skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The brain changes with age and perceives the passage of time differently. Just like your face changes with age and perceives touch differently.

The pop science is here:

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4

Not as lazy as the article's speculation. There is an experiment!

The experiment is people of various ages are asked to estimate a minute with their mind. Older people overestimate, children underestimate.

Your brain has a clock, a set of neurons that fire at a relatively consistent interval and help synchronize the rest of the brain. As you age this brain clock's interval gets longer.

Forming fewer new memories because of lifestyle changes is speculation. Without widespread changes in the brain making new memories more difficult to form, you'd still form a lot of new memories, even with your boring adult lifestyle.
After reading jwz's horror stories about that bureaucracy, I wouldn't be surprised if all of those were illegal but very selectively enforced.
Thanks for your comment. I am planning to add more frameworks and demos. More features are coming :)
This is a very good JavaScript beginner intro from msdn channel 9.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Javascript-Fundamentals-Deve...
'Realtime' may have many definitions but those I'm familiar with relate to near instantaneous feedback based control systems. More generally it applies to systems with mandatory and very limited time constraints. A common high level software example would be algorithmic stock trading. A more historically proper 'realtime' system is code/hardware that put MSL rover on the ground on Mars. These are not things which twitter does. Their UI may give the impression of 'realtime', their systems however are not, nor do they even pretend to be realtime systems.

In short, you've taken a term and misappropriated it based on marketing hype. That is a reasonable thing to do when pitching to a bunch of consumers/marketing folks, it doesn't usually set all that well with engineers.
Is this what you read? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085643/pdf/nihm...
I think the when we talk about Twitter, the definition of "reliability" is entirely different. When we talk about emails, we can say it's reliable as long as my email gets delivered one way or another. For example, if I send a mass email to 20 friends, I don't assume anything about when each of them will receive my message. I just think that it will get delivered in a reasonable amount of time.

However what Twitter brings to the table is this: It is safe to assume when I tweet, all my followers will be able to see it immediately. This is a huge difference not because of the delivery time, but because of the type of behavior it enables. Being able to assume that my message is delivered in realtime is very different from not being able to assume. And this is not a technical issue, so even if you build a "good enough" realtime system using decentralized architecture, it wouldn't be half as good as Twitter.
Linux Graphics Drivers book
But the protocol used and the latency are not linked at all. You can use a proprietary protocol to run a centralized service, you can use a proprietary protocol to run a decentralized service, you can use a public protocol to run a centralized service, you can use a public protocol to run a decentralized service. And of course you can also mix them, insofar as they interface.

For example, building a decentralized version of a stock ticker system sounds cool but in practice its performance will never be as good as the original centralized version.

Well, yes - but the question is, how fast is fast enough, for most applications? And wouldn't it make more sense for the people who need to have really, really fast exchange of status updates, to sign up for the largest, fastest provider -- instead of everybody having to be there, just because some people need it real-time, all the time?

Personally, I prefer some latency actually. I like being able to edit thoughts after I posted them, and so on. I like being able to search stuff and organize it -- Twitter fails dysmally in that aspect, if it wasn't for the "that's a joke, right?" limit of 140 characters. And if something really important happens, it will show up on blogs and news sites a few days later. Friends will tell me about it. Personally I need information I can ACT on, not just... stuff... that clogs me up. New software or knowledge is usually still fine when it's even a week old, or more. It's not like I can instantly learn it. And that something is popular is not something I need to know while it's popular, actually, a delay filters quite a lot of lame stuff out.

And again, you can still build the exact same thing centralized and interoperable with slower leaf nodes, on open protocols. People just don't wanna because then they don't get to license it to others, and brand things that are much prettier and more useful unbranded. To me the proof that it's people problem is that the technical problems are more or less solved, or at least proven to be solvable (there's always room for improvement, none of our protocols are utterly fantastic). The people with the most energy are the ones that are kinda greedy. There are sparks of genius or excitement here and there, but they disperse too easily, while the ones that keep at it are the ones who should give it a rest, so the rest can think and build things that are by and for everybody, forever.
But XMPP does the exact same thing, and it works in a distributed fashion. I can have an instant-message conversation in my IM client over XMPP with messages being exchanged effectively instantaneously. There's no appreciable delay between me hitting Enter and the other party seeing my message, barring problems on the network between me and them; and those problems would degrade my perception of Twitter's performance too, if they were between me and Twitter. While centralized instant-message services exist (AIM, for instance), in 15 years of using instant messaging more or less daily I've never ever had the experience of feeling like a conversation I was having over AIM was happening "faster" than one I was having over XMPP. Never. It has literally never happened.

XMPP is performant enough for Google to use it as the IM component of Google Talk. Google Talk is instant messaging. Not "eventual messaging." Instant. Just like the centralized alternatives.

Centralized services have some pros over distributed ones -- ease of discovering other users is a big one. But you're just making an assertion that only a centralized system can pass messages back and forth fast enough to be perceived as effectively instant without providing any evidence to back that assertion up.
I've long thought that those "take a number" queuing systems (commonly used at fast food places) should be random not linear. When someone with a larger number than you gets called first it feels like such an injustice! However, most people wouldn't be the wiser if the numbers were randomized. I bet it would reduce wait time complaints substantially.
Double Brace Initialization in Java
When the building, power, cooling, and compute is one integrated system its like a really really big PC cabinet.

Which makes it all more interesting. Seeing how they engineered to building to work somewhat like an old VW bug engine (the building uses water to cool, the engine uses oil) is very cool. Made think of how, in the not so far future, we might be building cities with data infrastructure as part of the regular utilities. And I don't mean cabling or optic fiber, but how we might use water from the sewers to cool down some underground datacenter. I might even see datacenters being spread alongside sewers. As the hardware becomes smaller, we might just create a data center in a tube and cool it with dirty water. Who knows?
Until Motorola has unlocked bootloaders by default, they willl always be the bootloader locker company to me.

This is a step in the right direction no doubt, but they hava a long way to go,
I think its good practice to spend a little bit of time each day or week trying to learn something new that will help you work[/play], a new vim command or feature, etc.
I wonder if the memory effect is related to emotional state - strong emotions result in stronger memory formation (I think I read this as a research finding as well). Strong emotions, in turn, are caused by new, challenging, and meaningful experiences. As we get older, our emotions tend to level out as we sort of "find ourselves" and settle into a routine. Break the routine, and memory formation snaps back to what it was in childhood.

Personally, I haven't noticed the same effect as you. I'm in my early 30s. I remember watching Perseids last Tuesday with a date much more vividly than watching them last Saturday with my friends. I remember my spring semester junior year of college (spent abroad in New Zealand) much more vividly than fall semester (spent in the same dorm that I lived for sophomore year). I remember 2009 (moved out to California, started working for Google) much more vividly than 2006 (lived at home and worked for the same company as in 2005). I remember Oct-Nov 2009 (spent on leave at home as my dad was dying in the hospital) much more vividly than Jul-Sept 2009 (settling in, nothing in particular happened).
Could it be that you just replaced your Toyota to a expensive but nice BMW?
It is safe to assume when I tweet, all my followers will be able to see it immediately.

Unless they do something else with their computer, or are doing some chores in room with the big blue skybox.

And you can only assume this because you know Twitter has fast servers etc. - not because it's a proprietary black box.

The same would hold true for your favourite, lightning-fast diaspora or OStatus pod of choice. Yes, ONLY those followers who ALSO care about super instant real-time speed, will be signed up to fast pods in turn -- but guess what, if you forced them to be on twitter they still wouldn't read, much less react, to your stuff in real-time. So you gain nothing.

Is there a delay when updating to a status to identi.ca before it shows up on rstat.us for example? Have you even tested before you accuse people of "not getting it" --- ??
I agree, and so it always puzzles me why wikis are so hard to maintain. We use Google Sites at my job, and I've never found them particularly fluid, intuitive or efficient.

A markdown based wiki would be a decent start, but I still overall feel like this is an unsolved problem.
Like you said, "realtime" has many definitions. And I disagree it's a misappropriated term based on marketing hype. Twitter IS realtime, just in a different context. If you stick to your strict definition, it would be incorrect to even call things like XMPP realtime.
Absolutely. And then force yourself to adopt it. For instance, if you want to remap your control key to caps lock, physically remove your control key from the keyboard.
"the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today".

This may have interesting ramifications, specifically around economic theories, labor, migration of some jobs back to the US etc. How will the world look like in 10 years from now with robots, artificial intelligence etc.?
There is a bright side: factory meat farms are responsible for a lot of pollution. I would think any reduction in demand for cheaply produced meat would have environmental benefits.
> There are less things you can do with GPLed software

Yes. You won't be able to restrict your users with GPL.

"Robust" because the software, once licensed under it, will remain free.
Why Rails? Why a JS heavy front end?
interesting - I was actually thinking of Wordpress having to rewrite its code. But what you said is more interesting - especially since Postgresql already has a SQL Server compatibility (you can replicate from SQL Server to Postgres).

It would be a cool kickstarter to fund something like this.
I thought the context in which isalmon made their comment was obvious. Are you suggesting that OP wasn't referring to romantic/sexual questions?

I doubt it but even if one charitably assumes that the OP meant professional interactions with women, isn't your reply assuming that the isalmon's assertion is a valid one? What reason do you have to believe that women don't mean no when they say "no", especially in a professional context? Do you really subscribe to the (IMHO rather sexist) view that women say no but don't mean (with the implied subtext saying that men don't do this)?
Yeah, I remember hearing the "Time moves faster when you're older because it's a smaller fraction of your lifetime" theory from my 3rd grade teacher, and then in college I made the "And then if you integrate that rate over time, you get a logarithmic progression, which matches with experimentally observed fetal & childhood development, and OH MY GOD I'M BRILLIANT!" connection. Then my friends thought I was weird.
Check out the Immutable Maps feature, does the same with some nice syntactic sugar - http://docs.guava-libraries.googlecode.com/git/javadoc/com/g...
Ditto. I've had this exact conversation with multiple groups of friends over the past several years. Interesting to see this form of the conversation's analytical deconstruction, though.
Except not at all?
tapin.tv does a great job promoting what their startup actually does in their blog - both at the top of the page, and at the end of the article.
>>This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience).

I've heard this explained in part because of how our neocortex works. New events tend to require the involvement of more layers of the neocortex than ones that are redundant and routine. This is part of the explanation for the time dilation we experience when surprised by something like a car crash or a thrill seeking adventure. Your mind is fully engaged much the way it was when you were younger and everything was a new experience. As your mind adapts the neocortex handles the events more efficiently; more reflexively. Your mind subconsciously ignores the sensory inputs that don't surprise you.

For this reason, it's often advised that if you want to slow down the apparent passage of time just change your routine. Granted...your neocortex would probably even adapt to this.
VFIO!

The I/O MMU!

Write your drivers in userspace, save your sanity. I realize it's hard to get a kernel that supports everything you need to accomplish this, but it's definitely "the future" when it comes to device drivers.

However, this is a decent beginning point for people completely unfamiliar with writing a driver. The table and the makefile parts are especially important for beginners to just get freaking started.
AKG K-55, they are a closed-in design, good for masking external noise, comfortable and sound great.
Incidentally PepsiCo released an interesting PDF document which revealed their redesign "process."

http://bunnitude.com/misc/files/pepsi_gravitational_field.pd...
Way ahead of you :-) I made up some plans for a 'pocket' data center (think pocket battleship). In the past such things have been infeasible because the scale was needed to achieve the economics, but advances in energy deployment and network design have created an opportunity here. Now we just need $25M to build one :-)
Thanks! I didn't write the article, but I'm on the team. We tried to make sure that people who care what we do can find it, but it doesn't dominate the page.
That is what I was thinking. A contact lens with the right reflective hologram to look like a retina. Most retina scanners don't have insanely high resolution (usually less than 1 Megapixel)
This is a nice book, barring a few spelling mistakes
Let's say you hosted your Diaspora or Status.net or whatever on your heroku server. You post something and it gets huge traffic and the server goes down. And this doesn't happen just for you but for lots of people on average. Who will maintain this? In this type of environment, you cannot make any assumptions on realtime delivery. That's what I mean by it's not a technology problem. You can use XMPP in Google Talk since most of the times you're doing 1:1 chat. Twitter does 1:N (where N goes up to as large as several millions), and this becomes a big deal. Does this make sense?
So, by that measure, "The Web" as a nonprofit (w3c.org?) will never work and should be a huge failure, right?
In my experience (multiple hours of touch screen use per day, sometimes >40hrs/week for weeks on end), "gorilla arm" is a total myth. Yes, if you switched to a touch screen without changing any other aspect of your workspace you might have issues with the screen being too far away or too high, but that would just be silly.
Wondering how many are paid users
Clearly, you've never worked in distributed systems, and your impression of Twitter (and other large "centralized" by your definition systems) are actually huge, loosely coupled decentralized systems.

The real difference is whether than decentralized, loosely coupled system is run by and owned by a single corporation, or not.

It's the design of the system itself that determines latency, not the centralized vs. decentralized argument.

You're speaking as if twitter.com is a single giant machine on a single IP address. In fact, it's thousands of loosely coupled machines and services all working in tandem across nearly the entire globe. Sounds like a typical decentralized system to me.
Lifestreams was co-opted by Apple for their Time Machine interface. I think Apple settled with David Gelernter.
Should App.net change its name?
Super slick, love the design. Uploading a few test images was painless and the workflow was straightforward. Great work!
Did you get to read my post by any chance? That's not what I talk about in the post. My point was, sites like Wikipedia are successful as non-profit, but the type of value Twitter provides is very different from the value w3c or wikimedia provides and should be considered with a different frame.
I have no idea how your bringing XMPP into this but just as Node, AMQP, ActiveMQ, ZeroMQ, Jetty, or <insert messaging or async tool here> they have have no singular impact on a system being realtime or not, they are just tools. If you want to consider a system which involves these tools and has a realtime constraint e.g. X arrives before Y time or we're seriously screwed, then sure, I'll happily concede and call the system, not the tool, realtime.
Drug Dealers Say No To Crack In Brazil
Natural gas has lower GHG emissions during energy production, but this doesn't account for GHG emissions during its extraction. With total life-cycle taken into account, this kind of GHG "reduction" isn't so clear cut.

Natural gas is mostly methane. Methane is a potent GHG, far stronger than CO2. During fracking and so on, lots of natural gas (methane) escapes to the atmosphere. It is a gas, after all. A proper accounting would add in this other set of emissions.

So yeah, saying that natural gas usage "drastically lowered GHG emissions" is kind of suspect. Maybe it is better on balance vs. coal, but that is not saying a lot.
We already have an existence proof of near-real-time 140 character messages crossing networks. It's called SMS.
> Word will spread among the homeless and drug addicts.

Word will spread that they scan your fingerprints and irises, and link them to unpaid charges. A homeless schizophrenic who enjoys painting with feces merely has to cough uo the $500 clean up fee before his next stay. I.e., lifetime ban.
Refu: a collection of cross platform programming libraries written in C
The only value twitter provides is in the value of it's users. There's virtually no value in the platform itself.
That would be torture
rounding error will get him there eventually.
Thanks for the awesome comments guys! This has been an incredible experience for us. We had no idea we'd get so much support and great feedback/interaction with our viewers. Amazing! Our viewers have helped shape this product. :)
8,318 Long Tail Startup Ideas Mapped. Add yours here. by GetViable |
Certainly syntax is very important; but I would suggest my point still stands even if you allow all of haskell's syntactic bits (in this case the ability to define infix functions of non-word characters).

And I think haskell's type system actually comes into play in your second code block example: languages where function arity is dynamic or untyped will never be able to make use of that simple infix syntax rule in your first code block.
HP creates division to focus on tablets, hires Nokia's ex-MeeGo head
Your title makes it sound like the company got screwed, when it seems it's the customer (you?) who was on the receiving end.

The he said/she said aside, the title and content are disingenuous at best.
This (the original technique) is dangerous, of course - the browser might end up wasting a bit of CPU/power doing a nice 60fps animation of nothing. Even if this turns out not to make a significant difference in most cases, it's better to stick with JavaScript.
Software developer salaries
Maybe those restaurants should use people's names instead; on the other hand the article indicates that people like feedback on their wait times. Perhaps people would be happier if they were instead given time estimates that the restaurant could reliably beat.
For everyone who thinks the conclusion is "Send YC partners gifts", I personally know a smart guy who sent YC gifts related to his startup before the deadline (and therefore, before Apoorva), and still wasn't invited for an interview.

You have to realize that YC isn't doing this for gifts, they are doing this with the expectation that you have the potential to be breakout success like Dropbox, AirBnB or even better. They are savvy investors, and unlikely to fall for mere gimmicks.
It's not that he sent beer, it's that he sent beer with his own service. He was able to prove it worked, to an audience that needed that level of ease of use to be convinced it would work.
The fact that he would get a free six-pack out of it was, I'm sure, an after-thought. After all, who knows if Garry even likes beer? ;)
Percona Server has lots of improvements (some small things and others that are pretty essential for me) On the SSD front, the main ones are:

* You can put the innodb doublewrite buffer on your spinning disks - that's the best place for it since it's heavy sequential writes. See section 2.2.2 here http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2009/05/tables-on-ssd...

* The ability to tune various parts of innodb that were originally designed to perform well on regular disks - those with fast sequential access, slower random access, and no real wear considerations. See http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.1/scalability/in...

Here's a recent post from Percona showing MySQL vs Percona server on an Intel 320 SSD:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/23/percona-serve...

--

MariaDB is pretty nice too. Their team has introduced some sorely needed query optimizations (http://kb.askmonty.org/en/what-is-mariadb-53/#subquery-optim...) and it does include Percona's XtraDB.

I haven't looked at MariaDB 5.5 to see how it compares to Percona Server 5.5. I put Percona Server into production last fall and MariaDB was still at 5.3 at the time.
For those who are curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_De...
This is an excellent idea. I am adding this RIGHT NOW as a show for how it 'could' be, but should probably become a separate site. I'll reply back when it is live.
‘Double’ (YC S12) Turns the iPad Into a Telepresence Robot
Not sure if this a version of the classic Spacewar or not (since the site is down), but if it is...

When MMOAsteroids came out, I spent a few days making the rules (but not the graphics) more like Spacewar. Check it out here: http://www.mmospacewar.com
What? No paid Wikipedia editors? They're missing a good bet, there. <smirk>