skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To get help, you can type tutorial. I think it would be better to type (tutorial), or at least have both options available.
SO, basically you just learned about non-blocking and think node.js is a golden bullet. It's not.

And it's exactly the same situation as anything they could have used in Python, as soon as they add actual code to get work done (as opposed to hand over work and wait for a callback).

"""The reason why I like node.js is that everything is built in a non-blocking way. Twisted has the same philosophy until people think they can get away using a blocking library inside the IO loop."""

That's not what they were doing, though. At the end of the non-blocking fiesta you want to actually return results to a waiting connection -- actual results, rendered templates etc. That will block and take time -- especially in node.js which is single threaded.

So they just traded Python's threads/processes/lightweight threads for node.js processes.
This is another reason why i moved off of django. This arrogant attitude of belittling other people when they have problems. I expect this from the rails community not from python. However django is increasingly becoming a "its the django way or the highway buddy". Which is dissapointing frankly.
There probably a middle step "we also wanted to play with the latest shiny technology", that's not mentioned.
This is exactly the point of the Rootstrikers campaign[1], supported by Larry Lessig[2]. I encourage all of you who live in the US to take action.

[1] http://www.rootstrikers.org/

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc
Where did this absolutely bad title come from? Apparently not the article.
These demos run perfectly well on my Intel card. There are also interactive music videos like http://www.ro.me/ or http://lights.elliegoulding.com/ which are running fast enough. OpenGL ES is almost the same as OpenGL, the only feature I've found missing so far was geometry shader.

What in my opinion stops graphics from being better is model size that has to be transferred. You wouldn't wait 2 hours for game to load, would you?
.defer() and .only(), they're right in the list of methods on Querysets: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/models/querysets/#.... Sorry, but it's a bit hard to take this critique seriously, given how trivial it is. I have a list of complaints about Django's ORM that is about a mile long, so don't think I'll defend it blindly, but let's try to stay grounded in reality when we criticize something.
Javascript Lispy Gist (js trying to remove the c syntax)
Please change the title to something more descriptive. Perhaps "Data Size an Logical Operators".
Nice how i get voted down. Thus proving my point about the python and django communities. So glad i moved to node. I will still consider using python for backend stuff though.
It's not like (language specific framework + language) is that different from (language + built-in features + standard library).
Video: The Zen of Steve Jobs
Reality Inside #Fukushima I Nuke Plant
Part of this though is because web apps are for better or worse increasingly being almost nothing but javascript. And it becomes tedious moving back and forth between javascript and another language. Even if that language is really good. So i think people are just going with javascript for "everything" and rewriting their libraries in it.
SO, a congressman has to be an expert on:

The Internet
Farm policy
Arms control
Abortion and medicine in general
Debt, finance and sustainable economic growth
...

I'm not sure we can find even one Congressman to fit the bill (and with that elipsis I can guarantee it).
It IS a bit long.

To me the "Lexical blends" are an example of competing motor programs. Yes it does given a window into cognition, but it is a window into the parallel nature of processing in the brain and not into generalization.
No idea what defers and only are. Actually maybe only was what i was looking for. The django documentation for many things such as this is almost non existent. Some of it is from older versions as well. And im sorry but how is a newbie supposed to find this stuff. Youve probably been working with python and django for a while. Which is great. But when youre just starting and playing around having to spend hours looking simplistic stuff like this up when you have a million other things to do really gets frustrating.
I think we would just have run into Amdahl's Law earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

.

Basically you don't get a free pass for parallelising things.

.

If 90% of a task is parallelizable then the maximum speedup you can get with infinite cores is 10x
Wow. I thought we ran the world, through our devices, code, networks etc.

In fact, the politicians are mostly concerned about reigning US in, right? That means we have the real power.

So, as many important scientists in history have mentioned, isn't it irresponsible of us to remain politically ignorant?
You might want to improve the page load speed. Some quick thoughts:

- load above-the-fold content first

- combine the JS to a single file

- include the country flags and other small icons as inline base64 PNGs
Ask HN: Working Memory And Understanding
I think i have the same problem with programming as i did with math. I have a hard time understanding what each variable/piece of logic represents/is used for and then when i finally do understand it, i forget not long after finishing with it.

It's almost as if my short term(working memory) does not move over to long term memory.
the bubble floats the wrong way on my macbook... if I lift the left side, the bubble moves right ...

if i lift the track pad side, the bubble moves away from me ...
It also misses NSElite (later Teamware), which, in Larry McVoy's words, was BitKeeper's grandparent.
Video version by Hofstadter on "Analogy as the Core of Cognition": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8m7lFQ3njk
Ask HN: what's the best platform to scale with?
If I am thinking about building a web app, and could choose any platform, language and framework to build it with, what should I choose assuming great developers are going to build it no matter what the choice?

I suppose scalability is only 1 aspect in determining a stack, but it tends to cause the most problems and issues further on, does it not? So which ones cause the least, either generally or specifically?

Aspects may be the size of the talent pool that can work on it, and ease of learning, so they would be important factors in making a choice, but I'm thinking from a purely technical perspective - most straightforward scaling, least complexity, and by extension minimized learning when it comes to scaling compared to others.
I bought Expandrive.
HTML is the most popular language on GitHub ;)
Id have to disagree with that myself. While node and mongodb are both "shiny" they are because they solve a problem that people have and offer solutions to problems that are very appealing. Including as i mentioned i blieve in another comment here that using node allows you to only have ot work with one language. Which is great. So its true that python has similiar technologies such as tornado and twisted. But if node works then why not just stick to one technology to have to maintain rather then multiple ones. Also node has a great community that is increasing. Many python libraries dont have this. Meaning really documentation. For example tornado has very little documentation.
> How many times do you have to re-learn file IO?

Dunno. Bytes IO or text IO? evented IO? Lazy IO? Monadic IO? Which platform are you on? Will there be concurrent access? Is your file always a file or is it also a socket?

Yeah, you re-learn file IO quite a bit I'd say. And that's without talking about APIs going from straightforward (and broken) to completely baroque (and still broken).

Oh sure, sometimes

> it's really to [read a file] quickly and but not understand any of the foundations.

isn't it?
hell. I have the same feeling and I am only 23...
Latest full version Rovio Angry birds Rio With More Unlocked Stages
It's a shame that fibered Ruby feels like such a ghetto. I'd really like to see it be a viable concurrency choice, especially for apps that call a lot of third party services.
New application environments are created all the time.

A new api that exports the true internal (uuid-based) identifier need not obsolete existing (broken) applications.
But then you end up with a version control system that is not generic, but dependent on a particular language. The story of Smalltalk suggests that the added value might not be worth the coupling and complexity it requires.
Yes; but uuids are network-sharable, never expire (never get reused), can be conjured up without cooperation with anybody. You can merge two handle spaces without any issues, ever.

Its time to stop prematurely optimizing handles.
A few points he forgot to mention about audio, without answering it's hard to make a convincing argument:

1. There isn't a lack of sound currently. there are tons of podcasts , and even more video shows that can be consumed as sound(lectures, talk shows) . And there's a lot of music. Lack of content is not a problem or a reason for growth of future audio consumption.

2. People already consume alot of sound. Mostly in the form of music , because of it's emotional content. There's no reason to suspect they'll consume more music.

3. It's easier to communicate in writing, because you can easily edit it. Communicating with sound is more difficult(if you want to offer interesting content).

4. People prefer high bandwidth communication mediums over low bandwidth communication mediums. People prefer communication mediums you can control their speed and skip over content easily.

Why ? Both of this issues help with flow and engagement.

5. lack of good podcast monetization scheme. since good audio is much harder to produce than text , that's important.

EDIT: most of the work on making spoken audio interesting has been done on the content side. Relatively little has been done on the technology side. I wonder if there are some opportunities there.
Vaclav Havel about the designers’ civilisation
WOw, that's a good answer. It even feels right. I'm not kidding, and thanks for your response on such a touchy issue.
Maybe people don't produce art after 30 of 40, but there are hundreds of millionaires and billionaires who made their riches in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
24in60.com has closed.  DayToMe.com is carrying the torch.
Indeed, we see this today with our compiler (Manticore). On our 48-core AMD and 30-core Intel boxes, we now routinely have flattening speedup curves due to the small sequential portions of even our supposedly "embarrasingly parallel" benchmarks.

Compilers, even icc, are still shockingly bad at making good use of the x86_64 instruction set for sequential code. Part of that, of course, is due to C. But part of it is also our (my) fault as compiler writers because even with fantastic type information and unambiguous language semantics we emit shockingly dumb code.
Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths
So you are on the side of those relativist who think that all languages are equals or have their own fields of use where they are better than others, and that syntax doesn't matter, that indented or bracketed blocks are just a matter of taste, that cleanliness and homogeneity of syntax and grammar is subjective?

I dare to differ. Hiring a dev for things web, I could ask what language they prefer and why. Someone saying he prefers PHP because it is clean and well organised would get a downvote. If he says it is because it is fast, and that the dirtiness can be avoid by proper training, that would be better. To someone who'd say Ruby, I'd ask what he dislikes about it, or is there any pitfalls. If he knows of no pitfalls, I would have a downvote. Someone saying he don't care at all, would have a double downvote. A good answer would probably be "I'm happy to work with any language but if I have to build something new and can choose the technology I would consider python because I like this tool very much and I'm quite seasoned with it".

Same with code editor: Engineers, developers are using tools and if they have a little bit of a love affair with their job, which is necessary if one want to work hard creating a nice product, they probably have some strong feelings about these tools, which are not all made equal before God.
24in60 was previously discussed on HN here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2544778 65 points
اهداف ريال مدريد واشبيلية 6-2 Real Madrid Vs Sevilla 6-2 All Goals
I think Symfony2 may solve this issue for PHP.
Giveaway – 15 EasUS MacCleaning Pro
I'm glad to see this idea continued, I've always been attracted to the spirit of the project. The lean towards sensationalism of news sites I used to frequent has more or less made me ignore news as a whole, aside from reading the occasional Economist issue. All in all, a welcome addition to my daily RSS feed.
Hahaha. I love this attitude. I have heard it for the better part of a decade and I keep charging a premium for flash work because there are not enough quality people that know it.

I know HTML and a bunch of server languages as well so I'm covered if something would happen. I'm not going to say that flash is here forever but it will take a lot longer to disappear than you probably think, especially with the new 3d stuff.
I'm sure you have better things to do than build a lightbox from scratch. Take 10 minutes to learn someone else's solution and you can move on to solving the actual problem for which you were tasked, which likely has little to do with lightboxes.
Ljung Lunges Out “Sound Will Be Bigger Than Video” | Bombtune
>For example em-activerecord just didn't work so well under huge load (dropping SQL-connections), so I had to write my own mini ORM for the workers.

That's interesting - could you elaborate (here or a blog post) on your findings. what was different between your ORM and em-activerecord that made it more performant.

The thing is - my first thought would have been to leave the ORM alone and focus on the DB side (like more sophisticated connection pooling/pgbouncer, etc. ). Which is why I'm interested in what went wrong in the ORM that made it screw up when used in a non-blocking kind of a setup.
Also next version of RoR is likely to have auto EXPLAIN for slow queries.
The best game ever (2000)
Kazakhstan Government Blocks Internet and Mobile Networks
Not necessarily. The fact is that you could probably do just exactly that by making the pipeline deeper. But making the pipeline deeper has a price: your control logic becomes much more complex and emptying the pipeline is more expensive. The question is then: does the price you pay become larger than the gain. As this is not happening I have a good guess :)

Historically, the Pentium 4 is an example of a Mhz-oriented design. The pipeline was made ridiculously deep. This meant that when you had heavy floating point intensive work, then the Pentium 4 was very very fast. Essentially this was because you could fill up the pipeline in the CPU and you have relatively few jumps in that code. It was just a processing job. On the other hand, the P4 suffered for almost any other task. Even to the point where a more beefy Pentium 3 (Tualatin) could beat it. Intel chose a path which was based on the P3 design for their Pentium-M CPU and that is the design which guided Core, Core 2 Duo, Core i7 and so on.

So it is possible, but it is not a given it would lead to faster CPUs. Mhz is but one of the knobs you can turn. The problem we are facing is that all the parallelism we can squeeze out of a sequential program has been done. Modern CPUs dynamically parallelizes what can be run concurrently. But to gain more, now, you need to write programs in a style where they expose more parallelism.

Welcome to parallel programming :)
Western govts turn a blind eye as Arab allies keep massacring protesters
"Id have to disagree with that myself. While node and mongodb are both "shiny" they are because they solve a problem that people have and offer solutions to problems that are very appealing. "

A lot of people use them for solving problems they DON'T have.

Lots of people use both Mongo and Node.js at ill-fated attempts at premature scaling (similar to premature optimization).
This is the nature of things. We use our lower-level tools to build higher-level tools that make the technology (or processes like development) more accessible to more people. Could you imagine having to build everything from scratch every time a new job came along?

"Build us a banking system that can be used by our employees to safeguard our customers' deposits and analyze our loaning ability, while providing web-based access to accounts by customers."

"OK. First, we'll need several tons of sand, some raw copper ..."

I think it speaks volumes that the infrastructure design of the web (or perhaps the Internet) prevents todays web app developers from worrying about how their bits move from the server CPU to the users' screens.

P.S. I'm terribly disappointed in my fellow posters actually answering the rhetorical question.

Edit: ordering is important to clarity
Video footage from that article: http://youtu.be/4iboFV-yeTE

Of course you have to remember - only a fraction of all incidents get filmed and posted on the web. For every such event there are ten you'll never see.
I'm rather interested in the amazing amount of abstraction achieved between "get instructions from internet" and "grab this pot and do shit with it". Fantastic.

That said, when the bread didn't go in the toaster for a second time I was half hoping it would start beating it until the toaster was a pile of screwed up metal.
Clojure's data structures are rather good for "concurrent access to the same data". References change value, but values don't change. The references are protected by read/write locks but the values in them need no protection once they have been extracted and while they are being used.
Monster Digital plans to launch LeMans SSD line in Q1 2012
But you have an inherent tradeoff in ORM-land., You can either essentially build your database as an object store around your ORM or you can build your database and do real SQL coding. But at that point why use an ORM like Active Record at all?
Your point has not been proven. You should forget the meta stuff (python people are like this, django people are like that) and counter with arguments when someone attacks your point of view on the topic at hand. No one knows who you are, just say what you have to say (about the topic) based on your experience. If you draw conclusions, strengthen them with data if possible, or argue why you believe that they're valid. People will call you on them if they feel you're in the wrong. It doesn't mean they hate you. You should do the same.

Also, the tone on a keyboard is often easily abrasive. The pen is mightier than the sword. The keyboard is harsher than the mouth. Don't fall for the bait focus on the arguments.
Just a note that there was good discussion about this before [1].

Remember that this essay is quite old (2002) and Python has changed significantly. [2]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859417

[2] http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2002/Apr/10/AnOptimiza...
Users already are free to choose proprietary technologies if they want to. The FSF isn't going to change that, nor are they are trying. It is developers that ought to use completely free software, rejecting all proprietary programs in the process.
> That's interesting - could you elaborate (here or a blog post) on your findings. what was different between your ORM and em-activerecord that made it more performant.

I will do a blog post about this when I finally have some time (christmas holidays, maybe). Em-activerecord worked very nice first, but when I hit it with thousands of concurrent jobs, some workers just dropped dead saying MySQL couldn't answer. This was annoying, because the workers didn't really fail in Resque, just failed to do their job and if this was in production it would've cost us thousands.

So, my own ORM is just a database superclass with em-connection-pool, configuration, openstruct and couple of class and instance methods (insert, update, find, query). And now this thing is really really fast, using lot less of sql connections (delayed job had 300 connections, now we'll need only ~40 connections) and scales really well.

The thing here is, that when I'm not using Rails at all, I don't know why I should use evented Ruby instead of Node.
Vaclav Havel Dies, Aged 75
Yet another Algol-based language. This is just what we need.
I know :( we noticed that yesterday, and are now manually having to separate the user generated tags that include commas, we are going to try and push these changes ASAP.

What do you mean it got "stuck on you", it wasn't processing correctly?
good observation!
Of course it is not with parallelism in general. PostgreSQL is pretty good at the process model although this means that queries can't have portions executed in parallel (within the query). Multiple sessions with multiple queries can be executed in parallel with no problem however.

Note that the big open source projects (Gridsql and Postgres-XC) which get rid of this limitation currently do this through a different method without breaking single threaded process model.

So the question is how intimately connected portions that run in parallel should be.
Thanks, either I'm going crazy, or this wasn't a link before...
What does my dream mean?
Why dont I ever see faces in my dream?
The problem in part is with hackernews actually. I dont find it very conducive to good discussions. I rarely comment myself actually. Most comments seem to be he said/she said and argumentative. Im actually surpised people dont ask for this site to be improved. And i guess it never will. But it would be nice to have constructive conversations about these things rather then arguments.
I recommend using Anki. Active recall (meaning you are asked something) is much better than passively reading and spaced repetition have been shown to help learning. If you dig into memory you will surely read about the 'forgetting curve' so usually a program such as Anki has an algorithm to ask you at the point you are about to forget something.

And by now you should wonder what is Anki. Well, it's basically a software flashcard. The neat thing about it is if you find something easy to remember you just click that you find it easy, so it wouldn't ask you as often, but if it's hard, it will be repeated often until it's drilled in your memory.

Here's the link: http://ankisrs.net/

P.S.
For learning languages the same way I would recommend http://www.memrise.com which also incorporates in a lot of their lists visual/auditory cues, which I cannot stress how helpful they are in remembering words. Try the SAT vocabulary list, it's fascinating how easy is to remember words when you associate them with a visual cue.
I must contend that the best game ever, as much as it transcends the world of simple computer games and approaches the world of particle accelerators in modeling and simulating complexity, is Dwarf Fortress. [1]

Dwarf Fortress contains whole worlds in each of its many (25X80) tiles... It contains graven images of cheeses engraved with images of cheeses carved out of cheese, the history of which rivals that of Western civilization.

I donated to Tarn this month and eagerly await my crayon drawing. Once you start playing Dwarf Fortress you can't play other games anymore.

[1] I vaguely recall someone building an LDC - a Large Dwarven Collider - but I can't find it. There is an explanation of Dwarven Physics here: http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Dwarven_physics
I lean very much against the idea of rationality, in the precise economic sense used by Aumann and others. I find the work of the behavioral economists more believable. I believe there is some truth in the saying that the only people who make economically rational decisions are economists and sociopaths.

BTW, in this thread I learned that I need to be more careful about how I use the term "population." :)