skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you look at the bottlenecks in opcode throughput for virtual machines it's almost always lousy branch prediction. Using a branch table instead of a switch block is not going to make much of a difference in any realistic program. The CPU has no idea which function is going to get called next so it can never fully use all the advanced look-ahead mechanisms.

For those interested, look at all the performance improvements made in the ocaml and perl and clisp interpreters. There is a lot of low hanging performance fruit left in the Python interpreter - the question is whether it's worth plucking. For instance, python can get a dedicated accumulator (I don't think it has one now) and you can introduce new opcodes that combine functionality of frequently occurring opcode sequences. For instance, python now has a LOAD_CONST and BINARY_ADD instruction, but not LOAD_COST&ADD instruction like clisp.

By combining the functionality of two instructions into one you're essentially saving an opcode dispatch. Saving a jump is going to make a bigger difference than making a jump faster. So that's where I think the python guys should focus on if they really want to improve performance.
SMS is a great example of "worse is better" paradigm. Several new technologies have tried to challenge it, MMS, advertising supported SMS come to mind. But none of them have really displaced it. I think its got to do with the simplicity. And its usefulness, as an "offline" notification system. Hard to beat the combination.

The only thing that could replace it is IM clients on Phones. When each and every phone is always on and when everyone is always signed on, and when operators are nothing more than bit pipes, SMS's will become pointless. Lots of if's though. :)
My understanding is that alot of the spam you get is spammers sending email to <phonenumber>@<carrier>.com. They don't pay a penny.
But OTOH, if you are careful about mutating when possible, your program will run faster. Not the most important thing in the world, I agree, but it is a "reward" for mutating things.
"What would you do differently if you were always on camera?"

One person I know calls this "glass house living" -- and I wish more people lived life that way.
Anyone have pictures of the pads?

Besides the pic at the article, that is also here?: http://news.google.com/news?q=hockey+goalie+pads
learn more about Ann Arbor's hacker culture and community at http://a2geeks.org/

we're trying to get a bit more organized around here, and be better neighbors to our startup friends in the area (publicizing our events, and partnering with others in the region - e.g. hosting a TechCocktail.com event here in March, and supporting the TechNow09.com event in Royal Oak in April).

thanks for the boost, Tom. Zingerman's Roadhouse on me, the next time you're in town. :-)
VoicePHP from TringMe to create Voice Applications
Imagine if YC were to automatically load the links, and re-format them to use the YC referrer, and then add a button in your profile that allows you to request a check for your 1/2.

You don't need affiliate accounts with 15 different companies. The platform takes care of it for you, and cuts you a check. Think of it as a meta-affiliate.
I am not sure the slashdot author understand the paper he read, he says:"the best often rise to the top, the very worst rarely do," yet the paper says:
"In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p...

Namely, the paper does not say that the best often rise to the top, simply that they are unlikely to do badly.
When you do what you really love, you don't count the money. Your pay-off is from the sense of accomplishment. Doing something for love and wishing that the money follows really depends on who else gains value from what you do. E.g. living in a log cabin in Alaska - minimal payback. Creating, building and selling iPods - huge payback. The difference being not many people are chuffed at you living in a log cabin. Lot of people are very chuffed at having the music they love when they want it and having a cool gadget to play it on.
"It's enough of a phenomenon that there are bloggers who've blogged about laptop etiquette."

This is a joke, right?
Yeah, the guy who started Salesforce.com just LOVES CRM software.
Maybe I'm odd, but I generally prefer reading stuff on a computer, especially if it's computer-related material (search is invaluable and paper is cumbersome).

If you find reading on a screen difficult, I'd recommend turning the room light on, positioning your screen so you don't have a glare or reflection, blowing up the text, and sitting at a good distance from the screen.
I can't see why not. It seems incredibly straightforward to cache effectively.
This looks like a pretty decent site. Are you planning to compete with it?

I was recently looking for something related: an online fax service. Most of those sites seemed to ooze sleeze and required a subscription. I finally decided on http://payperfax.com which looked much less cluttered and is pay-as-you-go. Much better if you only need to fax a couple times a year and is platform independent (there is a decent looking windows-only Skype plugin service called PamFax)

For whatever reason, some markets seem to get filled with crap. Just do a search for "online fax" if you want a taste.
mod_parrot should be just as easy to install as mod_php. Tomcat is also as easy to install.

Deployment in any language is not much of a problem on machines that you control. PHP is popular because of mod_php shared hosts that charge $1/month. Paying a dollar is apparently an easier way to get started with programming than `apt-get install <a real language>`, hence PHP's popularity.
this isn't really a new argument.. see this NYT article from October, which was one of the first major outlets to pick up on the story.. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/29credit.html

having said that, i completely agree that the CC storm is something to be concerned about
While writing Scheme is probably better than writing PHP, how are you dealing with PHP's poor support for ... everything? I am really interested in taking a look at this code, especially your tail-call elimination algorithms and the continuations implementation.
I'm working on a project (announcing it in about 8 hours on here, actually!) that would benefit from giving users an easy way to mail a letter while sitting at their desk.

We're just poking around to see who's out there. Ideally our users would be able to click a link, fill in a form and have a letter mailed a letter to an address autopopulated from our service.
The good news is that at least Lua has the core language features you need to implement good libraries and extensions. It also has very nice syntax for a non-Lisp.

If Lua became the new "standard" for web development, I wouldn't complain at all. I probably wouldn't use it, but if I had to, it wouldn't be bad :) (I was recently forced to do some PHP and Java projects. Wow. Never again.)
Pretty cool concept as bprater pointed out. I would like to see a special split character or something so you could generate comma separated lists and thus, multi-column SQL Tables and more complex JSON objects.
I was just looking around and was thinking that the money was probably to be made in (gulp) enabling junk mailers. But it looks like the US Postal service already has that down:

http://www.click2mail.com/how_it_works

In any event, good luck.
Neat concept, but I'm pretty impressed by how the design turned out. Credit should go to Stomp in this case, looks like they executed the concept quite well. Goalies are a special bunch -- I suppose spending more than half your time standing alone leaves you plenty of time to explore your artistic side (see the great masks out there) and think up ways to gain an edge on your opponent.
I think the author works a little too hard to be fair to the G1 but it's a decent review.

The G1's only hope right now is to get enough early adopters to sustain it until developers rush to it and make it as good if not better than the iPhone. That might not happen but that's what Google is hoping for.

That's basically what he says in the review. Lots of potential but very rough around the edges. That said, he doesn't mention what I think is the most relevant point which is the Palm Pre being on the horizon. Anyone looking for an alternative to the iPhone would be foolish to buy a G1 before the Pre reviews start coming in
Wow, then I can understand Americans are keen on getting rid of SMS. Imagine being charged for every email you receive. That would screw up by budget at least.
The GDrive will make PCs history the same way Google Docs made Microsoft Office history.

...catch my drift?
http://www.google.com/search?q=coffeeshop+laptop+etiquette&#...
Observations of programmers in the wild
We are using a "share this" button for a video based startup, and in my experience it is not important how many people will click on that button, but the potential traffic that those link could generate. So my conclusion is that share this button is very effective for video advertising but less effective for social bookmarking.
the CC storm is something to be concerned about

as is the commercial real estate crash that is in the process of unfolding...
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/cre-when-reserve-r...

many local and regional banks have larger exposure to commercial real estate and construction loans than to residential mortgages
I even get a little mad when my friends send me SMS :) You can imagine how pissed off you'd be when you receive spam. My wife once received the same spammy message about 5 days in a row. I didn't think too much of it until we got the bill and each one of those was something like $2.99 a piece from some "premium SMS" service that she had not signed up for.
OK. I presumed they brought the laserdisc players before it was apparent that (VHS-) VCRs would win.
Perhaps you should get a heated mouse?
oldgregg provided this list to me last week in a different thread -

http://postful.com/

http://click2mail.com/

http://www.viapost.com/

http://www.postalmethods.com/

http://www.cfhdocmail.com/

http://www.l-mail.com/

http://www.pc2paper.co.uk/

I'm in the process of integrating my app with Postful's via their API. So far, so good.
So you argue going from a RISC VM to a CISC VM? Interesting trend.
The high cost of SMS has benefits, though. Shouldn't it make spam more costly to send, too?
I really would love to see multiple inheritance. I don't understand why it's such a faux pas in OO languages. "Ohh... the functions might have the same name!" they say. Big deal! First one in wins, or last one in wins, I don't care, just pick one.
http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Privacy:_Stored_Communications_... seems like it would apply
I did the exact same thing. Win32 API for the win.
When looking at music listings, the button to add the event to my Ggle calendar is kick-ass. I guess I could share my calendar with others too. I just thought I would share that with you.
Without a PC, how will you access the GDrive? Through a Google neural implant?
Those Americans.. A carrier that charged for any incoming traffic (SMS, voice, etc) in Germany would see its customers flee in droves.
A particular part of this article stood out, because it's not the first time I've had someone claim this:

Wondering what happen to Jerry? Feel like you’re getting half the story? Wrong, you’re getting 1/10th of the story. People are messy and a huge part of the management gig is managing this messiness. Who knows what personal or professional issue Jerry has that is forcing this management change. It’s really none of your business. However, it is your manager’s business because the people are her job.

Why is it not? People may not be my job, but people are part of what helps me get my job done. For that matter, they aren't even the manager's job, which is really to make sure his department is adding value to the company however it can. It just happens that dealing with people problems can be part of how he/she accomplishes that goal.

But this philosophy screams of mushroom management. I can understand if Jerry is on some sort of medical leave, and has asked that people respect his privacy. But to universally say that people are expected to be disinterested in the leadership and staffing changes of their team and organization is insane. Leadership and teammate changes affect peoples' morale and their ability to get their job done, and to assert brusquely that it should not affect them, or that they shouldn't care that it does, will not make people go back to being unconcerned drones. People don't stop being concerned just because they are ordered to by an authority. Instead, you're just as likely to cultivate more drama, as people start wondering, speculating, and digging to find out what provoked the change. They aren't stupid enough to actually believe, and will generally find a way to find out anyway, except now they'll start trusting you less. They'll start to believe that you have political motives that they need to be acutely aware of, and they'll start politically positioning themselves in a way that probably won't benefit anyone to keep themselves safe.

There is a difference between protecting people from things that aren't particularly important or useful for them to know so that they can keep working, and controlling information to make sure they remain largely in the dark and without a say with respect to political and professional matters that really do matter. It's a judgment call, and I'd honestly say that it is better to err on the side of saying too much. At least that way, your employees won't start getting suspicious of you and your goals.
World's Smallest: http://www.worldssmallestpostalservice.com/

(as referenced in http://qwantz.livejournal.com/104142.html )
They do not contribute to variable costs. But in theory the money made from SMS could be used to cross-subsidize calls.
I'm an engineer/sysadmin and we're responsible for providing instrumentation for operations people. I'm always on the look out for functional and attractive displays, whether it's a color scheme for a cacti graph we already have or something completely different like: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/06/21/steampunk-problem-li.ht...
just for the record of translation into research literature for the interested:

* dedicated accumulator: stack caching.

* LOAD_CONST&BINARY_ADD: superinstructions. (though research literature suggests that dynamic superinstructions fare better w.r.t. performance than the static approach you suggest)
http://www.UUorld.com/
I didn't like this review. He compared it at every step to the iPhone.

It isn't the iPhone. It isn't trying to be the iPhone. I'd even venture to say that the target market isn't the same as the iPhone's. It's built upon choice; you can choose to do things different ways. You can't do this with the iPhone.

It doesn't assume the user is a moron.
The headline is pretty misleading. The article is largely about the problem of consumer credit being curtailed by the banks, not about anything crashing. It does say that there are fears that the credit card default rate could rise above 8%. 8% of one trillion is 80 bn, which seems pretty managable to me compared to what's happened in the mortgage market.
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I'd bet Google hates articles like this.

If Google does have a GDrive project, I'd bet they don't consider it a means to "make PCs history". I'd bet they probably just want to offer a service that users want to use; therefore increasing use of their other products and selling more ads.
Yeah, I heard all about how laws killed P2P on the latest episode of Law & Order I torrented.
True, but let me tell you a story. I walked into the T-mobile store a few weeks ago to get a G1 and the salesman told me not to, that it was a bad phone. Now he didn't know that I have been a T-mobile customer forever (since they were called Mercury and only had 2 handsets and 2 tariffs) and pretty much any phone I want would be "free" now[1] - he'd rather have not made the sale at all. That tells me everything I need to know about the G1.

[1] Unless they have some weird technology to detect my SIM when I walk in the door...
The $250 netbook may not cut it, but I'm writing this on a brand new $400 laptop that has plenty of processing power, 2 gigs of ram and a decent graphics card. This power would have cost over $1500 two years ago. When the computer costs the same as the operating system, people will be more willing to play around with which operating system they use.

You're absolutely right that Microsoft is going to get squeezed from both directions by Linux and Mac.

The most likely near-term consequence is that Microsoft may be pushed out of the home market if they don't introduce a relatively cheap home OS.
Wow. You haven't rented a storefront or an office, have you. Or paid water bills, or gotten permits to serve food and drink for a profit, or dealt with a zoning board, or...
Like mortgages, credit card debt that has been securitized has leverage on top of leverage, so even an 8% default rate will do very bad things to banks and other companies who have purchased it using leverage. (Often, the securitized product itself is leveraged.)

People were saying things like this in the early stages of the sub-prime crisis, when the default rate was still well below 10%, and everyone was saying, "The default rate is so low; why in the world is it causing all these problems?"

Welcome to the wonderful world of leverage.
Am I the only one that finds it prohibitively difficult to focus on programming at a coffee shop?
Not sure how you connect being able (or rather forced to) 'choose to do things different ways' to being a moron...
The salesman was probably calling you 'a moron'... :-)
I thought the internet was done with popularity contests?
About one in ten of my tech-industry friends (and because I edited Valleywag.com for a year I made a lot of them -- more enemies, but that's another story) have at some point told me they wanted a longterm cafe, something like a cozy shared office.

That's coworking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking

San Francisco coworking spaces include Citizen Space in SOMA near South Park: http://citizenspace.us/

And the Hat Factory in Potrero: http://hatfactory.net/

But these places have their limitations, and everyone thinks they can do one better. In fact, Digg founder Kevin Rose likes to say that when he cashes out, he'll start a teashop, but he once fantasized to me about starting a tech artists collective. I even encouraged him to try it, but I have a feeling it'll never happen.

Because to be honest, running a co-working space for people too cheap to find their own offices, going full-service without the high margins of a high-volume walk-in cafe, dealing with customers with serious entitlement issues, is not nearly as fun as all the other businesses a talented tech professional could start in SF or Silicon Valley.
Well, fair play - if "a moron" means someone who wants their phone to make and receive calls and not have to spend the whole time fiddling with it to make it work... Runs Linux you say? :-P
That's an interesting link. I very much doubt the linearity of these things though.
I use firefox 3 and it is not crashing with this site
We appear to be stuck in the high school years of the Internet. One wonders if the phase will ever pass.
Don't waste your time at Circuit City
I went there today and the only thing that was actually 30% off were the Monster Cables which would still be a ripoff at 80% off.

Headphones were twice as expensive there -- even on sale -- as they are online for the exact same models. Nearly everything in the store was really only 10% off, despite the signs outside saying 30%. Looks like stuff was marked up, then down. I'm not sure the regular prices, but no one was buying /any/thing.

I wasted my time, don't waste yours -- yet. If this sale is going to go through March, prices are going to have to come /way/ down before anything is worth buying, but really nothing in there is worth buying anyway...
Credit card debt is much less securitised than mortgage debt.
http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2004/10/the_nfl_is_not...

It does.
"Share this" buttons gently remind people to spread the word, even if they don't use the actual button.

(referenced from Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz)
The only thing which redeemed this article for me was (somewhat ironically) the comment by Robert Scoble.
My complete guess is pretty much the opposite :)

My friends have no idea what delicious is, nor other tagging/bookmarking programs, but they love to find interesting/funny content on the web and share that on facebook. I do the same, even though I have delicious and facebook bookmarklets installed. Just lazy I guess
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Isle of Man Plans Unlimited Music Downloads
Think id software.
You're right. Only about half of credit card debt is securitized, while about 90% of mortgage debt was.

However, the banks are in much, much more fragile condition than they were before, and this will have a disproportionate impact right now.

While it's not the end of the world, it's another thing piled on a whole heap of bad things.

It'd be a mistake to underestimate the impact of this, just as we've as a society so far made mistake after mistake in underestimating how bad this financial crisis would prove to be.
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Melodies derived from stock charts using MS Songsmith
Ad-free? Only in France
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L6, l6 charging problem, l6 charging ways, l6 not charging, L7, l7 charging problem, l7 charging ways, l7 not charging, motorola
From the article:

Under a proposal announced this month, the 80,000 people who live on the Isle of Man would be able to download unlimited amounts of music — perhaps even from notorious peer-to-peer pirate sites. To make this possible, broadband subscribers would pay a nominal fee of as little as £1, or $1.38, a month to their Internet service providers. [...]

Under his proposal, the money collected by the Internet providers would be sent to a special agency that would distribute the proceeds to the copyright owners, including the record labels and music publishers. They would receive payments based on how often their music was downloaded or streamed over the Internet, as they now do in many countries when it is performed live or on the radio.
What is a certificate of incorporation?
Dup. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448676

Washington.edu version of this dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449041
You don't have to love your job in order to be happy. If it provides you with the money you need and still leaves you time to do the things you love, is it horrible not to love it?

And what if loving your job results in you neglecting other important parts of your life?
Ask HN: Why isn't this site as successful as Craigslist?
This site is basically the same thing as Craigslist, except it has fancier design and allows sales of pets www.kijiji.com. I came across it because I'm looking to get a second dog.

So, why isn't it competitive with Craigslist? If I knew the answer to this question, then it would make me a better hacker and entrepenuer. Is it just because Craigslist was first? I think that's a facile answer.

Y-Combinator is looking to fund a Craigslist competitor, but before they do, they should ask themselves this same question, and the corollary - if not this site, then what would it take to unseat, or even compete with Craiglist?
la tacqueria (aka taco bob's) in union square is excellent. bset vegetarian mexican in the north east. i cant speak for the meat side of things.
No central heat + Boston winter = Many days I wish for a heated keyboard... not sure how you'd heat a trackball, but that would be appreciated as well!
The more popular, the more earning potential: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=adcause+twitter