skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The implementation that calculates pi took the same amount of time to build 30 years ago as it did today.

The discussion is about how much effort it is for people to implement things, not computers to run them.
If it didn't have the potential to become a very profitable, large scale business, I doubt if Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page would have much reason to care about it.
MacBooks are gone, they were replaced with Airs. Basically it is size vs performance. MacBook Pros are fast, Airs are sleek. Given the choice people want an Air form, but sometimes people can't choose them (game performance, faster compiling, whatever).

The original MacBook was a cheap alternative to the pro. That is now the Air, MacBooks aren't coming back. When the Air form is as fast as a Pro, the pro form factor will disappear as well.
Why Don’t Phones Let Us Record Calls?
Oh, I'm not disputing that Amherst is a good school, just pointing out that that metric is a stupid way to rank schools.
There are some pretty significant risks associated with driving as well, including both the risk of injury/death in a collision and the sheer sedentary seat time.
> Again, once you have doubled your money and gotten it back, you can invest it anywhere you like, including the same companies you may have before. But now you have twice as much money.

Again, that's exactly wrong. As far as the fund is concerned, that money's gone.

Let me help you understand with this link: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...

Pay special attention to the section entitled, "They don’t appear to be particularly interested in making large amounts of money."
"Simply taking walks I can peruse* downtown"

I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Introducing Pivot.js - A brief introduction to a new reporting library
As an enthusiast of old mainframes and the like, I found this read to be very enjoyable. Thank you for sharing!
No, he was downvoted because people leapt to the conclusion that he was needlessly pointing out somebody's preferred flavor of English, when in fact he was a non-native English speaker (as a great many of HN participants are) who was curious about the origins of a particular turn of phrase.
They are! The ones that are self hosted are in the leader board too. (And if there's not, you can suggest it and add it).
If you count Verilog, there are already at least a couple[1][2].

[1]: https://github.com/sybreon/dcpu16
[2]: https://github.com/filepang/dcpu16-verilog
How Apple Could Make a 4-Inch iPhone
Food52.com co-founder's advice to aspiring food writers/bloggers
I'm trying hard to let your valid points stand out from the rampant homonym abuse (effects should be affects, it's should be its, brake should be break)!
"The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it's cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work."

Why is this article on HN exactly? The article took 8-9 paragraphs to even start talking about the app actually being sold, and even then doesn't have a single point that addresses the the headline - what to actually do when your favorite app sells out (or shuts down or stops being maintained)
Ask HN: Help me write a book
I've started writing a "learn to program" book, focusing on presenting a very low barrier to entry.

What I need is feedback as I go from a few people of different levels of skill from non-programmers to the programming elite.

I don't need many people, and I won't take much of your time. Once every couple of weeks, I might send you a new revision, and ask for some feedback.

My aim is not to teach you how to become a pro, but to teach you enough that you will be able to solve problems, and understand the denser books.

So what I'm asking of you is this:

- If you are already a programmer; I would like you to read, fact check, bug check, and generally tell me if there's something you think I could explain better.

- If you aren't a programmer; I would like you to read, and tell me if something doesn't make sense. This is perhaps the more important part, because if something I write doesn't make sense to you, or a concept is too hard, then the book can't do it's job. The other thing to point out is that by doing this, you will probably be spoiling the entire experience for yourself. I'm not saying that you'll end up in a broken state where you'll never learn how to program, but it might not be as easy as fun to learn as it would be once the book is finished. I'm sorry about this, but hopefully your sacrifice will make life better for all the future readers of this book.

So if you have some time to spare, and would like to be part of a programming book with "unicorns" in the title, and get your name on the "thanks" page when it's finished, let me know, and let me know how to get in contact with you. I'll try to make it all as painless as possible.
"The main trouble was getting all the packages/dependencies correct. "

This is the one big problem python has; terrible package management. I can think of 3 different package management systems for python. All of them barley work and the various libraries all require different mangers and different python versions.

This package requires python 2.6. This other package requires 2.5. And now we have separate python 3.x packages. Ridiculous.
Disc drives will be out. Buy all your stuff at iTunes.

As for what consumers will want to buy...whatever Apple tells them to.
> to look over or through in a casual or cursory manner

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peruse
Intel StudyBook will target student platform
The 0x10c forum is lit up with BASIC Lisp and C++ well on their way.
Louis Vuitton Purses,
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Come out to SV and hustle. It's not that hard to attend a party with a VC firm. It's their job to be approachable.
My First 3 Months as a Venmo Engineer
> You've turned something that's a person's fault into something that's the language's fault.

PHP programmers have only one single thing in common. PHP.
The 1992 demo presentation of NeXTSTEP 3 by Steve Jobs
I'm sorry, but I simply have no idea what you're talking about. I'm sure it's just me being an idiot, but I'm lost whenever we talk about "composition of sequential software with disjoint data". Could you explain this to me like I'm an 8-year-old?
Warn: the page got hacked and will redirect you to a porn site.
What I mean is - whatever is driving your graphics card, monitors and local network. Sometimes I do a dist upgrade and my video drivers go to junk. Or family install something to my workstation and I find that it has added junk to the boot sector, and I want to get rid of it for sure. Or my mac laptop just starts being really slow for reasons I can't be bothered to investigate. These things are no longer an issue because your desktop install is expendable.
Plus, in NaCl there's a work-in-progress implementation of CurveCP protocol http://curvecp.org/, which works over UDP and seem to be a good fit for something like mosh.
Yep, I got an Air and never had the need to use an optical drive. Even downloading 4GB of Xcode over the wire is not a burden anymore. 'Bag of hurt' comes to mind.
It must definitely be overwhelming. So much hype is building, and he doesn't even have a functional prototype working yet. Greater men have failed to succeed when so much pressure is present.

I love the game idea, and think Notch is a great game designer+developer, and sincerely hope that it will be what we think it will be. But at the same time, I'm not as optimistic as others might be.
Of course Facebook's going to change Instagram
Quick Tip: Enable autocomplete feature in Windows.
What's wrong with hosting your own repo?
Yes, we could rank non registered members, but we prefere not to use data from people that don't participate on Masterbranch.
To put various radiation exposures in perspective (not entirely certain of the validity of the link, it doesn't cite sources):

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/dental.htm

>A typical dental x-ray image exposes you to only about 2 or 3 mrem. The National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) says that the average resident of the U.S. receives about 360 mrem every year from background sources. This comes from outer space, radioactive materials in the earth, and small amounts of radioactive material in most foods we consume.

>Some typical sources that may expose you to radiation also include smoke detectors (less than 1 mrem per year), living in a brick house instead of a wood one (about 10 mrem per year due to radioactive materials in the masonry), cooking with natural gas (about 10 mrem per year from radon gas in the natural gas supply), reading a book for 3 hours per day (about 1 mrem per year due to small amounts of radioactive materials in the wood used to make the paper), and even from flying in an airplane (about 5 mrem for one cross-country flight because of the increased altitude.)
> I think this followed from one primary thing: shift to software, which Sony has been absolutely terrible at forever.

I think this is true for all Japanese companies (all of East Asia, for that matter). I think the issue is a lack of English proficiency, which makes it difficult to keep up-to-date with the latest in the software world, which moves at breakneck pace.

Take a look at any Japanese website - the designs are at least 10 years out of date. The same is probably true for the backend. It's like you really are going back to the 90s.
Lipstick on the Enviropig: a tale of messaging and manure
Default installed means there's a java web plugin floating around to exploit, for starters.
It's a reason that I love living in Denver, Colorado. I live (affordably) about two miles from Downtown. There is a huge network of urban walking trails just a few short blocks form my house. I either bike or walk (or both thanks to the bike share) to work almost every day (or take public transit when it's really cold).

Since Denver is a very compact city at the core, I can get anywhere in the central city on foot. All the major sports stadiums and major cultural attractions are within a mile or two of each other. Most of the cities best bars and restaurants are clustered around the city center.

If you can live and work Downtown...it's just an amazing place to live. It's a major city that is extraordinarily approachable.
I've done quite a bit of PHP development, a lot of more advanced stuff (Earlier in this topic I linked to a PHP Daemon library of mine on Github).

But PHP has either missing or NOTORIOUSLY inferior Memcached/Redis/Mongo/Cassandra/HBase/Riak/etc clients. They get the job done, but they underperform, say, Python or Java versions in benchmarks and introduce far more bugs and quirks than I've experienced in other languages.

This has actually been a positive thing, because when you're using these data stores/queues/etc at scale and you need bulletproof client libraries, you naturally are led to a SOA. You end up with Python/Erlang/Clojure/Java services that interact with the datastore, that you consume from PHP using Thrift et al.

But being so bad that it pushes you into building a better architecture is kinda a preverse benefit
How to Make "Workations" Productive
I understand fail fast, and errors do still get logged and made visible (New Relic is great like that). I would rather fail a bit slower, silently, though. It's much less jarring to users, and therefore you lose fewer.
Excellent article. I would be curious to see how much of that recurring revenue sticks for 3 months. Would be awesome to see monthly follow-ups for a few months.
also the IPs will change over time. The dynamic DNS will not.
Time to fill out a YC application!
> A fast moving standard is not necessarily a bad thing, provided that changes don't break backwards compatibility.

Another problem is that the standard becomes irrelevant. This is a concern for HTML5, because a 'rapidly evolving' standard means that things can be added prematurely - but once something is in the standard, it can't be removed (easily). At some point, you run the risk of having more companies go the Microsoft route and just abandon the standard altogether, and either stick with an older version, or just fork it into their own new language.
I tried to take a walk in the suburban neighborhood where my parents live and was brought home in a police car. The neighbors called the police and reported someone suspicious walking through the neighborhood. Apparently, its just not done. I didn't have any ID on me so I was brought home in the cruiser so I could present my "papers" to the officer.

Its a terrible thing to think but I distinctly remember being grateful for the particulary large amount of light my skin happens to reflect that night.
Kubuntu Finds New Sponsor
For one second I was reading "I've started an online sweatshop"
Thank goodness they got rid of apartheid!
Powhow: Former Googler Unveils An Online Marketplace For Live, Webcam Classes
Google gives Chrome OS a less alienating interface
Hackaday.com will be running a competition for hardware implementations: http://hackaday.com/2012/04/08/getting-12-year-olds-to-learn...
Now all we need is a DCPU16 to x86 translator and we have a whole new stack of dev tools ;-)
I wonder how much of this is down to them drinking their own Kool-Aid or believing their own hype. It seems to me that each time they are about to release a new console they make ridiculous claims about how their new processor is going to make the PC obsolete. I know that people have used PSen of various generations to make "supercomputers" but their impact outside of gaming has been close to zero.

OTOH my most recent laptop was a Vaio and I'm very happy with it.
Interesting gimmick if it's legit. (I mean gimmick in a positive way.)
Thanks! We've been trying to be very transparent recently, so we'll do our best to do follow-ups and stay transparent. :)
I haven't used a PHP nosql client library at serious scale so I will bow to your better experience (although in the case of Redis clients, some links would be nice as I wasn't aware that the two major PHP clients had any performance/reliability problems - I'm very surprised that https://github.com/nicolasff/phpredis under performs given it's a C extension).

Having said all of that, if you are building a site that uses NoSQL and needs to scale to millions of simultaneous hits you'd be insane not to develop it with SOA in mind. Using just PHP (or any other single language) wouldn't make sense.
Why are you not using any caching for these read requests?
You can add Indianapolis, Denver, and Columbus to that list. I'd think Miami would probably qualify as well.
Thanks for the comment. My goal here was to write a 3 part series on buy-in, leading with the problem and helping people understand that they need to do more than just have a good idea.
One other slightly different view I'll throw out there is that FB having to pay Instagram $1billion, is simply its "cost of doing business".

For FB to maintain its leadership position -- especially with an IPO around the corner no less -- it needs to periodically "eat up" any new threats that may come along. This is afterall the tech space where "low-cost barriers to entry" are common, making this industry very different from what you read in business school.

So, if I was a (future) shareholder of FB I would simply need to be wary of these periodical "write-offs". Afterall, isn't this really what happened to Yahoo? It had to keep spending money to stay relevant until their common shareholders got disillusioned?
Samsung was iSuppli's best guess. It's an "Apple" branded battery usually on the inside.
That's the wrong question. The question is if the X-rays are actually necessary in order to have good dental health, and apparently the answer is no.

Dentists use them because "what's the harm", but now that a harm is demonstrated they should use them only when actually necessary (when "the benefit outweighs the risks").
Facebook Ads are a bit perverted
I think it depends on what market you're in. If you are selling to app developers, TechCrunch is a good place to focus your energy. If you are selling to businesses (or folks that aren't in the tech industry), I don't think it gets you much.
I love this attitude: "the Bureau will use public dollars to create the source code, so the public should have access to that creation." I wish more public sector agencies subscribed to this philosophy.
Because it's such a buzzword and also the things that are used in practice are barely near modeling actual neural computation in the Drosophilia brain, let alone the human one (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-in-a-...).
It's easy to point to Alan Kay's research and then wistfully say that it will hopefully bear fruit one day, but that actually does a disservice to anybody working on today's systems that treat the user as a mature, self-actualizing owner - whether they be creating new software or making existing software more user-friendly.

A system that's built on a philosophy of eliminating capabilities can never progress into a system that allows a user to gradually learn more and empower themselves, as there's nothing "further down" that unifies the whole thing. Software that starts off requiring significant effort to administer can progress into having a user-friendly interface and be incorporated into systems with sensible defaults.

One shouldn't require a user to have to configure everything out of the gate (say, cookie policy), but one shouldn't prevent them from doing things they know they want. Wasn't the Apple device-id thing "fixed" by only allowing tracking on a per-app basis? With cookies, I can have them deleted every time I close the page.
A speech to Harvard's architects of the future by Chris Anderson of TED
Though I am happy for the team, it is a slight stretch to claim that you have a monthly recurring revenue of $25k due to the techcrunch article even though there have been only 1.5 months since the article came out.
http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git;a=commitdiff;h=9dcfb8c73fd...

I'm sorry that you caught us just when we were migrating from SVN to git and the script that posts commits to the bugs was not working for a short time.
It isn't just snobbery (though I'm not denying that there's going to be an element of that in the comments, languages make people get religious and weird). Being called in to do maintenance on a php project sends a stab of dread through the heart of an experienced programmer and it's worth understanding why. This article goes a long way towards doing so.

It's important to re-iterate what the article is NOT saying. It's not saying that you can't do awesome work in php, there's tons of great counterexamples. It's not saying that you can't change the world with php. It's not even saying that you can't write a maintainable, legible, beautiful app with php.

The problem with php is that the core language ignores a ton of what we as a community have learned about language design: Be consistent. Make it easy to do the right thing. Make unwise code look awkward. Pick a type system and embrace it. Don't try to magically do the right thing. Be predictable. Avoid action at a distance.

It's not that PHP makes for a great beginner language. So does Python. It's not that PHP has flaws, so does every language. Many darlings of the Hacker News crowd even have some of the flaws from this list. But I'd challenge you to make a list a quarter of the size of this one with Python, or Haskell, or frankly even Javascript.
The service only pulls info from hosting services like Github/Bitbucket. If you host your own, you can't show up on their "awesome" list.
I may have been making that up re: redis, honestly. It's guilty by association in my mind, but I've used redis in PHP a lot without any first hand problems.

But Memcached, certainly (and even doubly so for the `Memcache` extension that ill-informed developers install instead of the better `Memcached`), and the others listed, either are slower/etc or just don't exist.
Almost extinct on Windows? I see patches for those every month. Here are six of them for the last two months:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-02...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-01... (two vulnerabilities of this nature)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-01...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-01...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-00...
> I think Valve's titles are very PC-centric.

They certainly are. But Valve has proven nimble in the past, so I wouldn't pulling off a transition to the console space past them. After all, Microsoft was able to do it successfully.

I think the key difference we'll see between traditional console gaming and the Steam Box (if it materializes) will be a complete elimination of physical media and a corresponding sea change in the pricing models (pretty much the same as what we see on Steam right now). Obviously, existing console makers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are loathe to cannibalize existing sales by moving online. But Valve has nothing to lose - even if it cannibalizes some PC game sales, they'll still be making the same (or similar) amount of money.

> why would I buy a console (even if it is a Valve one), when I can already play their games on my PC?

Remember, Valve is no longer just a game developer - it's also a content distributor for the PC gaming industry at large. Originally, it had to jumpstart Steam with its own titles, which are definitely PC-centric. But now that Steam is an established player in the PC gaming industry, it will be much easier to convince prominent 3rd party console game developers to develop games in advance of the Steam Box's release. Valve no doubt has clear financial data showing the advantages (for game developers, not for the console makers) of shifting to a digital distribution model.
Simply wisdom!
> this means it takes you ~39 mins to work each way

I'm not sure about your speed calculations - average adult walking speed is generally understood to be around 5-6 km/h (3-3.75 mph). I'm a male in my late 30s and I generally walk at a relatively brisk 7-8 km/h (4.3-5 mph).

As it happens, my walk home is about twice as long as my walk to work, since I pick up my son from school along the way. My walk to work takes about 20 minutes and the walk home takes around 45-50 (part of it at a child's brisk pace).

> This means the cost/benefit would go something like this:

You're missing some factors from your cost/benefit analysis.

* Walking to work means we only need 1 family car. That saves $10,000 a year in direct ownership costs, not including paying for parking.

* If I drove instead of walking, I would not use the time saved for exercise at a gym (know thyself), so I would simply miss that daily exercise. But if my commute just happens to constitute daily exercise, so be it.

* There are about a dozen restaurants within a 5-10 minute walk of my office, including some of the best places in the city. (However, I'm cheap and almost always pack a lunch anyway.)

* Downtown, not having a car confers more flexibility because I don't have to figure out where to park it.

* If I do need more transportation flexibility on a given day, I can always take my bike to work that day.