skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All this Moore's law talk is driving me insane. Improvements in performance are only a side effect of Moore's law.

Moore's law only states that the density of transistors on a chip will double every 2 years. This will fail because of the Zeno's paradox-like effect of limited miniaturization.

At some point, transistors will have to become molecule size, and then atomic, at which point it should be theoretically impossible to get any smaller.

(Sorry for the derailment, and yes, I also go bonkers over centrifugal vs centripetal.)

Finally, DHH may be amazing at writing frameworks, but he is just about the absolute last person I would trust with anything that resembled math.
I did not say there shouldn't be investment in public education and health care, did I? I am not advocating zero taxes, I am advocating tax policies that don't kill start-ups and entrepreneurs in general.

I am European. I worked at two start-ups in two different EU countries before coming to California for grad school. What I experienced is that social welfare has its costs. If you found a start-up and are trying to survive, high-taxes only work against you.
Just to be clear, I have my own project for the education space, it just isn't "twitter" like.

I don't want it to look like I'm pissing and moaning without contributing to the solution.
Note, I may be biased as I just started (literally 12 hours ago) building my own twitter app last night

It doesn't bother me that there is innovation, but I do get tired of seeing them on Hacker News unless it is something that has been created by someone/group I consider part of the hacker news community

But that's because I would be interested in any hacker created product. I enjoy some of the "I did this in X hours" kinds of projects

On days when I'm not in the mood for it, I let them slide

Of course, I'm not saying anybody else's opinion is less valid - some people may be sick of them, and I can understand that. I get tired of seeing updates to stories that I wasn't interested in to begin with, but there is little I can do about that as well =)
There's more to it than personal issues - it's one of the great socio-cultural insights of our time. Girard's argument is that human societies are originally based on violence and that this violence remains in ritualized form, though it is mostly no longer physical. If you are at all aware of how human communities tend to treat non-conformists, this mechanism won't seem so rare. It's a matter of noticing the symbolic and indirect forms that it takes. For me, it's a great insight because it calls each of us to be vigilant about our own capacity for violence, which goes a lot further than what we would normally label "violence".

Edit: you made another interesting point:

Also doesn't Christianity make a big deal about Jesus sacrificing himself?

I know Girard argues that this is not the scapegoat mechanism but the ultimate exposure of the scapegoat mechanism. I remember thinking this is where he starts to get too clever in defence of his own religion. Certainly it's his cultural analyses, not his religious thought, for which Girard is widely respected. But I think also that his claims about Christianity are bound up with a vigorous defense of Western civilization that in the late 20th century was an intellectually courageous position to take.
Buying a Headstone for Knut's Surrogate Father
My webserver is currently serving 5k clients in a single thread...

If you follow "standard accepted", you won't get anywhere.
Ask HN: What bookmarklets do you use?
I haven't really used bookmarklets much until recently. I just have a Google Reader subscribe and the del.icio.us bookmarklets right now. I'm curious to know what other interesting bookmarklets are being used. Post your favorites!
My point was more that adding RAM isn't to be as good as having an actually good DB which doesn't rape your disk and CPU by using inefficient lookup methods, employing overly broad locks and which fails at transactions.

His IO-problem is because he is using a shitty database. Only in the MySQL-world is it common to need the same amount of RAM as the dataset you are working on.

And if you are going that way memory-wise, you might as well you use an in-memory flat textfile or persisted objects.

I'm not saying having excess RAM for caching is bad, because that is obviously silly, but when you need to have the entire DB in ram, you should realize something is horribly wrong.
How come no pitch correction in sample videos ? I assume AviSynth is capable of doing that.
While rediff may not have a claim on the copyright, they did go through the effort of compiling the quotes. At the very least, link back as a sign of respect for someone else's hard work.
You are not tired of Twitter apps. You are tired of someone slapping something together without much due diligence, calling it a startup, and hopping they will get techcrunched, raise venture capital and finally get acquired early on for the low 7 figures. That's what you are tired of.

But you cannot blame someone who is trying to make it out of the rat race. At least they are competing. They will probably build 12 "stupid" apps before finding lucky 13. That last one will be the result of their pointless Twitter apps and honest feedbacks.
Don't forget to nab the UJS plug-in for it:

http://remi.org/2009/01/06/using-firebug-to-debug-unobtrusiv...

Now you don't have to guess what events were bound to which elements!
I'm not saying you're goldbricking, I'm saying that you might be underestimating how far Twitter can ride the network effect.
Oh god, not again. Will these bastards ever give up?
It's fraud -- a crime, even by libertarian standards (at least mine).
I suggest taking up a sport. It's a much healthier way to vent frustration, and it has the nice side-effect of making you healthier. Plus, if it's a team sport, it should help you with those 'dealing with crap' skills that are pretty vital... well, everywhere, really.

Even the smartest people in the world can be incredibly self-absorbed, vacant, and non-sensible, because they're people. People are emotional, and irrational, and that likely isn't going to change in the near future.
I agree. XUL isn't that bad, but it seems like XUL based applications use about twice as much RAM as their non-XUL counterparts. Firefox and Thunderbird are fairly competitive on that front with other web browsers, but Songbird easily uses over 100MB of RAM, and is sluggish, whereas even Windows Media Player, which for some reason has a reputation of bloatedness, uses under 30MB on my machine unless playing video, which Songbird can't even do.

That said, I think one of the advantages to XUL is that it allows for easy modifications and extensions. On the Firefox/Thunderbird front, that's worth it, but in some other cases, it might not be. I think even Amarok on Windows (when it works) uses less RAM than Songbird on Windows.
Satyam Chief Admits Huge Fraud
So, if self help books and seminars aren't doing the trick, what you need is ethics from the philosophers: Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Kant. To illustrate his point he links to a couple of essays and books on how to become a Pick Up Artist and seduce women for fun and profit. Actually, he didn't mention profit. Then he asks, is this right?

He says the philosophers will teach you to think clearly. Well I read those philosophers a long time ago and they sure didn't give me clear thinking. OTOH in that same long ago, I certainly could have used instruction on the art of the PUA. I didn't want a whole string of scores. I just wanted a date.
The Greatest Product Demo Ever--and What to Learn from It
Definitely not lightbox.
Yes, it is, wxWidgets is just a wrapper over the native libs.
Hacker News & New Mogul.
I've read about a few listener comprehension studies, and it's been found that people generally comprehend higher pitched, slightly faster than average, voices better, and female voices are better than male for comprehension and retention.

I don't know how that applies to this particular trick, but this is something I've had a vague wish for, for years. Though I just wanted a button on YouTube for, "Talking too slow!" that would speed them up some.
1) I understand that MySQL (with InnoDB) supports row-level locking today. I was speaking of both databases as they existed in the past, to express how much easier it was for PostgreSQL to optimise and scale over the past decade.

2) I am not trying to slam MySQL. But seven years ago, we had one database which was not ACID compliant and had inconsistent behavior, but was very fast. And we had another which was designed and built properly from the ground up - with the future in mind - but was quite slow. There were advantages and disadvantages to each one. But over the past seven years, PostgreSQL has had time to optimise and stabilize code, and as a result it performs just as well as MySQL in most cases. Whereas in the past seven years, MySQL has worked to implement the essential features that allow it to be a robust database. If you were starting a website in 2009, why would you pick MySQL? I could easily understand why in 2001, but not now.

3) My point is that the "Disks > RAM > CPU" argument is no longer valid. The point of that statement was that you should spend your money on disks first, then RAM, and focus less on CPUs. This is not true in 2009! Now (for web apps), you can easily buy enough RAM to cache your entire database. All of a sudden, RAM and Disks are no longer an issue and your DB becomes CPU limited. All that discussion about "more spindles = better" and "raid 1+0 > raid 5" is not very important anymore; you just need a disk that's fast enough to log your transactions.
I agree that it's a new protocol. I also think that because it's a new space and people are always dissatisfied with how they interact with it, coupled with the rather easy development, is pushing the myriad of apps.

I'm developing one, but even though the space is growing more and more crowded I'm not concerned. It's not being done as a primary source of income, but as a side project to help build my development skills as it provides unique problems which I don't face in my day to day web development.
Um, everyone's webserver can handle 5k requests (per day) in a single thread. Not sure how many requests your clients do per day since you didn't say.

Can you handle 1 million requests (per day) on a single thread?

By using just one thread you are serializing your bottlenecks (CPU, IO, network).

If you have more than one, one can be waiting for IO, while the other uses CPU.

Plus CPU speeds are not getting faster, the future is multi core.
Stand up for free speech
What is the best project management application for start-ups?
Hello,

With my friends we are starting a company and we had found that we need application to manage tasks whitim our projects. Its it project. We use Subversion to keep our code updated.but our needs are wider,

Do HN tested open source freeware software for this task?

best wishes!
or buy 5 of this guy's pianos for the same money and donate to 5 schools ;)
Then "Men Captivated by Power of C" would clearly appeal to a larger audience.
Wireless electricity comes to CES, but will it power mobile devices?
Exactly. A lot of the rich people I see have taken big risks and turned out rich. Let's all take big risks!
Sorry, I must have missed the part where I was making any justification for standards compliance.
A123 wants to mass produce li-ion batteries in USA, creating 14,000 jobs
That's fantastic. Are there any other great tools I should be aware of?
No. The person quoted has to sell very expensive software.

These people are not dumb.
I was encouraged by the demos of 7 running on netbooks. If the OS stays lean, that will be a good thing for Microsoft and consumers.

What do developers think?
That was quite judgmental. And it might not even be wrong; I am also bothered to all hell by bad grammar as well, and noticed that about his comment. But I'm not ready to presume that he will remain as uncollected and scattered when given the chance to make lengthy preparations for something slightly more important than a Slashdot post.

That you launch into a litany of other things that have nothing to do with this guy's Slashdot comment (clothing, physical fitness, etc) suggest a major chip on your shoulder. You imply that, amongst other things, shortness and physical unattractiveness are problems that need to be fixed; how exactly do you propose people fix these problems? This comment smells of either a self-validating or apologetic cheer toward people who hyper-focus on image at the expense of all other metrics. If you believe what you write here, and aren't just resigned to thinking this is how the rest of the world works, I wonder how many people you've misjudged as a result.
I wish I could upvote this 10 times. EDIT: except that while cool, it's very fresh and buggy. High hopes for it though.
Man, I thought this was going to be a parody of speed reading.
I'd recommend Trac (trac.edgewall.org). It's pretty configurable with basic milestone tracking and a wiki (and people have written addons, etc.). It also integrates with Subversion.
Um, everyone's webserver can handle 5k requests (per day)

He's not talking about the number of requests per day, he's talking about the number of simultaneous requests.
It's actually not Microsoft making a bid this time. According to this, Microsoft gets only the Search and Search Marketing (which is what they have been really after) and only a minimal control over the rest of the company, which is also shared by the investment groups.

There's no news on any other news networks about this so it might as well turn out to be a rumor.
The decline of the NYT highlights a problem for media as a whole: the devaluation of large audiences. Pay-per-click advertising is a much higher standard than traditional media are held to. In radio or television, all you have to do is hit your circulation numbers/ratings and demographics, and you're golden. No one cares if your audience ignores the ads.

Newspapers are getting hit first because their business has traditionally been based on geographic monopolies that the Internet renders meaningless. Nevertheless, I suspect television and radio will suffer similarly once advertisers realize the disproportionate cost of eyeballs in traditional media.
8 Definitive Web Font Stacks
Porn industry seeks federal bailout (not a joke)
I'd like to know as well. Amazon FPS seems like one of the best/most comprehensive solutions for payments, but from what I can gather from their site, it's currently still limited to companies with a physical address, bank account and credit card in the US. I'd love to use their services as a Canadian company...
The eMusic download manager is built with XUL, and works nicely on Linux, Windows, and Mac. I think it's pretty swish. I reckon if I had to make a desktop UI, I'd probably try out XUL.
"Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a bailout of the adult entertainment industry."

Well...I dont even know what to say
It's pretty much pointless if all you are doing is caching the result of a simple query using an index.

Not if your database is under heavy load, and you can easily shift some of that load by putting frequently accessed things in memcached instead.
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard (humor)
"Despite the immense secrecy, reports have leaked that the limo also comes with a 10-CD changer . . ."

All that tech in there and he'll only have 10 CDs to choose from? Seems a little dated.
I think Win 7 is still "too Vista-y".

Honestly, its not just the bloat in Vista that makes it suck so much. Bloat you can at least throw hardware at, and solve. Its Vista's poor design.

They took away the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel. The Add/Remove control panel has been in Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, 98SE, Win ME, Win 2000, and Win XP. In Vista, for some reason, it was renamed to something like "Program Changes and Features" or something to that extent.

Even if its a truly bad convention (e.g. the Add/Remove Programs control panel does more than Add or Remove) its better than nothing. At the very least, if you're going to rename it -- have names that are clear and obvious like "Uninstall Software" for its name.

So yeah, basically Windows 7 is going to still suffer consumer rejection from having sub-par UI design. Power users, if they haven't forever already abandoned Windows for Mac/Linux, will skip this upgrade or cross-grade for Mac/Linux.
I've never found much merit in this approach to situations that you have little intelligence about.

The way I see it there are two approaches, you can either ignore the details like the article says or you can try to think it through, find that the odds are not in your favor and still go ahead with it (assuming that you want to go ahead with it). He mentions that you should take the first approach for situations that have little downside. But the risk involved only plays a part when the cost to analyze a situation outweighs the advantage/disadvantage caused by the outcome of the decision. According to his conclusion he is implying that it is not worth doing the analysis before starting a business because the outcome is not worth it which I think is wrong.

If we were to look past that and look at the real idea of article, I find that the second approach gives you better chances of success and also has an interesting psychological affect. Using his analogy of looking before you leap; if you were to use the second approach I would expect you to have a better chance landing on your feet. You also have a better chance of not getting blindsided by problems (or using his terms, the rules). This is simply because you were slightly more prepared and you had given the possibilities some thought. You wouldn't be shocked and would be more "quick on you feet".

It should also be remembered that if we were to consider the percentage of people that actually take the jump and also look at the chances of success (regardless of the two approaches), it is certain that we are dealing with small numbers and coupling that with the fact that human beings are bad at translating odds into practical actions we have a lot of people that give out such advice. Like somebody mentioned in the comments "Not knowing what you're doing isn't sufficient for success, but it's not sufficient for failure, either.", this applies because the the chances that second approach would increase the odds are small. Even thought the advantage is small I would rather take confidence in the fact that I have done my homework rather than go in blind.

There is also one final aspect of people that take the jump; these are people that regardless of the approach they take are clearly in love with what they do. It is easy to underestimate as an outsider the amount of work that goes into doing tasks like starting a business and doing it with passion. It is funny because even for the people that take the jump, they tend to underestimate the work that is put into it since they are having "fun".

Since he brings up the QB analogy here, let me share what I always find interesting while watching athletes that perform at the top of their game. They make seemingly impossible throws effortlessly but it is impossible to tell the thought and work behind that single decision by watching them on screen. We will probably never know what went on inside that head while making that throw, for all we know it could have been luck.
Pupils conquer fear of computers: "I was worried it might explode and kill me."
I had never heard of this, and I have to say I really like it. Your personality really comes through in this web site. So often I go to sites and just think "who cares", even if it's doing something cool, because I can't see anything that clue's me in that it was a unique item made by human beings.

And too often a web site will actually just say "we are ordinary people with a passion for...". But that's insulting to their audience. It's the small things in the design that make this site unique. I hope you grow a great community out of this.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but does this mean that the a/c is condensing the energy and sending it to what is essentially a solar receiver on the device (solar being light, not sun)?

1.5 watts doesn't sound like much, but I'm not super familiar with this stuff.
This blog post is basically an excerpt from "Designing User Experiences" by Bill Buxton.

I have mentioned the book before as one of my faves. Bill Buxton is a brilliant guy and all hackers should check out the book.
HAML templates are object code-ish and those render properly. It is certainly possible to write a chunk of code that maps objects into valid XHTML. Through a style sheet on it and you're done; its not like HN has a complicated page layout.
lol, nopes we're looking forward to make something for Microsoft projects this year - http://www.student2business.co.in/

All we could think was a traffic monitoring system where we can find out if a vehicles has broken the red light rule.

trying to think something better... any ideas on whats the latest in this field?
To be honest, I think that ideas on their own are worthless. Its the sweat that needs to go into building something that is a real business that is the difficult part. I agree that you might think that people would want to clone it, but cloning something alone does not guarantee any kind of success. There are hundreds of examples of sites that do very well, where other people have tried to emulate them only to fail. Personally I put it down to a lack of passion on the cloners - its not really their 'baby'. They've not agonized over what to create, how to create it and this probably makes (part of) the difference between success and failure.

Personally I often find it inspiring when people do discuss how much their startup makes. Inspiring on the "I could do it too" scale and sometimes there are good lessons in these stories - not so much this one I would hasten to admit!
Handling Formats Based On Url Extension
Three Widgets to Follow CES '09
Linux pioneer moves from Red Hat to Intel
I don't think this discussion is going anywhere, but for reference, my webserver does around 45 million requests a day, and yes, that's in a single thread. Webservers aren't typically cpu bound.
The thing is that iPhoto comes with every Mac. So, in a way, it's free too.
Laptops, students, distraction: hardly a surprise when combined
Exactly. So, unless one really dislikes iPhoto, it will be hard to push Picasa to Mac users. Some will use it for sure but there's a big barrier to entry (which is not without reminding of the case of Internet Explorer on Windows...)
I'm glad his administration is using online social tools, because physically, this is going to be one of the most isolated presidents we've ever had. He just has to be protected like this.
How To Get The World Excited About Your Business – James Siminoff (PhoneTag founder)
Maybe I'm not understanding something - how do you do simultaneous requests in a single thread?

And I knew he couldn't possibly mean 5K per day, but he didn't say how many it was.
The problem with this for me is that it doesn't run in an iframe, say, but directly in the JavaScript context of the parent page. This means a malicious site can use AJAX to send all the data it can get back to the server. A privacy concern if you ask me.
Trac looks very solid. Curious. I'm starting a project soon and want the following functionality in the software that we use:

I want it to (a) track bug issues, (b) track milestones and a roadmap, (c) allow us to upload code to keep track of each of our changes to the code, and (d) give us a (login-restricted) wiki and/or forum so we can document the discussions/ideas we have.

I'll take a look at Trac in more detail later tonight, but if anybody knows off the top of your head if Trac (or some other software) does the things I mentioned above, let me know!
>Microsoft All But Abandons Vista

assuming Windows 7 is not just another version of Vista, you mean ;-)