skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's about it. I got my 13" MBA in October because I didn't like all the flux going on with the Linux GUIs, and I've not had very good luck picking Linux-compatible laptops.

OS X really fits my role for it well: A UNIX which works (nearly) perfectly on a laptop with a tight and stable GUI.
11 Disappointments About He-Man, In Retrospect
> A lot of apps will take more memory than they need so they can keep more data "live" and be more responsive when they need to perform actions.

Which is annoying, because it leads to double-buffering.
a lot of contracts will come up of companies updating apps..money to be made..
I'm wondering where the memory useage really comes from. I'm coming from an dev culture where if I do things right, i can trust the underlying system I built on to make it run fast enough and use up as little resources as it can, so most of the performance & optimization work comes from me.

Are the underlying systems running web applications (aka browsers) doing it wrong? Or are the webapp devs not doing what needs to be done in general? Or am I raising a false alarm and is everything alright?

As for my macbook, it has an unrelated problem, that's for sure, but all it does is magnify the memory issues for me.
So /usr is now the directory for where all programs installed by the system or package manager gets installed. That actually does make sense.
Keeping in mind that Amazon has never released sales figures (apart from "its selling well") for any version of the Kindle so basically they are pulling numbers out of the air for that. Samsung stopped reporting their sales numbers "due to competitive issues" last summer so once again they are pulling numbers out of the air for that. Until the Android vendors man up and report actual sales then any comparison is meaningless.

Meanwhile we have at least 2 cases of manufactures taking baths on their tablet stocks (RIM and HP) after the stuffing the channel, Occams Razor would suggest that is the simplest reason.

Keep in mind also that Raymond cherry picks his data to fit his model and has been strangely silent on the decline of Android's market share in Q4 last year.
No, because fruit includes a lot of fiber and releases the fructose into your digestive tract over time. Fruit juice is bad, though. It's essentially uncarbonated soda, and sometimes has a higher sugar content than soda. Compare grape juice to Mountain Dew, for example.
Because I used to think I didn't need it and it's a bit of hassle. I also thought swap was almost useless because of the comparatively slow speed of hard drives and that I'd rather have the memory hogging process killed than my computer lock up completely.

I might try it out sometime though.
Lego in space
The topic reminds me of a presentation by Mark Pesce: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCoCTc3T5Q

In it he talks about how piracy has helped some shows, and alternate forms of publishing (physical media, online). Keep in mind that he's speaking from an Australian viewpoint and the economics are slightly different in this case mostly discussing content produced for another market... But it could be good stuff for you Kill Hollywood thinkers.
I have a 13" MBA 2011 w/ lion,just got it after years on a dell Inspiron 1545. It is amazing. Incredibly light, With really really good battery life. So need for an iPad, I have no qualms about carrying it with me, it doesn't weigh that much more than large book. It can power down, restart and be back on my desktop in 15 seconds. Backlit keyboard is great, don't underestimate it for late night projects. Also, I now have nothing on my desktop, Osx file systems are muchore intuitive and multi task orientated. Get an MBA, it's more money but better value than anything else on the market.
The page outright says that it is not a cryptographic hash, but the Hash Quality section doesn't expound on why (except for a minor flaw on short strings for one of the functions). Does anyone know what the expected collision rate for this hash is?

In other words, I don't care if the hash doesn't avalanche perfectly (half changed for one bit of input change; a requirement for cryptographic hashing so changes are "obvious") as long as the collision rate is ~SHA256. Or, if I should care, explanations would be wonderful.
Box offers developers $1000 for the best integration with Podio
*no need for iPad & much more

Stupid iPhone keyboard.
A wonderful example of this is people who type URLs into Google Search or search queries into address bar (before most browsers had Omnibar-like features). To all of us here, it clearly makes sense that the browser is a local software that enables you to visit websites while a search engine is a website that finds other websites. Typing a full URL in Google is generally a waste of bandwidth and time.

This abstraction of service is lost on many users who see the browser and search engine as the same thing. And even different websites and the Internet as the same thing. I've had to field many tech-support calls because a Java exception occurred on the outsourced Payroll processing site but somehow since I manage the IT Department, clearly it is something I could fix.

I think a good way to look at this is to pick something complex that you use regularly but don't know much about, like an automobile or cellphone hardware. Why does my cellphone suddenly lose reception for 5 seconds when walking under my carport? I have no clue but I suspect it has something to do with the signal or maybe because there's a lot of metal around. That is how users feel when you show them a big red X, regardless of how much descriptive text you present. Best is to avoid situations where you have to show X and just make it easy to revert to the previous situation.
The most interesting aspect IMHO is that just about everybody would agree that this reasoning brought to its logical conclusion is immoral.

For example, a Space Shuttle launch costs on average $450 million, kills on average 0.1 astronauts and destroys 0.015 shuttles (worth $3 billion). If the Space Shuttle could be redesigned so that on average it cost $300 million to launch but killed two astronauts every time, predictably, would that be morally right?

I would say no. But I agree that contradicts logic. I draw the conclusion that logic is for deciding some things and feelings are for deciding others.
I have trouble finding my "home" button too in Firefox. Maybe I'm just getting older, or maybe things are just getting more complex. Probably a bit of both.
Bing Germany’s Beta and the new Domain
"That's like..your opinion, man" :)

So if someone wants to say that Google is becoming like MSFT - say that (incidentally regarding MST being evil I recently read this: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/antitrust_kills....)

But I think that we should not dilute the definition of Evil.
“If they aired a day later,” she says, “illegal pirating would be going on.”

Probably, for different reasons, but likely not anywhere as near as it is today. If you knew stuff would be on in the UK on Th night, and you could see it uncut and unreformatted 26 hours later, you'd be far less likely to have initially bothered to go search it out.

I submit that the awareness and convenience of online 'piracy' of TV shows has been driven, in large part, by the frustration people felt by knowing they'd have to wait months in the first place. Now that there's a whole generation of people who already know how to 'pirate', they're not going to turn back (certainly not without a fight - SOPA, etc) but the content industry has themselves to blame for this again.

We gave up on BBC America back around 2004/2005 because they insisted on showing repeats instead of decent shows, and not explaining themselves. There was one week where they showed a combined 96 hours of "ground force", "changing rooms" and one other insipid home reality show. 96 hours of repeats of just 3 shows. Meanwhile EastEnders was scaled back and they showed less of that, and kept falling further behind. Eventually, after about a year or so of EastEnders in 2004, in to 2005, they started showing repeats of EastEnders from 2004 in place of the then-current episodes. It was as if they thought people wouldn't notice (or care) about getting repeats of a year-old ongoing soap episode. We quit even trying to support BBC America at that point, and turned to full scale torrents of any UK shows we wanted.

In the absence of being able to simply pay a UK TV license fee directly to the appropriate office, we'll just pirate. I realize that $300 still wouldn't cover all the potential ads and such ITV gets, but it'd be a strong start.

Make the BBC channels, ITV, and a couple other UK channels available as a UK package on DirecTV or Dish, charge $49/month, and I'd happily pay, assuming they were uncut feeds.
Or turn off your computer completely to have 100% free RAM. This advice is not as helpful as it seems if your line of work is, let's say, a JavaScript or Flash developer or you want to use anything more advanced than a blog.
Sort of. As of right now executable code is only allowed in the lower 2GB, but data is allowed anywhere. "Below the bar" I think is the term.
Excelent breakdown of cjdns, tor, i2p, phantom.
I've struggled with this question myself, and while ultrabooks offer a few hundred dollars of savings, a Macbook Air makes more sense for me(personally) in the long run.

Reasons:

I've started to develop iOS apps, and I need an iOS device and the MBA solves 2 of my problems in a single go. (need for an ultraportable device, a Mac for iOS dev)
It's like banning guns. Bad guys will still have them and still know where to get more. Only good, decent, law-abiding people suffer from these efforts.
The phrase, "Hoisted on their own petards," comes to mind.
I would say that it's not so much that RAM Requirements are going through the roof as it is that the benefit you can get from having more RAM is going through the roof.

Having said that many of the languages we are using such as Javascript are not exactly storage efficient combined with combined with the fact that many people who would probably not have considered themselves "programmer" enough to write native apps in C++ back in the day are writing things in Javascript and putting them online.

I often see people "benchmark" things like operating systems or browsers based on RAM usage (people coming to the conclusion that 32bit Win XP is more "efficient" than Win7 for example) but I think it is far more important to measure swap file usage as this is the thing that actually hurts performance. Afaik there is no performance hit in overwriting a flip-flop in memory that already has a value stored but there is a huge penalty for hitting a disk. So I'd be quite happy to have all my RAM utilized all the time if I have 0 swapping.

First of all if you are using a 64bit platform your pointers are going to be twice as big as they used to be but you get to access so much more memory that this issue solves itself.

Also IIRC Windows 7 does things like arrange your frequently used data into a contiguous area of the disk and then reads all that stuff into VM at bootup. This will result in higher RAM usage (due to many pages being loaded into physical RAM) but better overall performance since if other stuff needs the RAM more urgently it can either swap the cache back to disk or overwrite the cache entirely.

Let's say you have 8GB of RAM and are watching a HD video which is 7GB uncompressed and the rest of your system only really needs 1GB of your RAM, surely it makes sense what whilst you are watching the video you can use spare CPU cores to uncompress the rest of the video and put it into RAM.

I think it's more the case that computing will always expand to fill the amount of memory available.
Bearing in mind that even the cost of swapping is dramatically reducing with SSDs etc.
and I'm tired of people excusing any and all scrutiny of bad behavior as alarmist
SSD swap is an excellent way of mitigating memory requirements. It's a huge factor in the MBA being a viable development machine.
NYC subways decent??? It blows my mind away how people put up with it. Has any New Yorker taken public transit in Europe? If I have 2-3 people in my group, I have stopped taking the subway entirely.

Btw ... Uber is still cars. On a typical day, the NYC subway system carries 4 million riders. The estimate for taxis is far far less (probably less than 500K people).
I'd be curious to see these statistics mashed up with some productivity stats per capita.
I think it's time the tech industry starts asking for broad sweeping changes of the copyright laws. The copyright industry may be affected by the Internet, but the tech industry is being affected by copyright laws, too, so it should have a say in copyright laws as well. The copyright laws need to be adapted to the digital age and the terms need to be brought down from virtually forever to a much more reasonable time period.

The current strategy of doing nothing is only going to help the copyright industry, even if they don't always get what they want - but they do get something eventually, and it's usually to the detriment of the tech industry.

MPAA said they are now willing to have an open discussion with the tech industry (which by the way still isn't enough, it wasn't just the tech industry protesting SOPA), but apparently they are up to the same old tricks, and they are starting to discuss a new international copyright treaty, once again in secret:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120126/03162017547/public...
Ok, it may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I was serious. I love that there are so many great cloud hosting solutions now. I honestly don't want to run servers.
Travel Restrictions and Offshore Development - Steve McConnell's views
Pretty sure the browsers follow a similar approach to windows: If the memory is there it gets filled on the off chance that it shaves a few ms off somewhere because the needed item is already in memory.

I think wiskers is right though: It depends on the box. On my PC (2gigs) the browsers rarely make it to 1gig.
You missed this in the 37signals post you referenced.

"Please note: What works for us may not work for you. Please do your own testing. Your conversion rates may suffer if you copy us."
The difference for me is that in our community, people should know better, especially if you're good enough to get into YC.
archangel nailed it. While this isn't the only cause for why we're seeing this, it certainly is one reason.

A simple example:

One of the types of apps you can build with our tool is Python/PyGTK apps. The root benefit here is that, because Python is interpreted, there is no compile time -- when you click "Run" you instantly get to start testing your app out.

Because Python and PyGTK are readily available in just about every distro's repo, this is never an issue. But, on the flip-side, setting up Python/GTK/PyGTK on Win/Mac can be a bit of a nightmare even for the nerdiest among us.

(We provide our "HTML5" web app option as the default option on Mac and Win for this very reason... But, even then, we still get support requests on trouble-shooting someone's Mac where PyGTK just won't work quite right.)
You have to give an app whatever memory it asks for, or it will crash. If it doesn't use that memory, the OS will swap it to disk.

Apps don't generally change their behavior based on the size of physical RAM, but maybe Chrome does this as a very advanced optimization.
Negotiating does not have to be adversarial, but it has to be negotiating. That means both sides are willing to walk away amicably from the table.

If you're not willing to walk away, you're not negotiating -- you're just having a conversation about salary. You've already decided you're staying; the only thing being decided is how much money your feelings are worth. Not a good spot to be in, for either you or your boss.

I like this author's advice to do a lot of research beforehand and have a realistic idea of where the market is. You should also have a realistic idea of what it would cost to replace you -- probably much more than market salary for a similar job. You need to have an honest -- and fun -- conversation about rates. To start that conversation, you need to be clear with your boss that the starting point is your leaving to find a better job. (But this must be a true statement!) Given that starting point, you both talk and share information about how to reach an agreement you both like.

Yes, the emotional part is the worst. That's why you make those tough emotional decisions before you walk in the door. It's also why you give your boss plenty of time to step back and think through things dispassionately as well. Coming in half-assed, with aggressive demands, is a good way to get fired. Coming in well-studied, with no pressure and just trying not to rock the boat, is a good way to stay at the same job and salary for the rest of your life. You have to learn the art of working between these two extremes.

It has always amazed me the lack of education we provide people in negotiation. It's the one business-related practical life skill that nobody can do without.
Exactly my thoughts.

I'm German so even if my favorite shows finally made it to Germany after years they are usually butchered by a sloppy at best dubbing. If I insisted on English audio I'd have to wait another year to buy the DVDs.

I would love to watch my favorite show with ads or even pay for some of them to be able to support them but unfortunately that's just not possible as of now.
Let's hope tv series like "Touch" have success with their approach, Kiefer Sutherland said they are aiming for a 3 three day window (global broadcast).
Agreed. As it is, DirecTV wants me to pay $85/mo for essentially 4-5 channels. I don't want:

* those other 996 channels

* your DVR to keep adding back stations once I remove them from the hunt list

* your crappy DVR software--TiVo was fine and you replaced it with shit

What I want is a way to pay a reasonable price for the few shows I watch. I can't do that. So, what I do instead is torrent the few shows I watch.

People will pirate until the experience you give them as paying customers is equal to or better than their pirating experience.
Ok, that should be the RSS -- unless it's broken on your platform, which is entirely possible, of course.
3 cheers for Garry. Might mean future YC companies need to bring in design co-founders.
I agree - when it comes to web design, people steal ideas from everywhere. The way I see this as a bit different, is that they actually took the design verbatim and then cross linked the assets...so technically, they stole the bandwidth and images which may have royalty's associated with them.

As for duplicating the layout and taking the concepts, that's fair game in my opinion. The actual graphics should not be stolen and re-used.
had to blog: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16634123844/128mb...

To be honest, I don't really address where your 3GB for Chrome is going. All those memory figures you see should be taken with a pinch of salt. Reserving address space, using it and such are not so straightforward to untangle.

Your OS doesn't offer anything like http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13363076806/buffc... sadly.
Thanks.

I would have preferred a web in which scrolling (and certain other operations, like the Back button) was always instant regardless of how the page is coded, and consequently I did not have to watch out for rogue pages or sites.

ADDED. Or at least a web in which there were fewer ways for a page to go unresponsive, which would have made it easier for readers and writers to anticipate responsiveness problems.
I understand this is an issue, and quite a serious one at that, but how do we solve it for users? As a web dev, we have to assume that the user is decently prepared to use their browser of choice and once on our page "learn" our interface controls, right?
This, exactly. Most of the TV shows I do watch are American and are shown on TV the next day at best, and never at worst. I don't feel bad downloading and viewing something that I'm already paying for to get it in advance, and I'm certain millions of others on both sides of the pond feel the same.
While I agree in general, I think you're pointing at the wrong target here. It's not that "web programmers are doing something that's definitely not cool for our current RAM budget". The javascript is loaded and probably jitted to a smaller space than its text (depends on the number of paths, etc - I'm ignoring lots of stuff here), the actual text passing through the wire is also pretty small. So where's the memory going? All the supporting stuff...

There's the whole javascript framework with it's own allocator, memory pools which will stay around for a long time. Some of the browser elements use the same kind of vm to actually display the UI to you, adding some more mem usage. Then there's the whole page which had to be read, parsed into a tree, processed to create appropriate model for display (all stages are preserved in an editable way). This has to be a live model for the whole time, since javascript might need to interact with it - you can't just flatten it into a screenshot and display that. Now the images - they also need to be loaded and decompressed for display. Also the text isn't that simple - there's the whole engine behind loading fonts, analysing each letter / pair / triple / ... for special spacing rules to be applied. There are multiple glyphs, font variants, sizes, etc. to rasterise. That text needs to be distributed properly inside of the DOM model generated above. That text flow actually affects the model again - they're linked, so they get processed again (text metrics need to be recomputed on each page resize, which may make some elements longer/shorter). Then the theme goes on top of this - since the application displays itself, the needed libraries / theme elements will be loaded too. But of course not all browsers use the theme from OS for displaying the form elements, so another layer needs to be loaded here. .... I could go on forever about elements which are needed for rendering the page.

So yes - lots of that could be much lighter. Lots of that could be made into modules or pulled some levels higher to make them more general. Lots of that might be just a result of sloppy coding noone ever got to fix.

But just remember that what you're actually using is a system on top of a system on top of a system on top of... If you used gopher on a real 80x25 term you'd use kilobytes. If you used first web browser with no image support and no scripting, you'd be under megabytes. But you don't - you're looking at a realtime rendering of 10 different models coming together and interacting with each other with next to no lag. And it all probably renders with hardware support to give you a very smooth scrolling experience. So no, web developers themselves have almost nothing to do with this whole mess. Unless they made a silly mistake and are leaking memory like crazy... they're not the ones to look at first.

(I simplified in many places, not all facts are relevant to every OS/browser combination, etc. just trying to make a point here)
I've never used "1-Up for Google+" but are you sure it's really only 150KiB worth of assets, if you are measuring file sizes you are looking at compressed data which is useless to your computer.

You'd be surprised how big uncompressed data can get, compare a .BMP with a .PNG of the same image for example.
I have a windows machine I use for web browsing and it only has 2 GB of RAM. I often have 30+ tabs open for days on end and it works just fine - I barely get any swapping (in fact, I had the swap file turned off for a few weeks before Christmas and had no problems at all).
It hasn't been used or designed for cryptographic purposes, and probably hasn't been tested as such, either.
> I think it's time the tech industry starts asking for broad sweeping changes of the copyright laws.

This is a great idea. Broad sweeping measures, hopefully with a catchy name, to counteract the current nuttiness. Call it something like "The Internet Freedom Act"

You can't be against Freedom, cay you?