically he's at the top of his career.

The scary part is if standup isn't as as lucrative as it's made out to be. Theatre in general is even worse...

But hey, we're all rockstars!
My inaugural post to HN. Article is by Faruk Ateş of Modernizr with writing help from me and a couple other badasses. Hope y'all enjoy.
I think it is pretty safe to say that "acts out in school to get suspensions to stop your mother from being a prostitute" is an outlier.

I acted out in primary school. I did it because I was an asshole who didn't respect education. I suspect my peers were the same.
Do you mean...

How long did it take to get your first customer?

-or-

How long did your first customer keep paying?

I am assuming the first.
HHVM is a follow-on effort to the static compiler. We got started long after HPHPc was in production; I started playing around in early 2010, and three of us (Jason, myself, and Drew Paroski) started earnestly putting in full-time work in summer of 2010.

I made up the term "tracelet." Do not use it when trying to sound intelligent. It roughly means "typed basic block," though the compilation units aren't quite basic blocks, and what we're doing isn't quite tracing, and ... so we thought it would be less confusing to just make up a name. Think "little tiny traces."

The bytecode is stack-based for a couple of different reasons, but it will probably remain stack-based because of compactness. Since instructions' operands are implicit, a lot of opcodes are 1, 3, or 5 bytes long. Facebook's codebase is large enough that its sheer compiled bulk can be problematic.

The translator doesn't turn the stack into SSA, instead turning it into a graph where the nodes are instructions and the edges are their inputs/outputs. You can sort of squint at this system and call it SSA where the edges are the "single assignments."
If you need a good laugh...
AppEngine instances, unless they're running in a special backend instance, exist in a special containerized machine. These machines are very slow and don't have much RAM - 600 MHz and 128 MB. Based on the source that was posted on the blog, this app was running on a normal instance, as the source did not contain a backends.yaml file.

So it makes sense that a Core 2 Duo running at 2.13 GHz and slow CoffeeScript would be ~2x as fast. My personal experience of running Go code locally (on a Core i5 2500K) versus on a normal AppEngine instance showed a slowdown of around 6x or more.
Users determine what is successful, not developers

- Web app discoverability is much worse

- Updates is a minor issue for users

- App development is not the user's concern

- App store approval is a net win for users. It eases their concerns about malware.

- Browser functions are not useful in most apps and the add an extra layer of abstraction

Native app can be made into just fine web apps but that is not always good enough. The best apps are still native.
China and the US argue about butchering the Internet-scapegoat
Sadly I don't have the opportunity. :-)
Chat Service Meebo Launches New Version Of Site Around Competitive Sharing!
It's something to see how people asked "What we've got right now is just fine, VisiCalc runs fast enough. Some of the database stuff runs fast enough. What are we going to do with this extra awesome power?" and what Jobs' response was.

He wanted to use that power to get that one-on-one interaction go smoother, which is what exactly it look like he did, up to the iPad.

It's also interesting that he mentioned the possibility of World War III, which was indeed on people's minds at the time.
'the public' is the group of people that bear the cost. And no, it doesn't cancel out; the cost of avoidable accidents to the individual members of the population is small, but not that small. AAA (which is in the sinsurance business, admittedly) estimates, based on Federal Highway Administration data, that fatal accidents cost about $6m on average, and that the total cost to Americans is >$1500 per person per year: http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2011_AAA_...

This is actually a great study - comprehensive, rigorous, and quite recent. The overall estimate of accident costs is just shy of $300bn/year, which is something like 1% of GDP. Even if we assume only 1/10th of fatal accidents involve innocent victims of careless drivers - probably somewhat low - that's still a substantial burden on the economy, which the public has a collective interest in mitigating.
I think so. I'm not sure, but when I deleted mine a while back I got texts from friends wondering if I was okay, or dead, or mad at them. So there was at least some way they figured out I was gone. It may have just been that they couldn't find me anymore, but the texts came in almost immediately after clicking the delete button.

It was kinda entertaining how so many people assumed that something major had to have happened for me to get rid of Facebook. Really it just started as a bet and then I never got back on.
Clojure's Lisp roots make its minimalistic hashes possible. There is a possible reason for separators in a language that doesn't have special syntax for function application (e.g. function calls can be written as "foo bar" rather than "(foo bar)" or "foo(bar)"), but Ruby doesn't take advantage of it. Take this map:

{
foo: capitalize bar,
baz: sanitize quux
}

Without the punctuation, it would be very ambiguous:

{ foo capitalize bar baz sanitize quux }
Solid-Run CuBox: Open Source Platform for Android & Linux Development
This is a little off topic, but I wish there were an option to see just comments with no photos or names so I could try to guess who is saying what.

I know, it doesn't have much utility, but it would be incredible.
Pushing DTD over XML Schema is pretty surprising. A DTD can't express namespaces correctly (documents aren't required to use the prefixes you hoped they would) nor constraints like "this attribute must contain a timestamp".

It should also be noted that the JSON Schema situation is pretty grim, with an expired Internet-Draft that has seen almost no live use, and that presents all the same problems as using XML with no schema (only worse, because there's also no standard for avoiding name collisions).
The Planet Wants You to Bike like the Danes
First off, everywhere (with respect to the talent pool) has lots of VC funding and investment activity. I can say without knowing where you live that with almost complete certainty:

1. there's more interest in ability to get companies funded there than ever before.
2. people are leaving your town to work in the bay.

That said, I was pretty lazy when I spat out a list of problems earlier. There's lots of other interesting reasons it's getting harder to find good talent... I'm just not convinced that it's because there are fewer developers (which is the only thing that would define a 'shortage' in my estimation).

If we assume that there are plenty of engineers (you know, to humor me).. then there's only two reasons that you (or I!) would have trouble hiring:

1. They don't know we exist.
2. They don't think our job is better than the one they have.

The bottom line is that both of those things have gotten WAY harder in the last, say, five years. I don't think I could do it justice ranting about why and how I think that is in an HN comment but I think there have been a lot of interesting changes in the way software developers perceive their jobs, find them, etc.. and I think the way most of us hire is lagging well behind these shifts.

It's generally all really good, though. I think during my career (since '97) we've mostly gotten away hiring developers the way you might hire accountants, or anesthesiologists. Software development is a craft, and if you look at the way artisans in other crafts work and find work, you'll see a stark difference. My guess is that paying more attention to industries like architecture, graphic design, or even tattooing is likely a window into what hiring software developers will look like five years from now.

(But maybe I'm crazy)
OpenStack

OpenStack might be really important conceptually, and it might have an impressive number of backers, but they really, really need to get something usable in production environments out, and soon.

At the moment I think it is hard to justify it being the 5th most important..
Main reasons why I am not using Linux on desktop are as follows: the complexity and broken-ness of audio and video drivers and frameworks, poor state of unified user interface. Poor state of backwards compatibility on the user experience, not on software necessarily.

If everyone would have just stopped at KDE 3.5 and improved upon it I would have been happy.

As an ecosystem, there are too many options and ways of doing things. Yet, there is no single obviously good one.

Ubuntu ameliorates most of this.

But... There's still the huge problem of support. Flash works much better on Windows. Games are made for Windows, not for Linux. Interfacing with Microsoft Office environment works better on Windows.

Where Linux completely eviscerates Windows is on server and web development based on command line. New language and platform innovation.

>However, even if Linux isn't particularly popular, it already delivers the most compelling desktop and laptop environment to those who bother installing it; in that sense, it is already the year of the Linux desktop

This is simply incorrect. Only reason I would use Linux is for development and servers, Windows is still superior in all other aspects. There's hardly no mental overhead moving from Windows interface and software platform of 2000 to that of 2011. There is a huge mental overhead from moving between Xmonad, Window Maker, Gnome, KDE, various versions of Ubuntu, Gentoo, Debian, Arch, everything.

But... You do realize that if we count devices, Linux on desktop has already gone past Windows. It's called Android.
”I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,

I don't think it necessarily unhealthy, but I guess it depends how you interpret 'talk'. I actually read that line as that Blacomb hadn't communicated with her at all - for example, I've got a whole bunch of 'friends' on FB whom I used to interact with at College, but we've gone our separate ways and now never speak to each other and all I see are their FB updates. In that sense, I think it is unhealthy if you associate that passive one-way comms as 'friendship'.

However, if you take his stament of 'never even talked to her' as literal voice communications, then I agree that I think it's perfectly fine. If theyare exchanging two-way comms on FB, I don't see it any different to a long distance relationship of old where people wrote letters to each other.
Wow - thanks for those links. I shall be adding a dot grid book to the gift list.
Andhra Recipes
Lots of Indian Veg and Non Veg recipes
I think it comes down to being relatively worse off versus absolutely worse off. Although people today are not worse off absolutely, what normally counts when one determines problems in life is one's relative situation.
The dearth of mainstream Linux laptops certainly has nothing to do with the quality of the software--it is simply a result of unholy market pressure from Microsoft coupled with a ton of marketing.

No big manufacturer is going to go all-out on Linux: too much risk and uncertainty; big corporations rarely endorse such risk-taking. Instead, they want to sell some Linux computers but still maintain Windows. This gives Microsoft a lot of leverage in the market.

A perfect example would be netbooks--a while back, there were Linux netbooks available and they were threatening to become successful. I think Microsoft first lowered the price of XP and extended support for it and then threatened and cajoled OEMs into stopping selling these netbooks. A cursory Google search revealed, among other things, this[1] article about Microsoft's tactics.

[1]: http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_strikes_back_at_lin...

The other thing is that compared to the obscene amount of marketing behind Windows and Mac OS, Linux is driven almost entirely by word of mouth. Since there is no really heavy backing, Linux is at a disadvantage even ignoring vaguely anti-competitive practices and bullying on the part of the established players.

Edit: Here[2] is another article with more details that explains exactly what I was getting at about Linux netbooks.

[2]: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/why-the-linux-netbook-...
We use Asana. I prefer it over other things I've used such as Pivotal Tracker and Jira.

From my experience, Jira is geared at large silo-ed companies, where you need to spend time defining processes. It's very inorganic.

I liked Pivotal Tracker, but the whole agile thing proved to be a bit too inflexible at the startup I founded with some friends. It did work well at a larger startup of about 30-40 people, where a bit of process rigidity was kind of useful. It would be interesting if I had Asana available to have tried at that company.

Jira was used at the first tech company I worked at. Waaaaay too process focused. Detracted from those who actually do work. That being said, I can see how it would be an asset at a large company with A people to C people and high turnover.

These days I'm mulling a "pull request" based approach for certain types of programming tasks and everything else in Asana.
I introduce anti-matter backed currency! Not only does anti-matter backed currency make it (currently) highly secure from hyperinflation, but it actually takes energy to keep it from destroying itself giving it an intrinsic value (well, as much as anything can have one). Sure, there will be occasional bouts of deflation during say, rolling blackouts, but that's a small price to pay for a security that can't be "stolen" by governments!

If you're interested, please send me all your "old" currency in a self-addressed stamped envelope and in return, I will send you one anti-proton.

Disclaimer: anti-proton may be destroyed immediately
Wait, what?

Most founders I know would pay themselves a salary after the first funding round. A small one perhaps, but I don't think the difference is as big as you make it out to be. Especially when you consider that the first engineer in a startup gets at least the same workload as the founders.
Referential integrity is to databases what pointers are to code. You definitely need it.

What's worse than migrations? Being unable to turn an application off, since it uses the old schema.

With ChronicDB we support indefinite backward compatibility. Unlike per-record versioning tricks, application code does not need to be aware of migration code.
Btw, I figured this out at some point:

A cursory examination will likely not demonstrate loneliness. If I am lonely, then I will be happy when I'm in the presence of any of my friends, and so I'll appear happy and just fine to them. I'll even feel happy, in case they ask me how I am. Loneliness is thus peculiarly difficult to diagnose except deliberately.

[I suppose that once you know this, you might try to detect loneliness as "being really happy to see you" or something. Obviously you might find false positives (being happy for other reasons), or false negatives (if they don't feel you're a very close friend). Still, it's a starting point.

The cure, of course, is to continue to be with your friend for as long as he wants (to the degree possible), let him interact with you, and encourage him to share his feelings and his doings with you. (But no pressure. Encouragement is a friend who's happy to be with you and happy to hear anything you have to say without giving unasked-for criticism, not one who asks you hard questions like "How are you?" Such a question can be helpful to establish that you're interested or willing to listen, but it can also be difficult and annoying to answer, so don't press if he stumbles on it.)

This is kind of a natural resolution, isn't it? I've said that, in response to seeing that your friend wants to be with you, you should continue to be with your friend; and that you should encourage him to share things that he probably would like to share with you (in a way that isn't unpleasant or difficult). This is kind of "duh, that's how to be a good friend", and "that's how to make good conversation, at least in this situation". But it's probably helpful to have things like this written down; not everyone has figured out or internalized every part of it by himself.]
> Look, I appreciate your sincerity but think you are really starting to eat your own tail here

Care to elaborate why? I'm not arguing because I think you're going to suddenly acquiesce, but because I'm trying to refine my own viewpoint.

I obviously can't quickly read the linked books to see what they're actually saying, but they clearly have their own set of philosophies. This is fine, but these philosophies are not beyond reproach.

And as to Arrow's theorem and the problems of procedural outcomes - that's precisely my point! You're the one coming from the viewpoint where we're all bound to an ever-growing system that possesses the mandate to regulate whatever is economically prudent. If a system is incapable of adequately taking into account the conflicting desires of its inhabitants, it should be decentralized so that everybody doesn't have to agree!
I can't argue with that, though I'm running this on just one core (single process).

If I was better with the v8 profiler I would check to see how much time it spends in JS land vs C, since node-canvas is all C, as well as the http parser.
"See NodeJS and Python for examples."

What's an example of the Python community doing this. Usually Python get's criticised for being overly-conservative if anything.