skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, the crossbar between the cores and memory controllers is not a problem. The problem is getting enough pins to attach more than four memory channels.
Yay software patents!
You could probably add a bit of readability by making the follow paragraph bullet points:

Compare... "This release adds a built-in manual, an error console, RubyGems integration, simple asynchronous downloads, an in-memory and database-backed image cache, support for external fonts, and, most prominently, its own unique library for packaging apps into little executables. OS X support is significantly better, as we switched from Carbon to Cocoa."

To...

"This release adds:

-A built-in manual

-An error console

-RubyGems integration

-Simple asynchronous downloads

-An in-memory and database-backed image cache

-Support for external fonts

-Most prominently, its own unique library for packaging apps into little executables

-OS X support is significantly better, as we switched from Carbon to Cocoa."

(Sorry if I mis-spaced it, I'm not sure where all the commas should go with my ultra-limited technical experience... but yes, bullets typically add a lot of readability in a paragraph with tons of things going on)
Is a Google Operating System Built on Android, Gears in the Cards?
New AdWords options for iPhone and G1
Local store vs. ccNUMA is orthogonal to stacking vs. non-stacking. The local store architecture looks like an evolutionary dead end at this point.
to me jquery feels less heavy-handed about the abstraction. every abstraction has a price, i tend to avoid them unless they have a demonstrated value. to me, OO has no demonstrated value

to be honest, i see the basis of objective-j born from some notion that apple does things right so naturally we all want to do things they way they do...but objective c sucks (having coded in it), and i have no idea why people would want to muck up another stack by pasting objective c onto it
Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money
I would recommend against it. I co-founded a small enterprise SW company and we tried several "commission only" sales people and teams. This become a time sink. No success what-so-ever!

When we focused on doing it ourselves things picked up. One "trick" we used that worked was to 'SPIFF' sales people who had complementary products to give us leads. This lead to our eventual acquisition ...
And again, since Objective-J is a proper superset of JavaScript

really? what can it do that js can't do?
I'll add: I'm not sure how much of these are really simple for most hackers, the way "The U.S. flag is red, white, blue, rectangular, contains 13 stripes horizontal stripes, and 50 white stars on a blue background as a separate rectangle in the top-left corner" is simple for an American - but as someone far more business-inclined than technologically inclined, I can piece together 90% of the changes when reading in bullets, whereas the paragraph is overwhelming. If it's all super-simple things for a decently skilled hacker, then never mind the input and congrats on the new release :)
Is Last.fm really as widely known and ubiquitous as the Billboards are though?
"1. goofy/eyes-bleed syntax"

This is almost always an indication that a programming language critic has nothing really thoughtful to say. Same with Lisp and S-expressions.

If I may paraphrase: "It's slightly different than what I'm used to, therefor I despise it."
Interesting article but I for one genuinely prefer libraries to syntactic language changes. We do not need another language among the thousands already there.
It's pretty sad, but I've worked on teams where management followed every single one of these rules.
this can easily be extended to systems that prevent cars from speeding, being put into drive with passengers not wearing seat-belts, etc...

this is why there are people who oppose mandatory seat-belt laws, the idea being once you give up a modicum of freedom you can open up yourself to losing more. if we all believe their should be mandatory seat-belt laws, why not enforce them remotely and electronically?
I would have bought a subscription for this right away, as we were discussing rolling something like that on our own for a client.

However, your pricing page being a "mailto" link put me off. Tell the price right away.

Also, what are "advanced" events?

63KB is a little too heavy I'd say. Perhaps rewrite this so it doesn't use jQuery, or at least give me the option to skip it in the tracker js if I'm already using it on my site.
I was trying to contrast your point-of-view, that you prefer OS X, in contrast to the fact that there's little empirical evidence that OS X is an outright better model or that there's little evidence that lots of people are going out of their way to imitate it. Sorry if that didn't come across very well.

My personal opinion is that for every advantage that OS X has via its menubar and dock layout it has an equal disadvantage, so both styles are equal.

For example, for the menus at the top gives you the advantage of Fitts' law but makes accessing menus while multitasking and switching between applications and using menus more difficult. Moving from looking at the top of the screen to the window is a further distance, which may make viewing slower. You do get the advantage of a more intuitive MDI applications though.

The dock is better for frequently used applications, but it uses more screen space, the locations of applications in the dock shift as you use it and it uses dramatically more space than the quick-launch bar. It also stylistically makes maximisation look rather 'off'.

If you solely rely on keyboard navigation, Windows-style is probably better - you can easily load an application without the mouse (especially in Vista), plus you primarily use alt+tab/cmd+tab which means that the menu is largely wasted space. If you use many applications, the Start Menu is likely quicker than using Finder, especially on Vista with its built-in search. Of course, there's Quicksilver and their ilk but that's not standard and similar applications are available cross-platform.

Finally, if you believe they're approximately equal, if you're developing a new OS from scratch with no existing users and you have to choose between the two it's probably better to lean to lean towards a Windows-style layout as more people are familiar with it to narrow the learning curve, which would make choosing Windows-style windows as the default a reasonable decision.

I'm certainly not saying this was the thought process at all - let's not forget Mac OS X was years from release when the GNOME and KDE projects were started and they were building on top of the paradigms of existing X applications - but it certainly shows that if you were making the decision today choosing the Windows model would still be a reasonable one, and that's excluding the factors involved in changing like alienating the current user-base.
Thanks pedalpete,

The idea is that it's user generated content, so hopefully some better cooks than me will sign up.

Thanks for the comments on the design - It's really hard to look at things objectively when I'm looking at it all the time.
I blame it on corporate greed, and stupidity.
LED products may still be expensive, but they are easy to use and great to DIY. They are also perfect for locations (boats, sheds, etc) where you can't get AC power easily. I have a basic page here http://www.cedarlakeinstruments.com/products/led.html to show just how easy it is to build your own LED lighting. I am (slowly) adding more content to it as time permits.

If anyone has any ideas for content, contact me.
So we should embark on a huge government-funded program to widen broadband availability so 1% of children can benefit from it.
"to be honest, i see the basis of objective-j born from some notion that apple does things right"

The word "apple" DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE ARTICLE. (I just checked.) Please, read the article and reply to the very thoughtful points made there. Ascribing some vague, unsubstantiated motives to people who have carefully laid out their entire reasoning behind their decision does not reflect well on your ability to engage in substantive discussion.
Ask YC: Google Vs. Yahoo for traffic
I've got about 3 web sites going which I actively advertise for and am noticing a consistent trend.

1. For organic traffic - while most of the raw traffic of my site comes from Google, Yahoo has a noticeably lower bounce rate and higher daily conversion rate.

2. For advertising traffic, Yahoo's advertising engine delivers noticeably higher quality leads then Ad words (although, again, less of them).

So I'm extending the question out to the community - who treats you better in terms of both organic and advertising ROI? Yahoo or Google? In terms of both quality and volume?
Wikipedia vs. the Brittish govt. on Child Pornography.
Read his first sentence again:

"There is also the issue that implementing things like method_missing and import are prohibitively difficult without new syntax."
Well they have a desktop client. They could easily encrypt it there.

The web client is a bit more of a problem, they would just have to promise to encrypt it right away.
Very cool.

Back in college our final assignment was a GA to find the best trajectory for a hypothetical space mission. (You had to go by particular planets in particular windows in time.) It was great fun playing around with it.
What exactly is the author arguing there? After becoming fluent in irony and sarcasm, you won't 'experience' that asshole beating you up at recess as 'damaging'?

I find it much more likely that the social punishment for being a bully greatly increases as the social structure builds, and it hits critical mass by the time children are 11-12 years old. The bullies then must become more subtle about their actions.

I agree that teasing definitely has its benefits, but this author's portrait of teasing as an innocent victim just has me confused.

Teasing is an extremely subjective social concept, and the same actions can be either teasing or bullying depending on the situation. If one of my friends comes up behind me and tackles me playfully (I'm a rugby player, so this isn't an uncommon occurrence), that's just an everyday part of life--but if a stranger took me to the ground while I was walking down the street, I wouldn't be so forgiving.

It's up to the teasee when teasing becomes bullying, and I think it's a great idea for schools to have policies against bullies.

If you enjoy it, it's not stalking, but if it is, you need to be able to get a restraining order.
Being a superset of JavaScript doesn't mean it can do more, it just means that all valid JavaScript is valid Objective-J.
I don't think that _why cares much for people alienated by mere silliness. Not everything has to read like O'Reilly.
The problem is breaking stuff like

(also see url: http://google.com)

Might be better to treat a trailing ) as not part of a url only if there is no ( earlier in the url.
Not that I necessarily agree with their logic, but presumably they are estimating that the net economic benefit of the things created with the billion dollars exceeds a billion dollars.
Hell, this was the 10 commandments at every job I've had...
My favorite vim plugin is to not use any plugin: use the filter command "!", the unix way.
"The author is against language features implemented as a library."

I don't understand how you can say that, when the entire article is a defense of why they added a bunch of features to Javascript as a library. That is, as opposed to adding those features as part of a new language specification.

I think the actual argument is "as long as you are adding language features as a library, you might as well introduce new syntax for them while you're at it." They present several arguments in defense of this claim.
Poll: Honestly, how "creative" are you on your taxes?
Please vote just once and choose the closest option if multiple would apply. IE: If you're a waiter and they only withhold on the $2 wage per hour and tips aren't withheld, choose no withholding. Fascinated to see the results of this...
(Employee whose employer withholds): By the books
(Employee whose employer withholds): Some "creative" expenses
(No withholding): By the books
(No withholding): Some "creative" expenses
(No withholding): Income could arguably be underreported + "creative" expenses
(Business owner): By the books
(Business owner): Some "creative" expenses
(Business owner): Income could arguably be underreported + "creative" expenses
Legally paying no taxes and making money
Creatively paying no taxes and making money
Not making money
also, the sound is only coming from my left speaker.
nice app. love the simplistic approach.
Absolutely! For Javascript at least, putting the { on the same line as the thing that caused it is pretty much the only rational policy.

The weird thing is just how the interpreter handles this:

return;
{
a: "foo";
}

That's a null return, a block (not that JS supports block-level scope, so blocks are pointless), a labeled line (line-labels aren't actually used for anything, since there's no GOTO), and on that labeled line, there's a string expression that does nothing.

So, this is really like 4 different warts working together, but semicolon insertion is by far the most insidious.

Also, liberal use of parens can help prevent semicolon insertion bugs.
I guess I'm just a watered-down kind of guy.

As for a little background. I lived 50 miles outside of DC. On a good day, from there, you could practically see the capital. No broadband. I was informed by the local county government that the cable operator given the franchise contract was technically required to serve my area but opted instead of doing so to pay a small fine each year in order to skip us. The franchise contract renegotiation was only done every 15 years. This likely meant no broadband for us until 2015.

The frustrating part was that we could see the places that were served easily from our house. I could just about throw a rock and reach it.

Finally we rented another building nearby to use as an office and set up a radio link between the two to bring the broadband in. (About 9 miles)

Now I'm sure there are plenty of high minded, well thought out arguments on both sides of the net neutrality issue, and the studies on broadband penetration in the US are surely more than enlightening; But I had to crawl onto my roof in the freezing cold with a yagi and a telescope to get broadband just 50 miles from the nations capital.

Does this seem right to you?
Indeed. Though I'm accustomed to adding a space at the end of urls.
I guess so. One more little reason not to develop web applications using a proprietary overgrown and buggy ad banner creation tool.
Genetic algorithm building a small car
And, dare I ask without sounding like a complete user, what would you use if you were only doing < $1000/month. Would a credit card processor even touch you or is it basically just paypal?
It was an interesting article indeed, but I disagree with him that it "gets better with aging". Think about work-place verbal abuses disguised as jest, or parental "funny" put-downs spoken to adult children, or when an adult jokes about his/her spouses' performance in intimate situations or lack of financial prowess, or that he/she's "still chasing that making it big dream". It could still hurt, even when the subject of teasing realizes that it is meant to be funny.

The only thing that changes with age is our ability to laugh at ourselves along with them, or to laugh back, or the ability to distance ourselves from the abuser. The author has taken the acquiring of fight/flight defense mechanisms which comes with age for granted.

My other comment on this thread: the luxury of being able to fight is what distinguishes good teasing from bad teasing. Those of us who have ever been teased will know what I mean.
Blame Verizon for "selling" the lines to Fairpoint.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/81006

And they still haven't completely taken over the lines yet. The last I heard the final switch was scheduled for January 2009.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Fairpoint-Ready-For-Janua...

Doesn't exactly bode well for the area up here. Though I'm not sure sticking with Verizon would have been any better. They pretty much had given up on expanding the infrastructure in northern New England.
"Interesting article but I for one genuinely prefer libraries to syntactic language changes."

I feel like there is some terminology confusion here (I already replied to someone else in the same vein).

I think it makes more sense to say "I prefer libraries that do not introduce syntactic language changes to ones that do." Technically, I would say Objective-J is a Javascript library, in addition to being a language in and of itself.

I think that Prototype, jQuery, etc. also add some syntactic changes, so I would say the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Hiring salespeople purely on commission is tricky. It shifts all the initial risk to the side of the salesperson. Therefore people willing to work that way often want a big slice of the revenue and aggressive payment terms. While the lack of up-front risk for your company is nice, the commission terms can come back to haunt you if your product / service becomes successful.
I agree, the middle part is weak, but the bookends are compelling arguments.
JQuery Based Music Player
You could also do it like this:

var closures = [];
for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
var j = i;
closures[i] = (function (k) { return function() { alert(k); })(j);
}
closures[0](); // outputs 0

The issue is that the var here is passed by reference. Ie, all 10 closures refer to the SAME "i" variable. So, when i is incremented, they see that it's been incremented.

Outputing 9 is actually correct in the first case. If you want to trap the current value, you need to copy the value to a new reference, ie, by making it the argument of a function with a new scope.
I hate to sound like wet blanket, but from my personal experience, browsing sessions by themselves aren't all that useful in learning about your users. Over the past few years, I've worked a lot with recording browsing sessions (I was the creator of Tapefailure, and now VisTrac.com, which is a work-in-progress).

The main issue is that the sessions aren't focused (you don't know about the goal of the user) and watching tens/hundreds/thousands of recordings to get an idea of what users are or aren't doing on your website is simply impractical.

What, I believe, is really important is summarized data; taking the data and boiling it down to more specific bits of information about how the users are browsing: What are they doing on the page? How long does it take them? Collectively, what is and isn't being focused on? What about how users interact with forms?

These are just some very broad examples, but there are many ways in which you can distill the recorded data, and I find those to be far more insightful than the browsing sessions themselves (look at some of what ClickTale is doing).

There is a lot that can be done in this field (otherwise I wouldn't be working in it myself), but I think recording user sessions is only the very least of it.

Despite my reservations, I'd love to have a chance to further discuss your plans. What would be the easiest way for me to get directly in touch with you? (My email is available via the "Questions? Comments? Contact." link on VisTrac.com)
Yup, I use that all the time too.
Paypal and Google Checkout are both good alternative options to look at. In some cases when you factor in all of the upstream credit card processing charges you'll even pay less.
The claim was 4% IE, not IE6. Big difference.
I realize that. But I've also had positive reactions under similar circumstances. The movie quote just refers to a scene most of us can easily picture.

Another example; I'm a bit homophobic, and I get teased for it occasionally. A friend of mine from years ago also behaved homophobically, but reacted badly to the same teasing. He came out of the closet last year.

His bad reaction was due not to the input, but his own internal state.
The Top 10 People To Unfollow On Twitter
This is very well thought out, and their reasoning was surprising to me. I knew the whole point about Objective-C choosing its syntax to allow it to be a compatible superset of C, but never applied the same reasoning to Objective-J and Javascript.

Having said that, I still maintain some skepticism about using a single language for the entire webapp stack. I understand their desire, for example, to be able to swap out the "rendering layer" in the future. However, CSS is a pretty good language for specifying how things should look across an entire web site, or part of a website, or single page, etc. I don't think Objective-J is a better tool for this particular job. Likewise there may be times when you just want to express structural relationships, and HTML might be better than Objective-J for that purpose (less sure about this one).

I don't know the details about Objective-J. Maybe they address this point elsewhere. The counter argument may be that Objective-J is for "rich web applications," and you don't worry so much about site-wide CSS style in that case.
Should I be alarmed that I hear about yap integrations from Hacker News before hearing about it from my boss? ;) (J/k, this is somewhat old news.)

note: I is a front-end tech lead on YAP http://apps.yahoo.com/
TC: Redanyway Is Like MyBlogLog On Steroids (Invites)
New record: 94,563 Indian students in US
Speaking of understanding ecosystems, hasn't Seth cottoned on to blog comments?!
Verizon actually is working on a FTTH architecture though. Have you ever heard of FiOS? It's incredibly nice, incredibly fast and pretty damn expensive; Verizon's estimated to be spending around $23 Billion on it through 2010. Or around $800 per customer.
At that point, we are venturing into LISP territory where the line between mini-language and library is truly thin (and sometimes non-existant like in the CL loop macro).

My standard: Can a common JS interpreter (say firefox) execute the code without modifications?

If that is true, then said "thing" is a library.
You mean:

"impossible to find it being put to use outside of places apple forces it."

That's a huge caveat. iPhone development is extremely popular. Maybe the point is that people just put up with Objective C in order to do iPhone/Mac development. But I don't think that is true. NextStep had a small but rabidly devoted following, and part of that was because they really liked Objective C. Apple tried Java bindings to Cocoa at one point, but found everyone used Objective C anyways.

In general, I think it's true that most developers don't know much about ObjC until they want to develop for iPhone/Mac. But once they learn it, they tend to like it, from what I can tell.
When Linux fails
Ask HN about Server Side Javascript
What's the best server-side javascript implementation? Why?

There are a few out there. mod_js, Rhino, various Spidermonkey implementations. Have you used any or some of these? What were they good for? What did you like about them? What would have made them better?

Not interested in debating the merits of javascript as a server-side language in general. Thanks.
I don't know. You certainly bring up a good counterpoint, that it would be very costly and would benefit a disproportionally small amount of the population.

There probably is no right answer. I would personally like to ensure future children the same opportunities that were afforded to me.
The interactive demo is great, and this is certainly a valuable service if it works well (is robust on real-world complex AJAX apps, doesn't slow things down too much, can handle high volume). I've tested www.robotreplay.com which is/was a very similar service and it fell short.

I think you should be more open about your pricing - asking us to email you for an estimate is going to turn a lot of people off.
1 // 3 == 0