skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never had a production Rails project, but do you have any anecdotes or numbers to back up your statement? From initial glance, it looks like the win in processing speed outweights the complexity. So then you're implying that this win isn't required. I'm assuming that scaling out is cheaper than the complexity cost of implementing/maintaining such a caching solution?
I'd like to hear comparisons between Leveldb and Berkeley DB.

I'm using LDB in my most-recent project. I wrote a trivial HTTP wrapper around it using Mongoose to make it a "server". :)

I like the snapshotting feature, the support for transactions, the built-in support for accessing the db from multiple threads, and that it maintains keys in sorted order (this great for timestamped keys like I have).

I looked at BDB a while back, and IIRC it doesn't have snapshotting and sorted keys. Unsure about threads.

I use the snapshotting feature dump a backup copy of the database.

The BDB API seemed significantly more complex than Leveldb's. IIRC, the native API is C.

I like C++ and like that Leveldb's native API is C++. It uses the standard library string (which allows embedding null characters).
Fake Pokemon Yellow rises to No. 3 position on iTunes app charts
2: Use the middle button. It will open a new instance if it makes sense. That is, you will get a new emacs, but not a new thunderbird.
That's pretty inaccurate. So I forked Linux kernel and changed nothing. Now I'm a 99.9% C developer. Cool.
They can't provide a P3P header saying that won't let 3rd parties track you with it? That would "Break" their +1 functionality? I'd like an explanation of that.
I'm impressed by the skill that goes into this but it doesn't seem like an even-handed technology -- it empowers governments, major corporations, and other large organizations more than it does private individuals.

As a specific example, people writing political blogs in China could be seriously harmed by this technique even at the levels that it's at now.

I applaud you for including the link to "manually changing your writing style will defeat these attacks" but that's a link to an academic paper. Could you please also write some good, layperson-oriented docs on "how to beat this"? For that matter, I'll do the writing grunt work if you'll provide the expertise. If you're interested, use the GMail address in my profile.
Companies Replacing Gut Feelings With Big Data
Many people here are talking about how iOS works vs a desktop OS and that's the big difference - but its not about the SSD. If you have a high powered computer then its no problem to leave the adobe suite running and then just grab it from the task bar and get to work. The issue is that most people don't have high powered computers, at least powerful enough to run photoshop constantly while doing other things (HD videos, netflix, chrome+firefox, etc…. non work things). Adobe and other big software companies are going to continue to push the envelope no matter how fast our computers get in terms of resource use.

Has photoshop gotten faster in our lifetimes? No! It just wants more and more resources with every release. So what is the difference between how apps behave on iOS and how they behave on the desktop? Backgrounding. Very very few apps (ableton live is one that has some "freeze" type features) don't have any way for you to shut down portions of the app or put the app to sleep so that you can start it up quickly. On iOS this is how apps are expected to behave, and it shows.

But, even if Apple did bring backgrounding to the desktop, I imagine Adobe would be one of the last to support it - and I only say this because of my previous personal experience with Adobe products like Flex, LCCS, etc…

I just thank code I'm not a designer...
Hindsight is always 20/20 and norms change quickly on the internet; we could say equally critical things about Telnet and FTP.

I agree that P3P clearly needs some rethinking to stay relevant. Especially now that the cat's out of the bag on how to bypass it. (Microsoft's immediate response is to set up yet another blacklist system... some cultures just never change.)

For everyone's entertainment, the OP's comments linked to an amusing satire of P3P called P5P, or the "Pretty Please Platform for Participating Publishers." This is possibly the best collection of protocol tokens I have seen since RFC 2324.

http://pastebin.com/ijjRKvUB
Not sure this belongs on HN Peter Thiel is a well documented libertarian so it's no surprise he is giving money to Ron Paul. If your trying to foster a discussion about super pacs and citizens united you could have found something bigger / better written
Apple tells Proview that it will sue for defamation if it doesn’t stop talking
>The pro-Google bias on HN is astounding.

I can imagine how exact same commenters here supporting Google would react if Bing Ads did this to Chrome. I am sure hell would break loose with the "OMG EVIL M$" shouts.

My concern now is that this post may disappear soon thanks to inevitable flagging of any negative news about Google. This has happened to many submissions in the past.

One instance http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544173

That was an article about Microsoft posting an anti-Gmail video, but the pro-Google folks didn't want people to even see the video for themselves and judge it for what it's worth.
The Oatmeal on why piracy persists
I would imagine that a program to detect you by writing style in the way explained here could also be able to anonymize your writing too, with a little rewriting itself. Or even used to frame other authors.
Except for the fact that the predecessor to Skydrive was released before Dropbox and is cross platform http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26811

No reason to assume Skydrive wont also be cross platform.
> Then it's not too hard to see that Δ(ΣF) = F, in other words, − undoes +. And it's not too hard to see also that Σ(ΔF) = F, because if you look at it ….

Note that your derivation assumes that F₀ = 0; but that, on the other hand, we can't assume this blanket condition, since it's not preserved by Δ (unless we restrict further to sequences with F₀ = F₁ = 0, etc., until eventually you wind up considering only the 0 sequence, which barely interests even mathematicians). One is thus forced into the definition of the indefinite integral (which I suppose we would call the indefinite summation in this discretised view? :-) ), which, in our context, says that Σ(ΔF) = F + F₀.

(None of this is to take away from your very fine main point, or even your equally fine smaller point; but it's a shame to come so close to a rigorous-and-yet-intelligible picture, and then to fall just shy!)

(Perhaps you were implicitly identifying sequences that differ by a constant.)
"already" ? GPUs are almost hardware implementations of directX/openGL APIs and it is not new.
Nice effort, I guess? But really this is just seems like a bad gimmick to me. As someone who lives nearby, Eastern TN as a whole strikes me as a horrible place for hackers or startups. The majority of local talent seems generally disinterested in moving to any languages or tools beyond those of the average enterprise (java, .net), or anything built/polished in the last 5 years. Generally your choices are making a decent salary working in healthcare with .NET/Java, or making <30k salaries with open source, which generally doesn't go much further than CMS modifications, or working for a CTO that thinks php frameworks are fadish and don't really work in most situations (so he rolled his own).

I don't think I need to add a disclaimer that this is non-objective and entirely related to my personal experiences in Chattanooga. It's bad enough that after job hunting in the area, I decided to go entirely freelance. And even there, I won't even talk to local companies. I've already wasted enough time hunting local clients only to realize nary a one of them expects to pay > $20/hr.

"moving to where you can get faster Internet service"... "GigCity"...

This is clearly bait. Pretending this gigabit internet service is available or practical for a startup, much less personal use, is either dishonest or ignorant of the actual situation in Chattanooga.
In Defense Of The Not-So-Lean Startup
Anyone done a comparison as to why I'd want a simplified tool like this vs. a more extendable tool like Zabbix or Nagios?

Yes, I realize that those and this probably don't perfectly overlap.
Colloquy can be pretty bad, but I've been satisfied using either Adium's IRC support (though I wish I could easily block the server message / nickserv spam) or LimeChat, which was the simplest/fastest standalone OSX IRC client at the time I was using a standalone client.
Including an offer in the first contact is essential. Without it, I won't even reply to your email or return your phone call, no matter how many times you follow up (without an offer). I don't want to sell my domains, but I'll take any serious offer under consideration.

Another tip: Don't play dirty. I caught someone trying to initiate a transfer on one of my domains without my knowledge. Naturally, it failed. Out of spite, I snapped up the .net and .org counterparts, which were still available. If it weren't for that dick move, I probably would have pointed out that they were there for the taking.
You can actually access Skydrive on any platform via the web if you set up a sync profile to your online storage.
So does this mean that things such as "like" and "+1" buttons don't work unless you subvert the P3P protocol?
Have you used a recent copy of Word (eg. Word 2010) or any of the other Office software? It all opens basically instantaneously on my system, and my system is like 4 years old now. They still show the splash boxes this guy is complaining about but the splash boxes are blink-and-you-miss-it fast and then the real app is there. Less than a second from click to load of the real app.

The Adobe apps still do have more significant load times, more like 5-8ish seconds, but RAM is cheap, just load that app once and keep it open forever. Hibernate your system instead of shutting it down cold so that the apps don't have to reload from initial state when you next use them. This also makes Windows pop up very quickly (but even from cold boot modern Windows only takes like 15-ish seconds on my (again 4 year old) system), which isn't anything to complain about compared to any other desktop OS out there.

All in all, I'm in the group of people very confused about this post. I'm historically someone who absolutely hated long load times, but it isn't something I've worried about for any app or OS I use in years now.
They can do it because Apple hasn't optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority.

Apple's market cap would suggest that this presents a false dichotomy.
I suspect that the intention of this article is to create some relationship between corporate donors and Ron Paul. Media probably couldn't (under)stand his "most of my donors are military personal" message.
> What about IE tracking what users are searching for?

What about it? A browser isn't a website, so P3P doesn't apply. Its written privacy policy applies, and likely allows such behaviour.

> Microsoft should admit that they only care about privacy when it's convenient for them.

I think the point being made is: so should Google.
Yeah, I'm using it in the project I've got in development right now -- actually sort of a hybrid approach. It's a grayed-out version of the main UI, with a "Loading..." message overlaid. I think that's a pretty common approach (graying it out, with or without an explicit message).

The app needs to load something close to 200 fonts (it's a design-oriented app). If they're not all present, the font choice list won't render properly. Lazy-loading isn't really an option -- otherwise the user will be sitting there watching the UI slooowwwlly render each font choice, one by one, while he waits to do something with them. Better to take the hit at startup, IMO, rather than making the user pause while he's in the middle of creating something.
Language	Bytes

Clojure	6731

JavaScript	9778

Erlang	13858

Common Lisp	584550

Emacs Lisp	2489

What do I win Bob??
Some great talks.

Not a big deal, but I'm curious: why are the Clojure conj videos always on Blip.tv?
I haven't had a lot of experience with caching, and I agree with your comment above about database views, but wouldn't the complications be mitigated by using the approach DHH detailed recently? http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3113-how-key-based-cache-expi...

That is, incorporating `updated_at` into the cache key, and using `touch: true` on your AR relations to make sure that caches of affected parent objects get expired too?

Are there other complications I may not have run into yet?
yeah, right. usually I call it interval. But you are right. this is the right term.
The difference is that users can understand when the interface is poorly designed because they have to interact with it constantly.

Can users understand the difference between poorly designed and different than what they're used to? Given that studies have shown that people think keyboarding is faster than mousing even when it's not, I doubt it.
Open source for domains means nothing to me, what are you to domains? I have no way of linking open source in my mind to the concept of domains.

I tried to look what OpenDomain was so I search and I find some business solutions .com which I assume isn't your project so I look and I find your twitter[1] (I'm assuming) which has the same slogan you used, so I go to the website and what do I find? Just some default filler content for whatever template your purchased.

Owning the domain for a project or a company is key as that is a great part of their identity that they have to build up (especially for online applications). Maybe if your project "OpenDomain" gets some backing and is alive for many years and actually says what it does then maybe people won't have to own their domains but as of now your complaint of people not getting it is moot.

[1]: http://twitter.com/#!/opendomain
Yes, it's called "OS X". Okay it's BSD, but that is exactly what Apple came along and did ten years ago. The desktop Linux movement has a much bigger mountain to climb (insurmountable imo) than it did when we were having this exact same discussion in the late 90s.
"To be fair, C++ is a mess. It is, however, a very capable mess with extremely broad adoption and compatibility on pretty much every platform anywhere."

C++, IMO, is not alone in that: XML, Unicode, multi-threaded programming using condition variables and mutexes, integer modulo arithmetic, date/time libraries, IEEE floating point, etc.

The good thing of all of them is that they solve complex real-world problems. The 'bad' thing is that they are more complex than other technologies that solve the same problem, partly.
I though this was a great movie as well and quickly picked up all the lessons in it for startups. I even recommended it to my co-founder to go and watch it.

One lesson I learned was that we have to have blind faith in our startup. I am pretty young so I don't get much objection to doing a startup, but I can see how this can be a problem to someone who has more responsibilities like a family, or puts higher education in jeopardy. Billy Beane himself lost his chance at higher education to go after his dream. The other point of objection is the startup itself, people might not see the potential in the startup like you do. Some people just won't get it, they won't think it will work, even after you explained the ultimate vision. Billy got shit from everyone, the scouts, the coach, and the sports commentators, who are almost equivalent to trolls. To these people you just can't explain how you eat what you kill, it's a concept they will never try and simply won't understand the fulfillment of the hunt.

My other favorite takeaway was in the beginning of the movie when Billy put a scout on the spot and repetitively asked him "what's the problem", referring to the teams main challenge. The scout saw the problem the way they always see the problem, the wrong way. Billy new that if they went about the season looking at the problem the same way they did the previous year when they lost, then they would naturally lose again. For alcoholics recognizing you have a problem is the first step. Startups know we have a problem, in fact startups wouldn't exist if there weren't any problems to solve. Picking the right problem to solve is key, as long as solving all the little problems that go with running a startup. A co-founder might recognize that they are not seeing the mythical hockey stick on their charts. Some might suggest that it is because the landing page design sucks, while the real reason is that the startup doesn't explain clearly how it can benefit their users. Being able to recognize the right problem is key in our success, we should make sure to look at it from all angles so as to not overlook it. Sometimes it is having the right tools in place, however, most of the times it's making sure you are listening to your users/customers.
Most clients (e.g. Irssi / MacIrssi) will handle logging. And you can have a bot do the logging for you.
Everyone has hit on the same issues I found with the article, but these parts bugged me.

First:

>Apple’s software is hard to customize and can be extremely clunky and annoying to use — that is, if you use your own brain instead of blindly buying the hype.

Am I reading too much into it, or is that very insulting to Mac users? I'm not sure where I'm buying into the hype by preferring the look and feel of OS X 10.7 to Windows 7. The author seems to subscribe to the "if you like something I don't like, you must be inferior" school of thought.

Second:

>A very good example of this is iTunes and the way the iPhone forces you, even today, to plug in and sync everything through one horridly clumsy application.

iTunes is in no way a great application, but the author has made it apparent he comments on things with which he has no experience: iOS devices haven't required users to sync through iTunes since iOS 5. You do it all on the device a la Android.

With those issues and the various points other commenters raise, I don't see how this article is anything more than a rant by a person who sees simplicity and usability as an encroaching evil.
I asked that question! I was going to post a link to that when I saw the headline here.

Ask HN's are awesome but you don't usually get a PhD thesis in reply :-)
IMO it's not 100% accurate for you to claim that you don't use garbage collection when you roll your own reference counting mechanism.
I'm about to head out the door, but here's what I see. He's got two fundamental changes to the way a modern CPU is designed:

* Internal representation of floats is logarithmic

* Small processing elements are connected in a mesh network that is made explicit to the programmer

The outcome of the second is that there is more work for a programmer, as details of the hardware are no longer hidden. The tradeoff is that none of the overhead to hide those details is required in hardware anymore. This is not new in other application areas, I'm sure DSP folk (and probably GPU folk) can tell us all about it.

The first gives us very fast arithmetic. What I think he's describing is, instead of working with x and y, you would work with log(x) and log(y). If `x * y = z`, then `log(x) + log(y) = log(z)`. (Additionally, the logarithm of exponentiation is multiplication, so square roots are just bit shifts!) Addition can be done in an approximate manner as well, using a bit more work. This is all from slide 5.

Releasing the hardware from the requirement that it be extremely accurate (he sets up his logarithmic representation to allow for ~1% error) allows him to make all this much smaller. He's shown that it can work "well enough" in some cases, and is working on finding more applications for the tech.

This isn't a free lunch (and isn't proposed as such), and not applicable across all of general purpose computing. But I would think there are lots of areas it could improve; whether it's huge datasets and customers that can afford expensive, custom hardware, or low power application areas that would benefit from approximate methods only a full-blown desktop can handle now (pattern recognition or noise reduction on phones and cameras, for example).
Very valid points. It looks like the Modules proposal [1] aims to fix some of your points. There certainly is still a lot of work to be done and from what I gathered of the GoingNative panels there is no broad consensus yet on what modules really are. Unfortunately this is still very far away and for now you have to choose between high compile times or a "header-only".

[1]: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n334...
Touché. EFNet, then?
Well, considering that Emacs is supposed to integrate smoothly with external processes, it looks that asynchronous IO support it will be a better solution. Multithreading is generally a tricky business for interpreters and virtual machines.

So to reduce editor interface freezing, looks like a dead-end: either you expose asynchronous IO (like AJAX), or you add the complexity to have a multithreaded interpreter (like JVM) or implement a sane concurrency model (like the actor model in the BEAM machine). Or else avoid Emacs modes that are known to freeze.

However, I recently discovered that VIM uses threads:

$ ps -eLf | grep vim
UID PID PPID LWP C NLWP STIME TTY TIME CMD
etanol 15073 15023 15073 0 2 22:23 pts/2 00:00:00 vim
etanol 15073 15023 15074 0 2 22:23 pts/2 00:00:00 vim

I wonder what for :-S
So do you work at Google or are you just a fanboy? IE is not being nefarious in this case. IE is following a standard that Google is actively abusing. Not sure why you have such an infatuation with Google, but I dare say: Everything in moderation.
I think that is a load of toss.

Sure there are dedicated clients for Windows, but you can access the entire of their "cloud offerings" via the web and some rather nifty APIs.

Ultimately my point is that it is no different to any other "cloud" provider out there.

You can also quite happily create a word doc on skydrive from a web browser. You can even mount a skydrive volume on Linux as it's just a WebDAV share as well.

Microsoft aren't the same company these days.

Check this out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104(v=prot.10)....
That instantly reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW8j3x3GzxY
Nothing is a solved problem. HipChat's a great product, and in my opinion the current market leader, but there are always ways to innovate and disrupt. (That being said, using IRC probably isn't it.)
I hate all that old baggage as much as the next guy, forward declarations, header guards...

But C++11 has improved on that aswell, as much as possible within the old framework.
Scare quotes don't have anything to do with your opinion of the author. Scare quotes are quotes that are editorial rather than informational.
Much better than that: if the research/software that identifies authors is published, and some reasonable approximation of the public training set that deanonymizers would use is available, then anyone can check their writing against the tool before publishing it.

If your writing is too identifying, just perturb the text until the tool fails to identify the author. Or even better: perturb the writing until the deanonymizer fingers someone else, in a usefully confounding way.

The deanonymizer's feature-extraction/analysis could itself help drive the perturbation routines. "Make my word choice more like Paul Graham", you could say. And even if there are limits to its automatic substitutions, it could offer coaching: "To make your writing more Graham-like, decrease your average sentence length and use fewer interjections."

Edit, resubmit, repeat until the right author is fingered.

Business idea: website that offers this tuning to help un-deanonymize or faux-deanonymize writing.

Evil business idea: this website remembers everything submitted, to allow the super-deep-pocketed to peek in and de-un-deanonymize (of re-deanonymize?) blocks of text.