skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Desktops aren't 'taking a hit from tablets', they're 'taking a hit from mobile platforms'. Phones, laptops, and tablets have all increased. Desktops have decreased. Tablets are chewing out part of the laptop market, but laptops in turn are chewing out part of the desktop market. Consider the desktop to laptop ratio you saw in offices 5 years ago compared to now.

I'm not saying desktops are dying, just that they're no longer 'the default' they once were.
> I wonder am I guilty to pirate Matlab?

If you otherwise support the concept of intellectual property, you are. If you believe that Matlab is MathWorks "property", MathWorks is not obliged to sell you their property, and if you take what you believe is their property against their will, you are guilty. If you dont believe in intellectual property, then everything is allright.
It's the same for any complex program, smartphone or desktop. I have Picsel Smart Office on my phone and it has a boot time, because it's an office app and has to load resources to use the app.

And on his proposed solution, he asks developers to empower users, to not make users feel belittled, and at the same time he asks developers to trick users into thinking the full app has loaded. How can you avoid belittling someone and trick them at the same time?
What is Macular Hole, Stages, Treatment, Surgery and Surgery Recovery?
When the Sky Falls
Dr Christensen wrote in his book that you have to compete with your own products before someone else comes along and disrupts your market & profits.
It's a no brainer but it's a difficult decision for most companies because most incentives aren't aligned with destroying revenue, making your products obsolete, ...
Dr Christensen explains the dilemma and he offers solutions.
Nothing's perfect but Steve Jobs may have solved the dilemma.
Steve's decision was to basically kill the iPod with the iPhone and to kill the Mac with the iPad.
You can still buy iPods and Macs so you could say nothing got killed, but you probably wouldn't be able to pull off decisions like that in big companies because they have well-embedded risk-averse corporate cultures.
Note: I don't mean to imply it's all about the culture.
Our software is written in C++11 and we are highly asynchronous AND lockfree.

This was neither hard, nor impossible and surprisingly (<-- irony) we have excellent performance with a very low memory footprint (in other words, all the problems discussed in the post don't exist for us).

We have a custom memory allocator for scalability. As for memory management we either don't copy it (zero-copy) or when we have to track the lifetime, we use reference counted memory (which does not have the problems you point out when correctly implemented and used).

We don't have (yet) a mapreduce-like feature, but this is coming.

Actually the most difficult part was the network layer.

We have a workable version with which you can play here: http://www.wrpme.com/ Feel free to contact me in private if you have more questions.
This practice actually goes against the recommendation of iOS Human Interface Guidelines, although it doesn't seem like Apple actually enforces it:

Display a launch image that closely resembles the first screen
of the application. This practice decreases the
perceived launch time of your application.

Avoid displaying an About window or a splash screen.
In general, try to avoid providing any type of
startup experience that prevents people from using
your application immediately.
Your Product Needs an Engine of Growth
I'm not sure how they would "tailor the application to the specific user's needs" as it would be clearly impractical to develop different versions for each of their millions of customers.

Photoshop (for example) is pretty extensible and has support for plugins as well as scripting capabilities etc, not sure what else you want?

Also part of the reason that adobe is the industry standard is that their applications are consistant and a designer who hops jobs can easily get upto speed in a new environment without having to learn a completely new tool.
Visual elements periodic table
Just wanted to let you know that in Internet Explorer 9 much of your page text is cut off. It seems to be positioned to the left of the browser so much of the text (mostly the code) is cut out.
Except they don't show the splash screen to praise who made the program. It's just to give you something to do while you wait. Just like reading shampoo bottles' labels in the bathroom.
He's got first-hand experience to back up his complaining.
For some reason I've had a preference against using CSS frameworks like this because they often take you away from the pure CSS code. My reasoning being if you end up in an environment where do not have access to the framework can you complete the task at hand?

I guess I would say it's like learning Javascript before using jQuery (which I did) so that you have the basics down.

I suppose I'll have to try a few of them out to see how I feel about it.

Also, I'm quite partial to ColorZilla's Gradient Editor.
http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/
Unleashed camels run amok
> If you have an SSD (like your iPhone), then swapping Photoshop back into main memory will also be much faster.

I think the point the author is trying to make is that it shouldn't be up to the consumer to spend more money to make their programs run faster. Software reform is what's needed and "just buy an ssd" is a very strong argument.
It looks like different people use different definitions of partition tolerance; the original meaning was:

"The network will be allowed to lose arbitrarily many messages sent from one node to another."

Which means that, if you have a network, you have partition tolerance, period.

But Stonebraker defines it differently:

"If there is a network failure that splits the processing nodes into two groups that cannot talk to each other, then the goal would be to allow processing to continue in both subgroups."

Great article here:

http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/cap-confusion-problems-...

As for two-phase commits, I'm not sure what system you've used that requires app knowledge, but (for instance) PostgreSQL does them automagically; you just do PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT PREPARED, and if the transaction fails you need app-level error handling - but presumably you have that error handling even without two-phase commits.

Here's an article on Facebook's move to HBase:

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=454991608919
I love Louis CK as much as the next guy, but he's not a technologist, and his perspective is not helpful to us in this context. In life, sure - have patience. Keep it in perspective. Appreciate what you have, and don't rage against things you can't change.

This rant is not about life, though, it is about what makes for good and bad software. Which happens to be what we do for a living. In the grand scheme of things, we're all dead, and software doesn't matter. While we're here, though, it's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about the things that bug us about it. It's our job to make this little area of the universe better. I think taking that seriously is a good thing.
I'm learning to program using K & R, and using Codecademy as a supplement. I'm finding it useful to see some of the same ideas in another language.

Codecademy (currently) won't teach anyone to be an expert programmer, but they're just getting started. I can see it turning into something very useful over time.
You are wrong.

Everytime I start Blender (3D content creation suite) I'm blown away by the time it takes to start. Less than 2 seconds! Ready to use!

Do I call Blender a complicates program? Yes I do. The feature list can compete with the one of 3ds Max.
We have similar problems in Belarus. I can not talk for Iranians, since it might be different there. But in Belarus, country close to the center of Europe continent, located on intersection of major roads between east and west, we are in a quite similar position. No PayPal, no Apple, even Microsoft is represented only via Ukrainian office (i.e. office located in another country!)

And this happens there because people do nothing about it. We have corruption there, presidential clan, which holds most of valuable businesses out there (oil refining, minerals extraction, weapons trade). I've been there, I had an great idea, that together we can change situation, get new government, build businesses. But after 2 years I realized - simply nobody care.

Let put it this way - If I live in bum's family, should I blame fancy restaurant management for not giving me access to it? Probably, no. Same case with Belarus - it is not an excuse for pirating software. Instead, Belorussians should fix their country first.

And in the mean time, if you really need to make work done, there is bunch of open source software. Use it. It might sucks comparing to propriate ones, but you can use it to make work done. There is no excuse for stealing.
You're confusing "country" with "government".
“Copy. Transform. Combine.” — part 4's video on software patents and copyright
That's a bit surprising to me. I haven't noticed this (not much of an app person), do many apps use the recommended technique? Personally I would find a splash screen that looks like the first screen to be confusing.
I feel like this is exactly what CSS was ment not to do; It shouldn't be something which adds content; it's simply there for styling.

Something more will confuse new developers into misusing it, and ultimately breaking more things that shouldn't have been even able to do.
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Obat herbal wasir

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I doubt it would change much. It's hard to get politicans to make statments that can be falsified. Watch some episodes of the brilliant "Yes Minster" to see what I mean.

"Well, in the fullness of time, given the most up to date information, subject to the findings of the interdepartmental crossparty study group, and dependant on the budgetry contrainsts, I believe something to be likely to be the type of programme that would, given there are no unforeseen circumstances, lead to positive net job growth"
I'm looking at replacing Munin with Amon. We used to use a pay-per-month monitoring service, but I find the setup and maintenance of many services to be equal to the headache of maintaining something like Munin.

The most obvious difference is that Amon runs on your hardware, so the data stays with you. The pricing model is fundamentally different than services like Server Density, New Relic, Scout, etc in that you pay per major version, rather than per-month.

Amon is currently pre-1.0, so it's hard to compare with a mature service like Server Density. They're (Amon) no where near feature parity with SD. Then again, SD will quickly cost you many times the licensing cost of Amon when you're monitoring multiple servers.

For me, the value judgement will have to wait. With services like Server Density you are (theoretically) offloading a lot of maintenance overhead to the SaaS provider. If Amon delivers on their "one line installer" promise, then it will at least have "effort parity" with many SaaS providers.

I have to wait because they're pre-1.0, so while their software is inexpensive and easy to use, there is a distinct lack of critical features. If I'm making the evaluation (whether to roll this in to production) today, I can't live without alerts, so Amon is out. Based on the way things are looking, I'd say that Amon has a bright future though. I might buy an early release, just to get up to speed on it.

Tangent: Where did you see that Amon is open source? I see that I can get access to the source by licensing it, but I don't see any mention of open source on the pages I viewed.
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obat herbal ginjal

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Those haven't been at the start of a movie for 40 years.
It'd be a shame to see such a beautifully simple feature that is the iconic 'Like' watered down by a stab-in-the-dark revenue model.
Thanks.

Tomorrow our site, with over 100 million page views per day, will be relaunching running on Symfony2. This is a complete rewrite. Prior to that it was running the Catalyst Engine written in Perl.
Overview of new features in Apache HTTP Server 2.4 - Apache HTTP Server
I guess presidents day is a slow news day on hn:)
Parsing is not the slow part.

Fetching js over the net is slow (multiple orders of magnitude slower than parsing).

Optimized compilation is slow (an order of magnitude).

But you can't even do baseline compilation without knowing what's in your evironment. For example, JSC (from WebKit) compiles to bytecode. But the compilation process happens lazily, as functions are first executed. (There is a quick pass to check syntax, beforehand. V8 does this too AFAIR.)

But OK, let's say you're parsing. You parse, create an AST, and go to compile it. The result of bytecompiling for V8 is native code! You can't cache that effectively, it will embed too many runtime constants. For JSC you do produce bytecode, but that bytecode too is dependent on runtime object layouts: for example if you reference a binding in the global object, and the binding is present, then the compiler will produced an indexed lookup into the global. That depends on what's in the global when the compilation unit (function, eval, or global code) is compiled. Caching is a security / correctness risk, in that context.

And then you have the negative impacts of caches on browser memory footprint (and associated GC cost).

It's no wonder why modern JS engines prefer to just keep around the source, and re-parse on demand.
I've evaluated the beta last month and it is a really interesting technology. Especially now it has incremental state transfer, which allows nodes to catch up again (e.g. after a reboot). It has some rough edges, but the developers are really helpful and on top of things.
What's the best low-power device for running an info display / dashboard?
This is a fair point; it makes business sense from Apple's point of view to give it away for free, however the same reasoning didn't stop Microsoft and IBM in the 80's/90's to charge developers $3000 for the OS/2 SDK.

In response to your second point, I would like to point out that submitting to the App Store is the only part of the process that has to be done in Xcode, which is a very tiny part of the app development cycle.
True, but the linked FAQ is very informative for anyone involved in open source software development, or software development in general:

http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq
I have moved from webdesign so that I no longer need the design features I admired on Fireworks. What I liked most about Fireworks was the blend between the vector and bitmap graphics, and I don’t think that Pixelmator is getting anywhere close to that. But it’s worth to take a look. Also try out Acorn (http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/). I think both have a free evaluation.
I for one prefer seeing splash screen for couple of seconds[1] rather than having laggy/half-functional UI appear instantly. Actually I'm more annoyed by Windows login, which shows desktop early while it's still starting up background apps, and thus being unusably slow.

And the comparisons to mobile devices are just ridiculous. At least in my use, I'd estimate that on average apps on my desktop launch much more quickly than on my Android phone. And I challenge anyone to find a smartphone that boots up faster than a fresh Windows 7 install on a SSD (or even on a regular HDD).

[1] I just timed: Photoshop 5 seconds, Word 2 seconds, both from warm caches. And that's with a 4 year old budget laptop.
Very cool and interesting idea, but basically useless. Without HTML you can't even have simple HREFs or semantic content like H1, H2.
All good points. To some extent you can work up to a $10k deductible using an HSA. First year, you elect a $4k deductible -- the premiums are more expensive but you have lower exposure. Drop the max into your HSA. If, at the end of the year, you've been healthy and haven't spent much out of the HSA, then change your insurance up to the next deductible level (e.g. $7500). Drop the max into your HSA. Assuming you stay healthy, your HSA accumulates a large balance and you can gradually lower your premiums. Keep in mind that you aren't required to spend from your HSA if you have expenses: if you can pay out of pocket for minor expenses, do it. This keeps your HSA balance up so you can afford the risk exposure of the higher deductible.

As a bonus, the HSA contributions are tax deductible and if you hit retirement age with a balance in the account, you can (more or less) treat it like your other retirement accounts.
About loading screens, I've always wondered why games don't try to get rid of these (maybe they do?).

Anyone familiar with why you have to have loading screens in games? Would it be possible to pre-load a level while you're playing?
Are You A Lemon?
Colourlovers (YC W10) hiring Senior Designer
Call for Demos - ACM Recommender Systems 2012
Whenever you can run the same software on a variety of hardware with different specs and capabilities, it's always up to the consumer to spend more money to make that software run faster.

Having said that, I agree with the idea of making software less monolithic and making it start up as fast as possible, as long as it is possible. However, when I say that I want a program to start up fast, I mean that I want it to start being useful fast. Quite a few of author's ideas are not about bootstrapping gradually, they're about faking it. It's like going to a place that used to have a "closed for lunch" sign and discovering that it's now open, but populated by robots whose personality is an Eliza-like AI.
I wouldn't fire him but I would ask that he be a little more informed on how modern technology works before going on a rant about it. Especially when he aims his complaints at his own company. There are REASONS for some programs to load slow, it's not like everyone is competing for the slowest loading software.
Pixelmator is a almost perfect clone of Photoshop 5. Not CS5, version 5 from 1998 or so. Even the shortcut keys are identical. I happen to like it a lot.

If your primary use of FW is to mock something up and export it as HTML and image slices, Pixelmator is not for you. You can get a free trial, IIRC, and see for yourself.
This 404 page is making me rack my brain to think of a good implementation for a green-screen question/response UI across a whole site.

Time to pull out my box of Apple ][ diskettes and find a program that could be reborn as a web site.
5-10 seconds? This guy is complaining about 5-10 seconds?

I hate bloatware. I despise behavior like the sloth and neglect Microsoft inflicted on Windows XP once Vista shipped and I loathe the abandonment of gingerbread phones like my late Droid G1 (unaffectionately nicknamed "the brick" in its final days) by Google once they entered the crunch phase for ICS, but 5 to 10 seconds?!?!?!?

Get a grip... If an app has any mandatory online component whatsoever (not that photoshop does), its boot time is unavoidably non-deterministic. Good luck fixing that (not that there's any excuse for avoiding latency that can be avoided)...
Intel drives have good reputation.
10% discount on domestic hotel booking by Expedia
Peter Thiel Gives Another $1.7 Million to Ron Paul Super PAC
Think of the 100s of millions or even billions of hours of unhappiness caused by whatever utter wanker designed the windows update system. All that misery waiting to go home to your actual life but you can't because your laptop's displaying 'Do not turn off or unplug your computer'. No, just sit here and watch me. Or those times you accidentally opened Word or Photoshop or MySql Workbench (god that's slow) or whatever. You made a mistake? Well fuck you. I'm not listening to you, says your computer, I'm just going to ignore you for a little bit.

That's why.

And they're not enormously complicated, paint opens instantly and has the same UI. Word is little more than a glorified textbox. Programmatically all the features make those programs enormously complex, but the actual common use of the programs are simplicity itself.
All Apple apps (inbuilt or downloadable) follow this guideline. Amongst the non-Apple apps that follow it are Reeder, WhatsApp, Twitter, Sykpe (sort of), AIM, Shazaam, Instapaper and so on.
Afaik you can create any actions you want using Open Graph actions. Is this really something new?
"If someone does not make use of it, and lets it sit unclaimed to the point where they don't notice that someone lives there for quite some time"

Then you get into different people having different ideas of what it means to "use" something.

A person buys a tract of land and doesn't develop it, because she thinks it should be a nature reserve. Another person wants to build a golf course there. Should the second person be able to just waltz in and build a golf course, because the land isn't being "used"?

Also, in the case of IP, a piece of IP can be "in use" without being publicly available yet. Consider a book being turned into a movie. That can take years.
Time to move Mono to the non-free repo where it belongs.
I imagine that your sculpting friends would also note that most of sculpting is thinking, not physichally shaping a medium.

Why do you think programming would be different?
Well, once you make a product that practically prints money, profit is one thing you can ignore. It will just happen.
Plenty do. The idea with that guideline is that it resembles the first screen the user sees, but in a "vague" manner - that is, maybe it just has the title bar and empty table view with no data filled in.

The idea is to give the user the impression the app has already started instantaneously, and you're just waiting for data to roll in to populate the UI.
How to use lead magnets for list building
Op here. Very true, which is why I didn't feel like I was a fish completely out of water when returning, but that my tools were outdated and I had to go out and buy new tools.
I might have misstated. I mean that consumers shouldn't have to compensate for poorly written (in terms of efficiency and speed) software. Sure buying an SSD would increase the write speed, which is usually the bottleneck for a system, but the consumer can save a couple hundred bucks if the developing company focused on speed instead of bloat.

And I agreed about the "faking" issue. Just like how Windows will silently keep loading tons of services in the background after a reboot, but shows you a desktop and makes you think you are free to click and launch stuff.
"To an approximation, asking when a non-trivial program will be done is just like asking when a theorem will be proven."

Thank you for this. ;)
Thanks that is helpful. Surprised to see no other replies. I would have hoped many people doing single source apps.
Standards for Web Applications on Mobile
Sometimes I go to my nightstand and my phone isn't there, "Four, Oh Four!" Other times I get there, but I hear from downstairs, "Three Oh Two, dear, it's down here on the coffee table." I run downstairs and grab it, relieved, "OK!"
NASA: You know you’re a Geek if….
1. Buy the book "Mindfulness in Plain English"
2. ???
3. Profit!