skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can't just dub yourself a "Software Engineer" because you self-taught yourself visual basic.

Well, to me it just looks like canadian Engineers(TM) are afraid of competition.
that's a good point. it is also true that us geeks tend to be too into technology, rather than understanding the people and situation actually using the solution.

i don't use twitter or SMS, and i use my cell phone simply for free calling with my folks, so i don't assume that twitter apps (or cell phone apps) could help students or school administrators.

knowlege about the market is always a far more significant unknown for me than technological unknowns.
Well, I personally choose PostgreSQL for my personal stuff, but your logic doesn't hold. PostgreSQL was slow, but correct. Now it is fast and correct. MySQL was fast, but wrong. Now it is fast and correct. Most of the reasoning behind picking one or the other has disappeared and we're left scraping the bottom of the nitpick barrel trying to convince people to use one over the other.

As for why someone would choose MySQL, there are a bunch of reasons. There are a lot more people with MySQL experience out there. MySQL has better replication facilities (and I've set up replication with MySQL, Slony-I and PgPool-II). I'd really like to see Mammoth Replicator become the standard in the PostgreSQL community (as well as for 1.8 to be out of beta) as I think it's a considerably better replication design than the other options in PostgreSQL, but right now MySQL replication looks a lot better. Maybe you have a good use for one of MySQL's less used storage engines. MySQL Cluster looks interesting, but I wouldn't trust my data to it today (even if Zillow seems to think it's the best thing since sliced bread).

The differences between the two are really minor today. Choose whichever one you like, but there are definite reasons to choose either one.
Even if 7 is very Vista-y I'm still very surprised.

I did not think MS would dump Vista that fast.
And I wonder what exactly 7 is all about, I have not paid much attention to it... until now!
Eliezer addressed a similar idea a few days ago (the relation to your question will be clear about 11 paragraphs down): http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/growing-up-is-hard.htm...
Turns out that Bernie Madoff did invest some of his fund!
What? I think you complain about stupid things and miss real features. It's called "Programs and Features" now for one thing, and it features a lot more detail and information than the Add/Remove programs dialog of old. Also, being able to search for a program specifically saves so much time it's ridiculous.

You seem to be one of those people that complains that Microsoft didn't add enough features in Vista in one thread and then complain in another that they changed everything around. You're complaining about superficial changes and willfully ignoring real functionality - the search-focused UI is a dramatic improvement, and you can claim it was taken from OS X or what have you but that doesn't make Vista's implementation any less useful.

Real power users will learn the new methods and features and probably learn to love them, and probably upgrade and/or dualboot/virtualize Linux. That's what I've been doing, and I'll continue to do that. On the other hand, whiny noobs on the internet will continue to whine about everything Microsoft does because they can't adjust to change.
I'm tired of all these apps asking for my password.
I actually like the homepage better because all the images are re-framed into the same square, producing a (kind of) random piece of the image.
It reminds me of some pop-art collage.
Yes; I should have mentioned, it has bug tracking (tickets) too.

The wiki not only works for arbitrary documents, but it's pretty well integrated elsewhere. For example, a ticket submitted to Trac can use wiki syntax. The tickets can also refer to Subversion revision numbers.

As an Apache server it can be authenticated in the usual ways.
The internet has made me sad. :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_I/O
My vim and personal configs are versioned and part of the code repo! On any particular machine, I just use a repo cloned from the dropbox repo.
Maybe I'm not understanding something - how do you do simultaneous requests in a single thread?

http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html

I'm not too shocked you don't know about it, to be honest - not enough people do for some reason. Axod and I are lucky to have worked together on a very large-scale problem at a previous company that could never have been handled with a threaded approach.

I've since moved on to Justin.TV, where I wrote a single-threaded chat server that scales to over 10k connections per server cpu (we run it on many 8-cpu boxes). Axod is now the founder of mibbit, and he's obviously using a single-threaded approach there too.
Well, I should have said that tables are easier sometimes. But all the layouts that people complain about being hard in CSS are already written; it's essentially copy and paste at this point. YUI Grids, Blueprint, blah blah... just pick one.

Tables are hard for everyone but the developer (and eventually the developer unless they never change anything) for reasons you can find in this thread.

You know, I'd expect CSS to be better, not necessarily easier. It isn't CSS that makes CSS hard, it's browsers, since they all choose to render the rules slightly differently. It's the same reason JS sucks; Browser A does this, B does that. Just the way of the world.

You can use the tools as they were designed and lose a little more hair in the process, or you can cram a square peg in a round hole and use tables for layout. That's basically what it comes down to.
Reclock is a much better option IMO
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ReClock_Directshow_Filter

AviSynth isn't the best audio processor. It's much better with the visual side of frame rate conversion. Its other strong points are: dealing with interlacing correctly, resizing, pseudo HDR, and improving how the clip looks (denoise, deblock, dehalo, sharpen, ect...). It's something I play around/code for with in my spare time. Check it out, you might like it :)
http://avisynth.org/
Thanks for the numbers, 45 million and 5k are kinda different.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I have never done a very large scale website, and only now did I check your profile to see that you did.

But I still don't understand how come it's better to do a single thread. Also, all my websites have been CPU bound.

And even if it's IO bound, if you have more than one disk, adding a thread can only help, no?
I'm not /tired/ of them, but I'm not interested in most of the apps that relate with how people use twitter: twitter clients, twitter recommendations, etc.

What I am EXTREMELY interested in is two things:

1. Data-mining twitter
2. Twitter as an interface for other (standalone) applications such as rememberthemilk, sugarstats, mymilemarker, etc.
Makes you wonder: How many others have succeeded because they didn’t know the rules

A lot less than the ones that know the rules.

While these stories of people knowing absolutely nothing about what they're getting themselves into and go onto stellar success may make for great reading they are the absolute exception.
Be happy, there was a time when we didn't know about this stuff either ;-)
I'm a fan of Basecamp by 37 signals (basecamphq.com) - It's good for small and big businesses, file sharing, messages to clients, whiteboards and task lists, etc.

Trac is also good because of its integration with subversion and it being open source.
Atheists Send a Message, on 800 British Buses
Maybe tell us more?
Oh, and another one: Maybe these quarterbacks succeed in part because they don’t have the highest IQs. Maybe they go with their gut instead of overanalyzing things.

More likely there's simply no correlation because intelligence isn't the defining factor of a quarterback.
You're not entirely wrong to be frustrated, and I'm under the impression that most people here would agree with you that you shouldn't have to be a emotion-pandering brown-noser to get ahead. The difference I see in the comments to this article, and a number of other comments that touch on this, is how resigned people are to that fate. I am not yet, and it doesn't appear that you are either.

The more resigned someone is, the less reasonable being frustrated about broken philosophy or practice seems to be. The solution then becomes either forcing oneself to become numb, or finding some other outlet for the frustration that doesn't solve the problem. I don't think either of these are particularly effective. They've tended in my experience and those of the people around me to become positive feedback loops; bottling or channeling it just doesn't do enough, it comes back and often with greater intensity. In an odd way, it strikes me as being passive-aggressive with oneself.

Frustration is a sign that something is wrong, and, although it is out of fashion to do so when politically imprudent, I'm an advocate of dealing with the root cause. If something is frustrating you, either change it, or become an advocate for change if it requires more than just your effort. Just advocating for the change can be a frustration reliever; you aren't constantly trying to expend energy forcing yourself to be ok with something anymore.

As for the letter, depending on the response, take it as a sign of whether you'd want to work at that organization. I'm undecided on whether you should've sent it; it depends on your goals. If you were just looking for whatever company would hire you, the letter was a mistake. If you're looking for people who are on the lookout for people with ideas and desire to share them, it might not be such a suicidal move. Just imagining myself as a hiring manager, if you had good points, it certainly wouldn't hurt your chances.
The title was showing as [dead] for some time. It's been resurrected.
Who cares? Really?

Does this site load? Is it fast? Then what exactly is the problem? Validation ensures that standards-compliant browsers will, in the future, render the page correctly. If the people behind the code are willing to rewrite it, fine, it's their choice. It makes no difference for anyone outside of the team whether it validates or not. Most browsers don't even respect the standards fully.
I'm starting to understand what you mean.

You have one program, that handles multiple requests in the same program - but it's just one program.

As opposed to multiple programs, each handling one request.

I can see how that will handle any IO issues, and if starting a program has overhead, that will help too, but it still seems like it won't do a good job of keeping the CPU busy.

But you did say earlier that you were not CPU bound. All my websites have been CPU bound (well I think they are CPU bound), so I guess that's why I didn't get it at first.
Any software for speeding up podcasts and videos for Mac? Some good podcasts like stackoverflow are just slower than Vista running on Eee.
But, people _could_ adopt http://identi.ca, and help make laconi.ca a better distributed platform and then transition to it. This isn't bound to happen though, but it _could_.
I'm reminded of Mac OS X 10.0 being so sub-par that Apple decided to make 10.1 free, to compensate. This turned out to be an advantage for developers as well, as they could simply forget 10.0 existed and require 10.1, fixing some problems.

Vista certainly qualifies as a sub-par OS worthy of a free upgrade. With Microsoft having lots of money, and a need for really good P.R. right now, they would be smart to mail off a Windows 7 box to all of their Vista buyers. Developers and OEMs could then forget that Vista ever existed, and apps could move forward to require Windows 7 (or XP) as a baseline.
Adding threads only helps if you have more cores, or if you're forced to use something that may block.

But even then, it's better to have a set number of threads doing different tasks, rather than one per user. eg have a network thread, a db thread(s) etc.
[Boston] Cloudant Looking for Erlang/OTP Hacker
Startuply Posting: http://startuply.com/Jobs/Senior_Erlang_OTP_Developer_792_1....

Cloudant is building a highly scalable distributed database service. We're looking for a talented and passionate Erlang/OTP developer to join us at our Somerville offices. We are a Summer '08 YC company and have recently closed a series A round with a local (Boston) VC.

To apply, send an email to jobs@cloudant.com with your resume, cover letter, and anything else that would pique our interest. Put something about Hacker News in the subject line; we'll give preferential treatment to HN users.
Wow! Thanks for the kind words. I decided early on to be as honest as possible about everything with this site.

Sometimes that means my personality shows through in the design and other aspects, other times it means that I rail against youtube for a few paragraphs in the public changelog/blog.
Who says this guy isn't top-notch? I bookmarked him. I intend for my future-millionaire fantasy self to be very frugal!
Engine Yard Cuts 15% Of Workforce
Ah the days of threadpools, the cpu battling to context switch. The late nights battling to hold the cpu steady and add just another few threads, good times, good times :)

You are of course right though. Easy to forget...
He's referring to the opening to MTV's "The Real World".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_World#History
He's anti-Obama. The reference to "change" and the bottom 95% were straight out of Obama's campaign.
They may well be CPU bound because of context switching.
Shoes seriously lacks Firebug. It's cool when it's working, but no way to tell what happened when it isn't.
Pivotal tracker has been mentioned here on HN before. Just throwing that out there as a possibility.
ensignavenger was referring to this statment:

> obtain it through file sharing networks where it would have been available anyway.

when mentioning the legality.

Or to rephrase, if you looked on the filesharing network it would have been there regardless of the licensing, and some people would not download it if they weren't legally allowed to.
Skip the LLC
I would like to second the recommendation of Trac. My only complaint (and a minor one at that) is that it's not intended for more than one project at a time. But it still beats the snot out of the competition for the exact requirements you just listed.
I am fan of Acunote http://acunote.com Not surprising since that is my startup :-)

It's tailor-made for a software startup, includes SVN integration and is free for <= 5 users.
Thats great stuff!
thanks for sharing.
Any hindsigths? something rigth out of your head about the subject???
I'd further add that in the time since I wrote that, where XUL has crept forward, GTK and especially QT have blazed forward. XUL just isn't remotely competitive unless your app looks like a web app, in which case, it probably should be a web app. The range where you need something that looks like a web app but isn't one, and absolutely positively won't ever need any of the extra functionality the other toolkits offer (all of which is there for a reason) is a pretty narrow one.

Between bindings and scriptability built into some of the toolkits such as QT, there's almost nothing left unique to the XUL platform. You can see an example of that in http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/12/02/widgets-enter-the... around 2:40, where the script driving the little Nazi is actually the scripting language QT ships with based on Ecmascript.
I really like this idea. I am about to release a couple apps on the app store, and would be interested in using reviewrobot.

I am interested in how and when you will be reporting the data back to your servers. Do you send this info every time the app starts and stops, or collect the data locally and then periodically report it back.

Great idea.
Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com/) is great.
Ask HN:How to get an internship with a VC Backed Startup
I am a sophomore in College studying computer science right now and I am looking for a summer internship. I've always been interested in entrepreneurship but most startups do not have formal internship programs. What is the best way to get involved with web development startups? Should I just cold call them?
Right. Ars, here are a couple of points you may be missing:

- Adding threads "works" up to some small number (maybe a few hundred or so - depends on your platform). Then adding more threads just takes up more cpu without doing any useful work. Your program can seem cpu-bound, when actually you just have so many threads that none of them can do anything.

- The approach axod and I are talking about uses a single thread to service many network connections. Obviously you have to write your code quite differently to handle this: Your code is typically "triggered" by an event like receiving a few bytes over one network connection. You do a (very!) small amount of work, and then you quickly return control to the network core (called the "reactor" in Python's Twisted library). The core then waits for another event (e.g. more bytes arrive on a different network connection), and the cycle repeats.

Hope that helps.
The Power of Less: Changing Behavior with Leo Babauta
You made it, this is it. This is the place.
I notice that ending your statement with a question mark seems to help in avoiding downvotes?
Ylastic - Manage Amazon Web Services from your iPhone
just be aware because you're on a shared host, they may kick you off to a more expensive machine if you start using all that bandwidth.
Looking like a tank would be an improvement. Regular car? Most of what you'd find in a junkyard is more attractive.
yeah but if you get its going quick - is that really lazy? If you value more getting it done and working over getting things "right" from the start - for many cases that is a good enough approach.

Although what I find interesting is the data store in google app engine - if you can work within that sort of database, you have a much better chance of scaling if you need to (and like you said, you rarely need the relational part of a RDBMS anyway).
Like everything else Java, it just does everything in the most elaborate, baroque and top-heavy way it can. There are so many, so much better ways to build GUIs out there. That's what I meant in my comment about Java editors; you need an enormous amount of tool support to do anything useful in Java because of all the boilerplate you need. Tk on the other hand is an absolute pleasure to use, and I spend almost no time on my GUIs now, I can concentrate on my real code.
Adhom is "you're an idiot and therefore your opinion is wrong". What I said is "you are reading into my comment way more than I put into it, you are wrong". Or is pointing out that someone is wrong an automatic adhom now? Seriously?
I'm pretty certain that whomever is the source of the funds is still required to have an amazon account. I'd love to be wrong about this.
Actually, software engineering is relatively new to the engineering profession here in Canada (and elsewhere too, I suppose).

To clarify, in Canada:

- You cannot call yourself an engineer unless you're a graduate of a CEAB accredited program.

- You can perform engineering without being a certified engineer.

- You cannot approve final designs without being a licensed professional engineer, which involves graduating from an accredited program (or recognized foreign equivalent), as well as passing technical competency and ethical integrity exams.

- Engineers are held personally liable for the consequences of their work. No passing the buck to your employer, and no "just following orders" Nuremburg excuses.

- Engineering advice you give, on duty or off, just like doctors and lawyers, unless otherwise indicated, are legal engineering advice, and you can be held accountable for its consequences. E.g. Advising your neighbor that'd he'd need a 5" support column for his deck, and if you're wrong, he can sue you for damages.

The difference is that non-software engineering is routinely life-or-death, and there are enough considerations in your average engineering task that you really don't want someone who hasn't been comprehensively educated doing the job.
Good article. His stacks are large, but it give you the basis for selecting stacks that will work across a large range of computers.
You are right. I was under impression that BigTable is distributed hashtable (as MemcacheDB), but it's not.

I revisited Google IO talk on App Engine Datastore where they explicitly say it [1]. They call it sharded sorted array.

Here "sorted" is the key difference: it means you can do efficient prefix and range scans of contiguous areas in one sweep without extra disk seeks.

This wouldn't be the case for MemcacheDB even if you created some clever key naming scheme, as locality there is defined by their hash function.

That of course, being in addition to many other features that GAE Datastore has and MemcacheDB doesn't have.

I mentioned similarity based on how fundamental is the "key->value" aspect of both MemcacheDB and GAE Datastore, as opposed to traditional relational databases accessed via SQL.

[1] http://sites.google.com/site/io/under-the-covers-of-the-goog...
www.rentacoder.com, whatever you do though, do NOT go with the lowest bidder.
I'd say Amazon is a lot easier to configure than real hardware, even if you've never used it before. Just use some web admin front-end like Rightscale, and premade images with Ubuntu, Centos, or whatever you like.
I think this deal holds some weight; The fact that microsoft won't directly own it might help get past any anti trust issues others would bring...

- On the other hand I think Google might try to step in again (like in the past unsuccessfully) and bring yahoo over to an agreement to block the microsoft deal.
That's if you have two machines. The comparison was vs keeping stuff in a hash table in memory, and I was saying databases are no worse.
Apple has been charging for iTunes Plus upgrades since 2007
I never said it wasn't accessible or that it doesn't degrade gracefully. I did read the links provided on sIFR.

My points remain. An image would degrade just as gracefully and be just as accessible. And graceful degradation/accessibility seem to be answering the UI question for older browsers. What about current browsers? Since I have flash installed, the title is rendered using flash and now I can't resize/select the title. In this case, the "degraded" version seems like a step up.

Finally, yes, I know that typography is important in design. I was just wondering at what cost.
For a usability site, it's a really confusing interface, and the text isn't that readable either.
A Markov chain generator in Clojure
cheaper and more effective security systems. something that the average homeowner can install and integrate to their home network, without having the need for calling in a pro.

detect motion, follow it, or zoom in on it, or whatever.
Sad to say, my only real takeaway lessons were:

- All statistical models have assumptions. Even if a model looks like it fits the data, make sure the data doesn't violate those assumptions. If it does, the model doesn't fit.

- Causation can be inferred, with confidence, just by analyzing data.

Honestly, the econometrics stuff was presented poorly. What looked like pages from a book were put up on the projector (and in some cases, I think they were book pages), and the professor would just talk through the page. Picking up anything worthwhile from his lectures was hard - he knew the class had a varied background (some CS, some philosophy, some economics, even one person from marketing), but he still went faster than my prob/stat background could keep up.

The causal inference stuff was presented better, but I think the subject matter is more intuitive in general. His (the philosophy professor) math was graph theory, which I have a firmer grasp of.
Finish the paint job and it's going to look OK.
Adobe AIR is proprietary. You could also use JavaFX or plain old Java. It's under a GPLv2 or CDDL license.

(Some people care about free software, others don't. Just thought I'd mention an alternative)