skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's everything wrong with premature optimisation. Optimisation isn't free. It costs in terms of time and code elegance and versatility - often once you've optimised a piece of code to be fast, it's more complex, harder to understand, and harder to change.

Premature optimisation is bad because of this.

Taking things one step further, what is premature? Well, since your production architecture (if you're a start-up on a shoestring) may well be vastly different from your development architecture or your staging architecture (you may run your production site on a clustered EngineYard set-up that costs hundreds of dollars a month and your staging site on a VM that costs $20). And even if the architecture is identical, the data volumes and patterns may be different.

And even if you can afford an exact duplicate of your production environment, and keep the data exactly in sync with your production system, usage patterns may be different. And even if you can afford to simulate the usage patterns in a realistic manner, there will be differences in how the traffic gets routed on an IP level which will also cause the bottlenecks to shift.

All this to say, if you're a start-up on a budget, do not optimise until you see a problem in production. You may well be surprised by how it's not the bottlenecks you expected that actually slow you down. My application has no indexes in the database, because so far, database access has never been a bottleneck. On the other hand, ruby parsing of objects, and AMF rendering of them, and complex aggregation operations on the objects - all those have caused problems that I only found once I was able to observe them happening in a production environment.

Simple solution: don't optimise before you see the problem begin to develop in production.
Bogleheads.org has excellent signal/noise ratio once you drill down to categories you are interested in.
Agreed. Momentum might have been a better concept to use here than gravity: Use something that a lot of people already believe in than trying to change their belief completely.

In other words, push the ball that's already in motion than trying to stop it and move in the opposite direction.
RIAA targets transplant patient Ciara Sauro
Could Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s sick sue ‘em all campaign get any worse? It could. And it has. Their RIAA is suing Ciara Sauro, a young transplant patient in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
yeah , but putting up some website with some screenshots never hurt anyone.
Now all I see is : " We are unable to find iTunes on your computer."
You're wrong, but I don't want to argue anymore. If you think that Africans have a genetic or cultural disposition towards corruption, then that is your opinion, and I'm not going to try to change it. I disagree completely, but trying to prove someone on the internet wrong is something I'd rather not spend my time on.
Russians don't see the world as black/white right/wrong like Americans. There's an 80% grey area in Russia which allows things like 'corruption' to be somewhat accepted.

As an American, I believe our politicians and major businesses are corrupt, but in order to function I turn a blind eye and give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that someone is watching over them. If I was Russian, I'd get some cash and go buy me some favors. Which one is right? I can't say.
I am not suggesting that Java is bad! In fact, it is pretty interesting, and facilitates a certain kind of development that has a huge place in the world. But it isn't really OOP. It is something different, that has some OOP features. I agree with jhancock's post that is a sibling to this one, and won't repeat his explanation about history, or his contention about the hijacking of the term OOP here.
Like others have said, the site looks horrible. My first reaction was to turn and run. After trying it out, I actually found it pretty cool. It's similar to tr.im's bookmarklet.

I'd spend the majority repeating the cycle of adding/refining features and getting feedback from users. Eventually you'll could evolve the project into something new & innovative.

Don't spend too much time on promotion, but do a few things to get the word out. Do you have a business twitter account & blog? Use it to announce new features.
Seems a bit deep and confusing to me, whilst not really saying much.
You get a halo effect where people just sort of pick up the dominant culture. Nobody nowhere has ever had a 100% culture, but you don't need it. Residual Christianity seems to work OK. (At least for a while.)

The critical point may be above what sub-Saharan Africa has, or it may be poorly distributed. The people in power have to reject corruption too; 90% of the country may be anti-corruption (for whatever reason), but if the entire ruling class is in the other 10%, you'll still have corruption.
Where can I get a deb?
It's like a Joel Osteen sermon, except tech related!

Ah, I feel better already. Can I donate money to the church of 37signals?
I doubt he released a new version everyday... It seems like this bug wasn't really hard to catch on...
The whole South America is Christian. Maybe you are talking about the protestant (puritan) beliefs. But Christianity in itself has nothing to do with development.
ObieJazz,
the way I planned to combat that was to display next to the essay, the level of the person learning that language, so you could distinguish from practicing a language and contributing by writing in your native language.
What's the install base for AdBlock on Firefox?

I don't think Google has anything to worry about, only the geeky are going to block ads (and invite all the headaches involved in doing so)

As a web designer, I need to see the web as my customer does, which means I don't use AdBlock or Greasemonkey etc.
I wonder what they're going to launch tomorrow that will top this?
They know that only a fraction of the user base will ever use it (because they certainly won't ship with it, anymore than Firefox does). They know people shutting off ads aren't clicking anyhow. They know that the people savvy enough to use the ad blocker are also the leading edge people who recommend browsers to other people.

Finally... how would they block ad blockers, even if they wanted to? Ad-blocking proxies are just as feasible as ever. And Chrome is supposed to be open source.

Conclusion: Instead of fighting what you can't fight, roll with it, get the leading edge people on your side, then cash in on the marketshare of the masses who don't block ads.

It's not really that mysterious... unless you're trapped in first-order thinking.
Jon Miller Trying To Raise Money To Buy Yahoo
13 Tips For Dealing With Your Laid-Off Friends
The rest, not so much.

Using Apple to talk about successful branding and cults is like using The Beatles as an example of how to become a successful rock band.

Tell me about a company that isn't on the 'rock star' level which has a cult following and I'd be interested.
Bootstrapping our way to an ageless future
Facebook demography stats by country
Well, I would think it's safe to assume that most people who have Google Chrome are trailblazers in the online world and probably don't click on a lot of ads and make them money anyway. Also, looking at the browser statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers) Google Chrome is just about 0.74% of the browser market.

Right now it's important for them to get Chrome on more computers. It will be interesting to see if this strategy changes when Chrome starts getting more traction.
Sorry, but I would never start a project without answering this question. The design is nice. Unfortunately "What sets this apart?" is my question #1 when I look at a webapp. I don't care if it's ugly as sin, I can always use stylish to pretty it up. I want it to somehow make my life easier.
I did setup an account @bigtweet but do most of my twittering @scott_carter
Long story short: I thought "a new card every day!" was an important hook when designing the site. User behavior indicates otherwise -- most don't want novelty, they either want a) the same card everyone else wants (because it is seasonal) or b) a particular card which they Googled for. Only about 8% of my users even see the "featured card of the day" page.

So yeah, on the face of it, this particular feature breaking is unimportant to most of my users. However, Googlebot is MUCH more impressed with novelty than 92% of my users. Given Googlebot's outsized impact on my business, it is sort of an important stakeholder :)
A better version...

http://www.ycfeeds.com/feed/ask-submission-title-contains?te...
Why do they call themes feathers? Yech.

On the Mac, it's set so that left-and-right scrolling becomes up-and-down scrolling. That's ugly, because I often scroll top-right to down-bottom, and Songbird stutters something ugly when I do that.

The display controls are unintuitive. It took be a while to figure out how to control the browser.

The controls don't sync to my Play button. iTunes starts up. Yech.

I don't know how I'd test its speed compared to iTunes. But if I close it, the music stops. It doesn't know to make itself a background process. Yech.

It shows my movies and TV shows as songs. It doesn't know enough even to ignore it.

I do like how they made their interface deliberately un-Maclike, unlike Firefox, which tries and fails horribly. But I don't like that they ignore Mac shortcut schemes.
"The Incredible Convenience of Advertising on Social News Sites".

That aside, this isn't really a killer app. It is much easier to adjust an image in the Gimp or Photoshop than it is to do so in Mathematica. If you are doing image processing, it might be nice to have that available in Mathematica, but it is equally easy to transform images in your $FAVORITE_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE.
I really liked this article. Gave some great examples.

Anyone ever work on building a library that leaks? I bet most who've been in IT for 5 years + have, and you knew it, even railed against it privately if not vocally. Granted the direct negative effect it had on others may not have been as dire as the example in this article, but I find it very similar in principle. I've see millions of dollars wasted on bad services and products, while everyone implementing, selling, and promoting them knows it.

It's ignored though, because they are hoping to spin it or sell it regardless (and often do), or they feel they don't have enough influence to make a difference. How many school books could be bought for these wastes?

I see a lot of comments about culture and corruption. I think it has far less to do with culture than it does with species. I like simple answers though.
I never said you made it at random, just that even if it were the best option it was still a poor one. From the options you laid out, it appears none of them were particularly suited to your situation. If it were me, upon realizing that, I would have just waited to see if caching were really necessary before instituting a cron hack.
App Store Total Tops 10,000
To all those who are linking culture and corruption:

The reason that some societies seem to accept corruption is not because of their culture; It's because of social behavior resulting from "learned helplessness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness).

Most of the governments in third world countries are designed to facilitate corruption, so that the elite few controlling the government can benefit.

After spending decades under corrupt regimes, people get used to it.
Starbucks does not franchise operations.

http://www.starbucks.com/customer/faq_qanda.asp?name=common
Does Steve Jobs lisp?
I only posted this because when I read it, I thought it was asking whether Steve Jobs was a lisp hacker. Sadly, it's naught but a vapid discussion about whether he has a lisp.
It's not source; just unzip and run songbird.

However, it didn't work for me. It ran and imported media, but closed when I tried to play.
But with the N97, Apple now needs to work on some of the dafter omissions from the iPhone: cut and paste, and MMS in particular.

Apple doesn't have to worry about either, because the people who would avoid an iPhone for a Nokia phone over those features alone are an incredibly slim part of the market.
Danish software company's ficticious sales claims exposed, CEO disappears
All software has problems.
There are seriously diminishing returns to this, though. Spending lots of time reading about a VCS that might be 2% better (or a language, for that matter) can be counterproductive, or a form of procrastination. They're just a means to an end, after all.
Professional JavaScript for Web Developers,
Pro Javascript Techniques,
Ecma 262 Spec ,
O'Reilly Definitive 5th Edition,
Javascript: The Good Parts

are books I'd recommend for learning JS, and most of the authors have experience with various languages ( though none of them are really geared toward a Pythonista ).

You could create your own custom function that emulates Python's set, but you can't do advanced expressions such as using the binary minus with 2 operands ( sets ) on either side. You'd have to do something like set.diff( firstArray, secondArray ).
My husband works in the fashion industry so I think I can provide a reasonably good answer as to why on-demand clothing isn't particularly feasible.

The way the industry works is, there are a few (much fewer than you think) vertically integrated companies that makes all our clothing. Let me illustrate what I mean by vertically integrated by explaining what my husband's company does.

Basically, they make stuff such as men's shirts under every imaginable label from lower end such as private label at J.C. Penney to mid-market brands like Nautica to up-market brands like Thomas Pink. They own the process completely, from growing the cotton to making the fabric to putting the shirts together in Asia to shipping into warehouses in the US to saying when the shirts go on sale. Other than labels providing a license (e.g. Calvin Klein granting the exclusive rights to make shirts under their label) and Macy's providing the floor space (Macy's being the same company as Bloomingdales, Lord & Taylor, Filene's, Marchall Field's, etc), they do everything.

As you can imagine, when you have a few companies covering every fashion category sold at practically every store, you have almost perfect efficiency. The cost savings for vertically integrated, economies-of-scale companies like my husband's are enormous to the point where you could never get anywhere close to the low, low prices they are able to charge.

So what you are left with is selling your custom stuff at price points that put you in the same category as designer clothing (often accompanied by free alterations) and custom tailoring. And why would someone buy a slightly customized cheap shirt/jeans/whatever when for the same money, they can buy an upmarket designer item, or have it tailor-made?

I am not saying you can't have some niche categories where you do customization. Cafe Press does pretty good with t-shirts. I just don't think there is a positive answer to your question, "How can I give my designer friends the ability to do low-volume production cost-effectively".
I've used Macs for over 20 years and I have never, ever had a virus.

The anti-virus software itself, ironically, has caused more problems for me. I uninstalled McAfee VirusScan within a month after I could no longer stand the drain on system performance.

On Mac OS X, there are a couple things I do to improve security:

- I run as a normal user, so that I always see (rare) prompts if admin privilege is being requested.

- I am extremely skeptical of software installers that "require" privilege. I usually decide to bail on them.
Yeah. And I always give negative feedback. I complain about things about iTunes, too.

When people are looking to see if they will want a piece of software, the best indicator of if you'll want it is whether or not you can stand the negatives. And HN's a big enough place where I think the developers might look at this post, and fix those problems. I'd love to have a viable iTunes competitor.
Tagging has come up many times before as a suggestion for improving the user experience. I think your reasoning is one reason it hasn't come yet. One of the things about YC is that it pushes a broad spectrum of fairly low noise links across to the reader.
I don't use facebook and I'm not sure what friend-feed is, so I'm stumped too! But would it be more user-friendly to say

||turn friend-feed off || delete friend-feed ||

instead?
Anyone know what browser it will be running?
It's not tough to write a virus for OS X, the hard part is getting root so that you can do some real damage.
Yea, I noticed, but I'd rather it be installed properly.
I wouldn't recommend anyone use Norton - on a Mac or Windows machine!
Not Havok, but close. It was MathEngine, which made Karma physics engine (used for example in old Unreal).

They were later bought by Criterion (RenderWare) which was subsequently acquired by Electronic Arts, where it just died.
Little tweaks that speed page loading can also result in surprising increases in traffic -- both visitors who stay longer and improved search-referrals. I think fast-loading pages get a ranking boost from Google, too. (They're very explicit that this is the case for AdWords landing pages.)
I've never ran anti-virus, even when I was using Windows. I've always been very careful about what I downloaded, what I allow to get root permissions, backing up, etc.

People always want to know why I haven't looked at their email attachments, and the response is always the same: no attachments, no exceptions! (Ok, I'm cool with images attachments.)
How does this compare to iTunes?
Apart from being alert, cautious and the stress on testing, the takeaway for me is

"this bug made a live, growing website look largely dead to the world, and Google accordingly sent most of their searchers to get their bingo cards elsewhere."

Most web businesses need to understand how google search works than their own businesses.
Yeah. 37Signals is better at concrete writing. Everybody is, really.

But I think that the message is important: you don't have much time, so change things while you can.
As a previous startup coder who was acquired by a much larger company, I can truly say you've hit the nail on the head. I never minded working 70 hour weeks before, but now I have a hard time punching the clock 35 hours a week. I hate my new higher paying job.
Isn't this sort of a myth? I run Linux and a virus running as my primary user (non-root) could delete every single thing I value on my computer.

I assume the same is pretty much true for OSX.
> Sleep is the best cure for physical tiredness, but mental tiredness is much harder to overcome.

I believe it is exactly backwards. For several times in my life I got myself in a shape where I went to the gym and did my full routine, yet felt mentally so tired I could only think in the same way a drunk person would.

For me, at least, sleep deprivation taxes the mind much quicker and much heavier than it taxes the body. Good quality sleep without an alarm clock seems to be the best way to handle mental exhaustion.
I'm not talking about companies that have a cult following, I'm talking about the perceptions of Apple's design process and how many web startups often try to emulate that fantasy version -- to their detriment.

I guess using Apple as an example made that confusion more likely, but the way they project their design process is part of why people are so obsessed about their products.
Ask HN: Cheapest Mac for iPhone development
I want to acquire a Mac to teach myself how to develop Iphone applications. Desktop, Laptop, apple mini what should I get? What would you choose if you only wanted a code development Mac? ( I do not do any kind of photo shop or graphic work)
Let me guess the outcome of this article without even reading a word .... "The Nokia comes close, but isn't better than the iPhone"

So, was I right?
I still want/need the ability to use DAAP shares from Rhythmbox, or even UPnP shares from Mediatomb, et al...
Meh, most of the advice is related to paying the check at a restaurant.

How about instead of treating your jobless friend to a meal, you team up and try to find a job together. Then maybe a smoke and a pancake once the days ends (on you of course)
The guy submitting this is in the top 10 Y!H submitters.

So either he finds it relevant or is a karma whore. I like to give the benefit in general, so I'm going to go with the former.
This is the second time in a row that I've been unable to read a page on my laptop because you insist on posting quotes like that.

Cut that shit out, please.
Kpss Tercihleri Ne Zaman Açıklanacak
Hey, cool! My article.

This was put together from two comments I made here, actually.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341372
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=330576 (there is where the title comes from)

The problem is that many web people just focus on the product, and only the product. If they're smart they focus on a product that fits a market.

But very few people focus on distribution, which is a necessary component of any successful product. And no, getting on TechCrunch is not a distribution strategy.
So is this a UI rant, or an article on managing privacy in the digital world?

/confused

As far as the FB warning goes, I didn't get it either, but only because I'm not a big FB user.
1. Most of the Internet runs on open platforms. The Internet is a tremendous revolution by all measures. I strongly believe that your mother, your sister and wife are all been into it already.

2. Have you tried to develop and deliver an Iphone app? Don't you think Apple could have make the iPhone SDK some how more open and flexible. Wouldn't you as a Java guy be happy to have Java there in addition to the Objective C?

I switched to Ubuntu from OS X 10.5 and don't think will ever go back.
The Mac Mini would probably be plenty good.
Irrelevant to HN, pretty tasteless, and bad advice generally. This is probably not a new low on here, but pretty low.
Thanks for posting this Michael (saw it on /. too). A much better read than the terrorism submissions that seem to be showing up here lately.

A title correction however: Should be 'Computing' Science. I might be wrong but I think Dijkstra drew a deliberate distinction between the two.

The precision of his words is refreshing.
Ask HN: Incorporating Online?
We are just about to incorporate, and we are looking at the options available. It seems like online services such as LegalZoom.com provides a cheap and easy way. However, I was unsure of the quality of the documents. Have any of you gone through this process? What are the implications down the road? Would it be better to just get incorporated through an actual lawyer?
Which is more profitable: Pomegranate or Heroin.

I can't answer that, but I can tell you which has a better repeat business.
MyCorporation Founds Your Company for Free This Week Only
+1 for the mini. They are cheap and portable.
They're also good people. And they read HN, so you may already have refund or something. Seriously, they're good people.
That was fascinating. In just a few years after that video the desktop pc that he marginalized there on the right became so ubiquitous and so powerful that it completely erased all of that market segmentation and swallowed up everything.

They never saw it coming. Nice to see every once in a while that Steve is a mere mortal as well.
I was not inferring that the money made would be direct.

If a new music artist signs with a major record label, it isn't because of the great % they are offering, it's the large exposure, which results in money down the road (from concerts, their 'second' deal etc.) Same with your book deal.

Making money isn't bad, I just feel it's a change in strategy from a company all about 'getting real'.

We (as hackers) all 'rage against the machine' when we're young and poor, but once we all have some success and wisdom most take the opportunity presented by 'the man'. Maybe I'm naive in thinking 37signals was different.
foobar2000 has been eating iTunes' lunch for 6 years.
Google Crowdsources Carnegie Hall Concert