skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The link to "I Love Pair Programming", a post on the nomachetejuggling.com blog, was posted on HN yesterday. The post describes in detail the advantages perceived by the author to using pair-programming.

And, it got many comments here on HN, so, if you didn't see it, you might want to check both the post and the comments about it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490173
Sad town happens. 1 in 4 requests after Request A will go to port 8000, and all of those requests will wait in line as that mongrel chugs away at the slow request...

I don't use Rails, or even Ruby at all if I can avoid it, so I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but... why in the world would anyone want to use a web server which can only handle one request at once?
Found Tobi's delayed_job (not deferred) --- I think I like the design better than Workling; fewer moving parts, just a database backend end a rake script. The biggest problem we have with backgroundrb (which again: nightmare) is not really ever knowing the state of current running jobs.
Sorry, what's the platonic ideal you're suggesting as an alternative? There are threaded Ruby web servers, but, just like with Python, the interpreter is mostly giantlocked. The overwhelming majority of web apps out there are running under Apache, which just like Mongrel is preforking and queueing, not running everything simultaneously.
Thoughts on Winning @juliaroy’s Twestival Charity Auction
I don't think FB is too worried, honestly. I reported some security issues with photos through the API, and it took weeks/months for them to fix them.
Im currently reading this book and there is one point that is off with this post.

"2. Who cares what other people think? Boring businesses can win big"

While I agree with the point, Buffett was very sensitive of what people thought.
That's nice. Almost nobody is using C anymore --- especially for the web apps we talk about here. But everyone drops to native code for encoding/decoding; in Python, Perl, or Ruby, you're calling OpenSSL to get your crypto primitives, an OpenSSL is gnarly C code.
(oh, and thank you).
That's somewhat true but if you think about it, every site really does have a single loop. Users that come, users that invite other users (any mechanism), users who respond.

You can still think of it as an aggregated loop of all the flows you have that add to your viral distribution. Aggregate all functions for X, Y, and Z and that's your site's total viral factor.
Most of those people sound really self-absorbed.
I agree that the top VC firms are a narrow channel that already has enough money in it. But on the other hand the number of startups is certainly constrained by the amount of funding available. Which means that if there were another way to get money to them besides the top VC funds, it would increase the number of startups.

Of course, if the government tried such a thing it would almost certainly screw it up. But it's possible in theory.
If you have N requests hitting Apache and one of them is slow, that one slow request will run in its own process while the fast requests are sent off to other processes. The fact that each process only handles one request at once is irrelevant.
Uh, this is how Rails setups work too. You aren't talking directly to Mongrel.
The fastest way to $30,000 profit after taxes is to rob a bank. :-)
Maybe I misunderstood the article -- it sounded to me like requests were being distributed between Mongrel processes and queued on the individual processes rather than being queued centrally and only allocated to individual processes when a process is free (like Apache does).
Google, being a good friend of mine, didn't mind me asking. His answer: Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). I'll introduce you: http://google.com
Porn, drugs, or gambling. ;-)

Joking aside, I think the easiest way to make $30k after taxes is to drastically cut your living expenses and save $30k. To make $30K after taxes, you'd have to make close to $50K before taxes (I assume you have a decent programmer's salary already, and this'll put you in a high bracket). There aren't many ways to make $50K in a hurry without a long ramp-up period. If you could, everyone would quit their day job and make their freelance business their real one.
I would love a real explanation. But believe you me, allergy science is just getting started. (So is a heck of a lot of other medical knowledge.) "Allergists" didn't even exist until a few decades ago. "Allergy and immunology" is a pretty new specialty.

My pediatrician switched his practice to "allergy and asthma" in 1970. He told my mom he did so because he wanted to try to help whatever the heck is wrong with me. Well, I can't read his mind for motives, but that's what my mom reported.

I astound and baffle allergists when their tests reveal the huge numbers of foods--and varieties of foods--I'm allergic to. (Note to self: I am not going into my other allergy foods here.) Their first reaction is to blurt out, "What do you eat?! How do you live?! It's a wonder you're alive!" After that, their reactions and attempts to help vary considerably. The closest I've gotten to an explanation from a live doctor is hearing one mutter something about "volatile oils" into his Dragon Naturally Speaking before walking off and leaving his nurse distressed for my sake.

I do get strange satisfaction knowing that food allergies have gotten much more prevalent in the past decade or so. This means more researchers take more interest in it, the FDA changes its food labeling laws, the general populace has a little more knowledge, etc. When I'm feeling grandiose, I tell myself that my strange body (and that of a guy I spoke to on the phone who is a guinea pig at the Mayo because he's allergic to all foods) are the vanguard or cassandras or whatever for something new and weird going on in the world. But perhaps I read too many Greg Bear novels. ;-)

I subscribe to an allergy research newsletter from South Africa, which contains a lot of fascinating, nerdly stuff I never hear from live doctors. And when I do try to mention research, I get, "That means you don't need me except to prescribe Epipens." But I got away from reading it a few years ago. I think I'll head back to doing so. Thank you for indirectly putting the bee in my bonnet. http://www.allallergy.net/abstracts/index.cfm

Ah! A quick glance reveals an article called "The importance of nasal provocation test in the diagnosis of natural rubber latex allergy." This just might pertain to me even though I have a banana allergy, not a latex allergy... But I think I'll leave it for a few days. This whole topic is getting way too heavy today. Bye, folks. I'm logging out.
Computer models will only get you so far when complex
financial instruments rely on past history, not future
performance.

I think that sentence captures the main point of this crisis. I am concerned that current money arrangements have an inevitability built into them that a prolonged boom will create a bubbles based on highly leveraged circumstances with lots of counterparty risk. One thing you could do would be to outlaw fractional reserve banking altogether (make banks actually store what they say they have) but I'm not sure that the benefit would be worth the cost and expect it will fail anyway - if the system becomes too much of a harness then people will just operate outside of it.

Regular downturns is the only thing I can think of to keep things sensible. Without them the dynamic chases the sensible people out of banking. (I don't hold with the theory that the current crisis is a result of banking liberalisation decisions by the US gvt - the US regulators relaxed the rules to stop US banking from being outplayed by the Europeans who were already consolidating.)
I used to run unstable for a while and it was by and large still more than stable enough for general use, regardless of its name.

But as I got busier on my own development projects I stated to dislike the occasional issues that would pop up here or there and take my attention away from what I was really interesting in. Hence why I am now using testing with as little pulled from unstable as possible (usually that means nothing pulled from unstable).

I still like to contribute in my own little way, filing/helping with bug reports on the testing release. Just recently I was pleased to be able to assist the fglrx-driver maintainer (and myself) with testing a fix for a reported bug.

If I wasn't so busy, I'd probably still be running unstable, it's still more stable than a lot of distros out there. :)
Hot News: The AP Is Living In The Last Century
paul, you innovated with a new form of venture capital called ycombinator. you've figured out how to get the right amount of capital to a new class of entrepreneurs and the results speak for themselves. you've attracted a bunch of copycats, some who will do good things and many who will not.

that's the kind of thing that i would like to see more of. we don't need more money flowing into the existing system which is at capacity and has been for years.
It's not anti-black racism. It's the welfare mentality that these black people have that's disconcerting. White people work for their success like they're supposed to, but when black people want to succeed we have to help them out with minority protection laws and quotas and such. That's the problem.

Whenever you generalise something to a large number of people, you commit some sort of anti-? ?ism. "Bankers" are not a singular entity that can have a "mentality".
No one is using C anymore, except for trivial things like kernels, database systems, and VMs.
Kernels are trivial (straightforward is a better word) and are very close to the hardware, so C works pretty well for them. If you started a new OS kernel today, though, you wouldn't have to pick C.

The other things are just going on momentum. C is not a good choice for those applications. (For example, look at SBCL and GHC. Two of the fastest language runtimes, and both are self-hosting. Yeah, you need a little bit of C to interface with the underlying OS, but the critical parts are not C.)

Anyway, nice attempt at snark. It earned you an upmod.
It's not much when you a) have to split it 2 or 3 ways, and b) have to watch the VCs take home several times as much, when you did all the work.

My point is that there is a value judgement here. VCs are being overvalued, and founders are being undervalued. This serves to demoralize and demotivate the founders, ultimately hurting the value of the company. It doesn't need to be that way.
These two books are a good introduction:

CCENT/CCNA ICND1 Official Exam Certification Guide

CCNA ICND2 Official Exam Certification Guide

Both are on Cisco Press.

It doesn't go up to BGP but does provide a solid introduction to other routing protocols like RIP, RIPv2, OSPF, and EIGRP.
Most of the Perl crypto libraries use Pari or GMP, actually. Your point still holds, however.

You will notice, though, that the Haskell crypto libraries are generally "pure Haskell", since there is not much of a speed hit for not using C. This is the Future.
There was a study that was published in Oct. 2007 by researchers from the University of California (Berkeley). They did not find any negative effects from heavy vitamin and supplement users. In fact, all the tests they ran showed they were far healthier than the non-vitamin users.

You can view and download the full report at: http://www.landmarkstudy.com/

It seems to contradict a lot of the stuff from the NY Times article.
I was looking at Skype's developer zone and something similar seems to happen there: like Apple, their documentation is well done and clear and they seem to really make sure all the info is there to build some plug-ins and stuff like that around Skype.

But if you look at the "Extras" section (the equivalent of the App Store), almost all of them have a rating of 3 out of 5 with thousands of votes for only hundreds of downloads and rarely more than 5 comments. It just doesn't make any sense and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to find the good ones.

Apple is doing a little bit better on the ratings side but still, there have been many complaints about how difficult it is to get out of the pack for a developer and nothing seems to be done.

It's too bad to make the whole development easy but not making the last step as polished as the rest.

One thing too is that it's bad for the developers who are trying to have their work recognized but it's also bad for customers who don't really care so much for the one-shot apps.
> You're only as fast as your slowest query....

Use HAProxy. Take the time to configure it correctly. It's absolutely the most stable and useful loadbalancer I've used. It also solves this issue by talking to your backends.
Combine and compress your javascript files: Scriptalizer.com
That's correct -- the load balancer passes the traffic directly to Mongrel, and each mongrel has its own internal queue / mutex.

That's why you run like 4 or 8 or 12 or N many mongrels to handle additional load.
They are asking for (in most cases) millions of dollars to develop a likely unproven idea.

They're asking for money that can potentially make the VCs very, very rich. Or at least make a good return on investment. The VCs are choosing to make that investment. They're not just being asked; they're answering in the affirmative, at which point they ought to be working in all parties' best interest.

VC's are not in the business of coddling founders.

I think you're making this guy's point. That is the problem. They should be in that business; they'd be helping themselves.

Judging by the number of up-votes, I wonder how many VCs lurk here. They can't be PG fans, considering what PG has had to say about VCs:

http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html
We're using Background Job (bj) quite happily, though we've been told that Delayed Job (dj) is the new hip thing to use in its stead.
Why functional programming doesn't catch on
This dropped my homepage load time from 1.84 seconds to 0.961 seconds.
The Singularity source code is available at http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

Don't be so sure that MSR stuff doesn't ever see the light of day... or hasn't already in one form or another...

(oooo insider speaks in cryptic tone.... cue Twilight Zone music)
Buffett deserves a lot of admiration, he certainly built his early cash hoard with hard work and grit.

However, he was born on an upward slope fed by historical circumstances such as the destruction of the industrial base in many countries as a result of WWII while America was mostly untouched; by the growth of fiat currency unencumbered by being tied to gold or silver; by the increase in the value of human labor due to (again) WWII and productivity increases of automation.

Now that many of those growth curves have flattened out, I am wary of following WB too closely - I worry that the lessons of the old economy will not work in the new, diminished age that is upon us.
SEC missed numerous red flags surrounding Stanford
That is a very good article.

I'd suggest absolutely everybody with a web page read up as much as they can about optimizing web page loading. It doesn't matter if you're Posterous or you run your 2,000 daily visitors off a 256 MB VPS which is never under load, optimizing the page can result in 90% decreases in the user-perceptible time it takes to load the page. It doesn't matter if you slave over a hot memcache to save 200 ms off the database queries if your page then takes 7 seconds to render.

Shaving off two seconds, one second, half a second just prints money. Every time I do it I'm flabbergasted by how much it matters.

The HTTP cache control mentioned in the article is one excellent place to start. For the rest, Yahoo pretty much owns this field of research -- any of the presentations from the YSlow folks are worth your time.

http://www.slideshare.net/natekoechley/high-performance-web-...

I'm kind of a lightbox junkie and I've had some good results recently by the simple expedient of having the browser preload the image (e.g. <img src="foo.jpg" style="display: none;" />) prior to the actual user interaction which calls it to display. There are a billion similar site-specific tricks you can do in Javascript these days.
i use http://copygator.com but am interesting in how tynt solution differs
The cell phone point is particularly out of place. How many kids are taking class notes on their cell phones?

I'll take your suggestion a bit further--I think, instead of looking to the government to implement these changes, why not provide an opportunity for bright kids to opt out of the current system? Enable cooperatives and networks to provide the kids with environments that will them flourish.
It's not just GM, it's everyone who depends on GM.
Great idea! Now we can finally, with accuracy, determine what portion of the internet population uses the click-drag technique when reading long blog posts. Yeah!
Don't teach kids programming; teach them science, math, languages, geography, music etc.

Most people are doing fine and use the computers without knowing how to program and I drive a car and don't know how to build or repair one. To prepare kids for technology teach them science, logic and math.
The fastest way to $30,000 profit after taxes is to suck dick. Lots of dick.

At around $30 a pop (literally a pop of jizz down your throat) you'll have to suck around 1,000 dicks.
If It's Hard To Say, It Must Be Risky
These guys are not fans http://www.ericlander.com/324.html
The opposite is true. Because women in their narrow age range of attractiveness get paired with men in a much broader age range of attractiveness, that would create a shortage of women. Say, if women 25-35 date men 30-45, there are 50% more men in that group.

or combining folk wisdom and math: d(half your age + 7) / d (age) < 1

However, the fact that men propose and women decide creates an inversion. Early marriages take decisive women and attractive men off the market, leaving beautiful women and schlubs. Hooray for graph theory!
RDBMS's seem like the next likely C stronghold to fall; they're I/O bound and feature-laden.
I'm pretty sure this service is not meant for the technically inclined. If someone who is technically inclined was worried about this, they would understand that they could use Google and/or a custom web crawler that searched over a subset of sites you cared about[1].

[1]After all, if someone copies your work and no once sees it, who really cares? The scope of your web crawler must be limited somehow. You could simply have it check up on your competition and/or popular links on news aggregating sites for categories related to your business. For example, if I was starting a technology blog, I could write up a Python crawler in about 30 minutes that parsed through blog articles on other popular tech blogs with related tags.
Mongrel is multithreaded, solid, and fast, the issue was with, which Rails wasn't thread-safe until a little while ago.
> Computer models will only get you so far when COMPLEX (read: disguised) financial instruments rely on past history, not future performance.

What do you have that relies on future performance?

(Actually, there are many contracts, such as "10% of next year's revenue, rely on future performance in a pedantic sense, but I take the above to be something different because there are plenty of computer models that satisfy the pedantic definition used in this comment.)
hmm is it romantic or pragmatic if you think of your spouse as a good friend/cofounder you can split work with and help each other out?

I'm beginning to see no point in love - only solid, mutually beneficial friendships.
And if you're looking for a slightly more scalable solution than "Find a sentence from Page A which is juicy, Google it, record results, repeat for all 10,000 pages on my website", you may be interested in CopyScape.

For example, if you feed them www.tynt.com, they'd tell you that feedmyapp.com has borrowed a few sentences from them. (It makes sense, as the borrowed phrases are part of a listing for tynt.com)
But on the other hand requiring/confirming email raises opportunity cost, loosing you users to engage in the first place.
I think the Netflix model is closer to what will work going forward. Movies and shows are ad free, but supported with a monthly subscription. It's already too easy to skip past advertising, so I think as we move forward expecting traditional advertising to pay for viewing is less likely (product placement seems promising though).
Quick question: how much is the additional monthly charge? I've got an application on the back burner I was considering using them for, largely on the recommendation of the guy who wrote the Rails kit for credit card processing.
> Computer models will only get you so far when COMPLEX (read: disguised) financial instruments rely on past history, not future performance.

Actually, their gains come from providing an exit for folks who did all the things that you value.

How do you propose to let the people who do things that you like make money without letting them sell out to someone who won't do a damn thing?
If you don't have a dropbox, you either don't know what really good syncing is, or you don't have multiple computers to sync. The latter leaves me with the question why you are trying to look at it anyway.
Years ago I applied a trick I learned from the Associated Press. Back in World War I, the Associated Press suspected that the Hearst newspaper chain was copying their stories from the Russian front, and they began running stories about a fictitious general Nelotsky. When the Hearst newspapers picked up the Nelotsky "story," the AP called them on it, pointing out that the first part of the general's name is just the English word "stolen" spelled in reverse. I used a similar technique on my most plagiarized webpage,

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html

mentioning a college that doesn't actually exist, but has a name from the Greek word for "steal." That finally got one persistent thief to acknowledge that my site was his source.
I think that there is a difference between services not meant for technically inclined people and those built by non-technically inclined people. In its current incarnation, I do not see how this service is useful, even if you are not technically inclined.

I think there is a need for a service like this (that watches the web for people republishing your content), but Tracer is not it. Tracer is just a silly JavaScript hack.
The credited response to that is that there are many ever so smart young people who are ready for college but have no access to the details of their parents' financial situation.
Great article! BTW, I was wondering what are the testing strategies used and how did you guys ensured smooth integration of features?
I've got into ticket scalping lately. It's not legal in many states but it is completely legal in my state as long as you do it online and conduct business using your real name. Check your local laws.

It is really, really easy. All you do is check http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/ for upcoming sales and refresh ticketmaster at 10AM when they're on sale. I don't use a script, though a simple one to get you direct to the CAPTCHA would save 2 seconds which definitely makes a difference in quality of seats.

Some intuition about what will be instant sellouts is needed. This is the best one going on soon: a legendary performer known for rarely touring and he is playing tiny venues. http://www.ticketmaster.com/Leonard-Cohen-tickets/artist/733...

Don't buy seats at the back of large amphitheaters unless it is for Phish.

It's easiest to sell on Stubhub but using Craiglist can add 8-10% to your margins. It's annoying to have to email/call back and forth with the people though.
> Even if it's 1-2% at exit ....

It's not - it's <0.5% at exit.