skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be a contrary view, but Cython has been ready for production for quite a while while PyPy has still been getting its boots on:

http://cython.org/

It actually works right out of the box. You can download it and get real world examples to work in five minutes. It works with C++. It works with numpy.

http://wiki.cython.org/WrappingCPlusPlus

http://wiki.cython.org/tutorials/numpy

It's the real deal: ridiculously easy to use as a drop-in replacement for slow functions. It works on problems that are not toys. It allows you to use high performance C and C++ libraries, it's used in a large and well maintained project (sage), and development was at least partially funded by Google.

With all due respect to Maciej for his work, PyPy has been in the works for many years now, and projects like that don't tend to ship -- or to meet expectations if they actually do ship.
This is a very recent trend reversal. An earlier story I saw in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal discussed some of the background to the very large recent increase in exports from the United States to other countries of refined petroleum products that count as "fuel." Some more current stories

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-0103-fuel-expo...

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-1...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2011/12/the-2011-ar...

http://www.ogj.com/articles/2011/12/market-watch-oil-makes-s...

give more background on the rise in United States fuel exports and when the trend became apparent to federal government energy policy officials.
Can your business card be followed?
The error is in the phrase "grew up with", as it suggests they were kids in the early days of personal computers.

The adult amateurs who went from programmable calculators to early single-board microcomputers are the generation who are starting to die off.

My Dad is of that cohort. In his 40s he went from programmable calculators to building a simple computer with an octal keypad and a row of LEDs for output, to working on an AIM-65, coding in basic and (I think) machine code.

He worked in elevator maintenance, being in charge of service in much of Connecticut for one company. At one point he designed and built, with circuit boards he etched himself, some kind of electronic box which I think the company adopted? Maybe? For some kind of elevator-related purpose. I was never clear on what it did, and he probably doesn't remember now.

He didn't have an academic background that would have exposed him to computing, having joined the Navy at 15. He later took some radio repair/electronics night school classes.

He's 80 now, and has forgotten most of that stuff, and uses a MacBook and an iPad.
Hell, I work as a security consultant for a living and any time I touch live finance systems I tread very lightly. Any significantly complex system with money directly involved is going to have too many variables to predict its behavior. I wouldn't touch something like this with a ten foot clown pole.
I don't know how to respond to the argument that it's "vastly easier" to chill a bank of RAM with inverted compressed air cans or liquid nitrogen and then extract its entire contents than it is to just use a debugger to watch a program run. I guess "No, I don't agree." suffices.
I forget who, but a fairly popular implementation of MongoDB once posted about their experience, and they mentioned that they always did a find before doing an update.

Every now and again you'll see this approach get suggested in the groups.
You have the option of getting a check, Western Union payment, or the card. The WU option may no longer be there since they put out this debit card -- not sure.
I use everything Apple, but it sucks that they are going on this direction. Their company made the best stuff not just because they are awesome, but because they also fostered an incredible community of developers who made/make "insanely-great" software. Once developers can't make amazing stuff because of the "closeness", they will move to something else.
One of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.
Presumably this is being run through a real bank with a real underwriting department. A VISA card that works at ATMs is not fun-and-games; it's not a Facebook feature.
was all of the 87 million used?
Thanks.

I am looking over the Apple documents now. I haven't come across Cocoa Design Patterns until you mentioned it. It seems like a good book.
But that's not her fault, is it. That's a societal issue. If you don't like it, work to fix it.
Happy New Year from Florida! Hope everyone does big things in 2012 and keeps HN full of great news.
Infrastructure Challenges to DNS Scaling
I was excited to look at the USA Search API:

http://search.usa.gov/api

I assumed it would have census data, etc. But disappointed to find out it only has one api: product recalls.
I will also admit that I was/am surprised to see this one submitted, for basically the same reasons. Not that I mind, exactly :)

I originally had a bunch of extra analysis/commentary with the links, but it made the post insanely long and wasn't very easy to read.

Will probably try tweaking the format a bit in subsequent weeks. Thanks for the input.
The thing is that you are still supposed to keep the whole working set in memory and use sharding if its larger than that. Which means that none of this is really relevant.

Except that now with that new graph showing such good performance on reads during paging people are going to get confused.

Anyway you can get 32GB of RAM for $232 or 48GB for $636. Which means that for 90% of applications, you actually don't need to shard. And if the journaling works (people with a vested interest in relational systems really have to hope that it doesn't), then I don't have to worry about my data disappearing, even if I only have one database server, which is also not a recommended design with MongoDB (or any database really).

I have years of experience with SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL. However, MongoDB is the most attractive database now because it makes the object-relational impedance mismatch go away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_impedance_mis...

If I can write code (in CoffeeScript using a library like Mongolian Deadbeef) like this

posts.insert
pageId: "hallo"
title: "Hallo"
body: "Welcome to my new blog!"
created: new Date

posts.findOne
pageId: "hallo"
, (err, post) ->

posts.find().limit(5).sort(created: 1).toArray (err, array) ->

then whey would I want to deal with separate steps of setting up the relational database tables, creating stored procedures, creating a software layer to map my objects to my tables etc., or hiring a DBA?

I believe that most of the hate for MongoDB is fueled by a survival instinct. The popularity of databases like MongoDB threaten to make years of experience obsolete and threaten the existence of the DBA profession. Relational databases are great, but they were an optimization designed to solve certain problems that most people today just don't have, and now they have become an unfortunate institutionalized dogma.
Happy new year from England!
Vancouver begins its free crack pipe program for addicts
Five posts of 2011 from Om Malik for startup founders
It depends on your learning style - I know that for myself (especially when I was in school) my brain was in a mode that worked well for structured learning. When I was just starting the learn the ins-and-outs of programming, I liked the rigidity and direction that classes offered and thus, I did the more formal internship path vs a self-study.

It also depends on the specific internship you hypothetically take - they can vary wildly. A good, established internship program can be invaluable and provide things you can't get studying on your own (team skills, client interaction, mentorship) - but on the other side of the coin you could end up with the repetitive busy work that you are worried about.

Also consider that you can always work on your own stuff even with an internship (assuming it's cool with your company w.r.t IP) - this path is probably the most work but likely to be the most effective.
"Did you even read the article? Did you look at the benchmarks? The entire point of it was it's not as bad as you would think, and it's getting better."

It's still quite bad -- the 2.0 benchmark shows a dropoff of 1000 read qps with as few as 60 faults per second. The 1.8 metrics drop to damn near zero reads under the same scenario. That's obviously worse, but a 33% drop in read capacity for 60 faults/sec is bad, no matter how you look at it.

Another way of thinking about it: if you're throwing 3,000 qps at a mongo instance, and expecting only 60 faults/s, then you need to ensure that 2940/3000 (98%) of your working set fits in RAM. Maybe there are toy problems where that's true as the DB grows to terabytes of persistent storage, but there aren't very many.
Happy new year from edinburgh, scotland :)
It sounds fairly cpu-specific. I'm not sure it would lend itself very well to being packaged up for general distribution.
That makes us two. I run with the first three and a couple more of those you mentioned (although NoScript isn't in global mode, if you can bother with RequestPolicy, why not NoScript as well?). I know about most of the others you mentioned but don't feel the need for them (yet), however I'll look into Certificate Patrol.

You may want to check out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy - BetterPrivacy, if you haven't taken care of it's features in other ways.
From what I understand, a lot of the raised money was for the advances required by the various labels in order to close the deals so I'd imagine a lot of money was returned to investors once it was clear the deals wern't going ahead.

There's a bit more on the story here: http://musically.com/2011/12/31/beyond-oblivion-shuts-down-b...
Building 3D datasets with Kinect for indoor image segmentation
What I Love About Ubuntu Unity
Ubuntu Apps Directory
Not I. Made a decision not to waste too much time just to read, rather "do".
Isn't that the definition of a patent?
This is a very cool development. I hope the OpenSSL project verifies this method and imports it so that more projects can benefit from this.

Being a FreeBSD fan, I also hope this can be made to work with the "geli" device crypto driver.

Out of curiosity, has there ever been an exhaustive study about the effectiveness against cold boot attacks against various crypto systems on various platforms? I hear much about cold boot, but is it used much in the wild for practical use, like in criminal investigations? I have never been able to find any reputable confirmation that anyone actually uses this attack to any useful end with regard to cracking real crypto installations.
Want To Know How (Not) To Pitch Your Startup? Look No Further.
Happy New Year from Chicago!
One of the great American artists, IMO, and one gets the sense his noteworthiness is increased by several orders of magnitude by his steadfastness in the face of "sell out" pressure. I think about the artist behind Calvin and Hobbes every time I see some unlicensed Calvin urinating on some automobile manufacturer logo, or kneeling at some religious symbol.
Thats a mischaracterization of what AUMF did. Also, he believed the intelligence coming out of the Department of Defense that Iraq had something to do with 9/11...

Which we now know is false, Bush lied, and Saddam was terrified of the al-Qaeda assassinating him and taking over Iraq and had never funded them or associated with them, and the hijackers were almost all Iranians and Saudi Arabians.

Ron Paul has voted against the illegal and immoral war effort since then.

Edit: BTW, if you're implying Ron Paul voted for wire tapping and Guantanamo permanent detention and torture, the Bush administration tried to site AUMF for permission for both of those, and was shot down twice. They were in the wrong both times. Ron Paul did not support any such activities.
Nokia 2720 Fold Unlocked Phone | Popular Electronics
From multiple years of NoSQL experience. The Object/Relational impedance mismatch stays right there where you leave it.

Using K/V stores will only help you write data. But the whole impedance nightmare is right there, waiting for you to try and make some sense of the data. Especially if you want to do relations.

And you are dead wrong about relational DB's. It is either due to habit or because of being a better fit that users demand representations of data that are best served from a relational source. So you better plan your data models wisely, because you WILL pump this data into a relational source, sooner or later. It would be wise do keep a schema around all the time.

In the end it is merely a question of data normalization and the use case at hand.
Happy New Year from Bolivia !!
I'm sorry, but "being queued up on disk IO" and "burning up XX watts for no good reason" are not related at all. For decades we have systems which do not do busy loops on external store access. They go into low power state if they really have nothing else to do in that time. They also use crazy "new" things like interrupts, notifications and wait queues. This article actually explains how mongodb does not wait for IO, but handles other requests in the meantime. (within the current known limitations of writer/writer locks, etc. of course - i'm not saying it's all perfect)

Did you really read the post before arguing this?
Git Vs SVN
"allegedly one or more of the domains some have purchased were removed for them or rather 'auctioned' elsewhere while they were still owned years ago to the very place[s] which were using their original birth given names as url re-direct to other companies already protected by the two year 'co. status'[this singular statement could be looked at neutrally] - ie: an 'upright above boards business or company should be able to own it's own intellectual property and name/domain name'. as 2011 some of these lost urls/domain names read as an internal error 404. this is the tip of a huge seemingly inanimate elephant in the iceberg room and if it [was me] i would have had nothing to do it. 'auctioned' would be a key word in this statement and nothing innocent 'auctioned off' unwillingly with 'possible' malice has ever been a good thing- even if the 1st to 3rd party is claiming simple ignorance or neutrality." however i am not really that smart and would have never seen any of this coming. lesson learned. things could have been worse fro some it wasn't for others. how to make things better is the question now. it is good to be alive. i have never worked for the co. mentioned in this poll, if it matters.
I think you are being unfair. PyPy is something you can use on your code without modifying your code. That's a big thing. And by big I mean huge. Paying someone $70/hour to modify code is expensive. Switching "python" executable with "pypy" is a lot cheaper than profiling code then re-writing it in Cython. Yeah you might still end up having to do that but who knows, you might not have to or you might even be running faster than C (yes in theory jit compiler could do that).
I watched the video first, I was wondering how he kept the flicker off of the display (laser display have notoriously slow tracking speeds that cause lots of flicker the more of the screen they end up filling up as the beam has to track all over the display). Filling up the entire screen with scan lines might look atrocious.

Here's an example of a very nice laser demo that only gets flicker in really complex scenes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_CHXwXvWvs

Then I paid attention to the writeup and picture and saw the device is just swiveling a smaller set of mirrors. Very nice!
"But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room"

Pitchfork.com and Wire magazine serve my music recommendations, Songkick and Facebook keep my social calendar full and Google Maps has fine traffic indications. Podcasts like WTF, Superego, Econtalk and the Indoor Kids provide better "company" than any radio DJ I've heard.
Still waiting for the embassy cables API.
I think that the loss of the honorific is still entirely polite if it's ommitted from the sentence that describes the person gaining their honourific. You're not diminishing them in any way, so it's not impolite.
Yea, this is well into the realm of going to jail for a long time if you touch anything. Find it pretty doubtful that anyone will even try.
I din't know what value it actually has, but it potentially:

1. Is exposed to people who weren't reading HN the first two times around. If HN is growing, that's a fairly safe bet. These people benefit from discussing the idea and working things out for themselves instead of simply readingwhat has been said before, for the same reason that to learn math you do math, you don't just read about math.

2. Might be relevant to things that didn't exist the first two times around. Maybe someone will comment about how this depiction relates to jresig's attempt to teach programming with JavaScript at the Khan Academy, or some such.

Both of these potential values have a common proposition: That while the post hasn't changed since 1996, the world has changed since 1996.
How I Write Django Reusable Apps
How To Burn Fat At Double Chin
Happy New Year from Seattle!!
Discrete logic gates? I didn't think anyone used those any more. Seems like it would have been much more practical to use programmable logic.
No he didn't. Simplified, his statement reads "Ironically, those who defend government start by listing a thing provided by government that is a small facet of what they do".

There's no irony there, no juxtaposition, no opposite. He's trying to get across the gist of "why the hell is it always roads!?", but it's frustration, not irony.
I think Mongo is great for some use cases. There are some use cases where the flexible json data just makes sense. Regarding his benchmarks, he turned off journaling. Would love to see them with journaling turned on, see how much is relevant.
>that is hard and takes time.

And I'm arguing that's going to be a hell of ride, which is more likely to break their backs than yield success.

I read up on the link you posted elsewhere (thanks for that, by the way) and well, it's just as bad as I thought.

Imagine, in pre-2.0 world, there's a greedy reader, and a subsequent writer queued up on the lock. All subsequent readers are blocked until writer quits, which can't quit before greedy reader does. This is a nightmare. That was before 2.0, now the greedy reader will yield, writer will finish, and all the pending readers will be unblocked. This is only an improvement if you consider the nightmarish previous situation. There are still two problems: 1) single writer blocks all readers on a shard while in progress 2) as soon as a new writer is queued up behind the reader lock, all subsequent readers are queued up again.

Does this look like optimal resource use to you? It does not to me.

Let's contrast this with "legacy" engines:

Sybase: readers/writer lock has granularity of a 8kb page. If you're not touching the same page someone else is writing you're fine. (*) they might have moved on since the 1990-s, I haven't looked.

Microsoft: reader/writer lock has granularity of a row. If you're not reading a row someone is writing, you're fine. That was in the 1990s, they have since moved on to snapshots, but have not yet made them default option, I think.

PostgreSQL or Oracle: 1) readers are reading a snapshot and never block writers 2) writers block each other, and granularity of locking is single row. If you're not writing the same row someone else is writing you're fine.

SQL Lite - readers do not block writers, there is a database-wide writer/writer lock. Note that this is a very lightweight desktop-oriented database, not a cloud solution.

MongoDB - reader/writer lock granularity is a shard, the part of the database apportioned to a single CPU core. If you happen to read data on the same shard someone is writing, or is planning to write you're not fine at all. Their plans are "collection level locking".

So I get it, you're saying they planned to add serious concurrency later. I agree on that - they planned. Where you and I disagree is that they will likely fail, because retrofitting concurrency is exceptionally hard. I just can't believe that anyone who knows what he's getting into would actually agree to get into this.

I understand you need to compromise something when you start out, but I think concurrency is the worst possible choice.
That would not work very well with fresh vegetables and fruits: what people like varies a great deal, as does the quality on the shelf.

Case in point: my wife adores green bananas: can't abide them after they begin ripen. How do you tell a robot picker 'only pick the florescent green ones, please'?
Google TV 2.0 screenshot tour
Some of the papers look to be behind a paywall, what a shame.
Mini Saga #121 - New Year Card
"Also, he believed the intelligence coming out of the Department of Defense that Iraq had something to do with 9/11..."

Really? If he's that catastrophically stupid, he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a position of power.
I'm not sure if these are problems anymore @ macys.com, but here's a list of issues I remember:

1) It is very hard for the company to match market salaries even though its margins are pretty good for a retailer. The only retailer I know of that does well in the salary dept is Amazon.

2) The development culture: I think this is every large retail company, but I feel that you guys tend to favor anything coming out of Big Blue (or Big Company X) as opposed to something technically interesting (but no longer bleeding bleeding edge) in the open source world. You guys tend to buy stuff instead of building. There's definitely nothing wrong with that given the situation and culture, but I feel that it doesn't fit very well with the HN crowd at large.

That being said, Macys.com has some of the coolest, nicest people that you'll ever meet in the workplace; which is really great.
I had never given it much though, but Tuesday my primary gmail account went down. This (http://douglassims.org/gmaildown.png) is all I've seen of it since then. My contacts, calendar, lunch plans, flight reservations, all are unavailable to me. It's made this week rather a catastrophe. It's also made me reconsider my dependence on the cloud and I'm going to start the new year off trying to take back control.

I've had no indication from Google as to when it might be back, but I see in some forum postings that at least one person with the same error message had 84 days of downtime. It's sort of a black swan thing - very unlikely, but with such great consequences that it's worth avoiding.
I think that several of those things have been on HN already?

That said, not all of them were on HN (or maybe I just missed them the first time), because it was still an interesting read.
Ask PG: HNY and what about some hi-res icons for 2012?
While it is nice to see improvements like these, I sure would like to see more work done on ARM implementations, especially given the huge number of mobile devices based on ARM these days.

That said, does anyone know of recent ARM optimizations for OpenSSL or other SSL implementations?
Happy new year from tasmania, australia
The only silver bullet is to get a number of people together who are passionate and skilled. The assignment really doesn't matter, as long as it spurs an emotion in the team.
If your goal is to go from zero to massive IPO in a small number of years, perhaps, but most software teams are not built with that goal in mind.
To be fair, there is a class of problems that fits in RAM, e.g. financial systems. (For more detailed examples, consider the YC startup MemSQL). However these scenarios are write-intensive and demand very high concurrency.
Happy New Year from Cluj-Napoca, Romania!
And from Madrid!