skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(1) I think the rub isn't so much that they're bashing Ruby as it seems like rather than evaluating all their options, they just jumped ship to some random unproven technology for whatever reason. They then turn around and say "well we switched because Ruby didn't do what needed" (but check out my book on the language that does!!). It makes one think they don't know if it did or didn't, since JRuby would've solved a goodly number of their problems (probably; we'll never really know). Just like when they wrote Starling, they seemed to have just decided to hack something out rather than make a reasoned technical decision.

(2) Yes, but JRuby and Ruby 1.9 both handle those problems much better. Moot argument.

(3) So rather than picking an "unproven" technology (by some measure of unproven), they write something completely new in a comparatively immature programming language. Yup. Much better choice.

And since when did JVM compatibility matter? The reason they chose the JVM was good threading and so on, but Erlang has that same support. It wouldn't be introducing a third "exotic" platform, but a second, different platform.

Of course, I'm saying this stuff from an outside perspective. I'm hoping he elaborates on his blog, because I would really be interested to hear a more technical explanation of their decisions.
An insurance company with a combined ratio of 99 has a cost of capital lower than the US treasury. So yes, it is probably making money -- even if it has its assets in T-bills.
The joke being that it wouldn't stop the runaway AI?
Which ones have you taken?
I've heard very good things about it on PC. Safari 3 PC was tripe; 4 seems to be much better.
Great point about extrapolating game state.

They are way overselling it. It's simply not possible to do as well as a game running locally, as they claim (maybe in 7 more years...). But there's a continuum of playability, between ideal and unplayable. If there are other benefits (flexible, convenient, cheap), and there is an audience who is very happy with this tradeoff, then this possibly, maybe could be a disruptive innovation.

It's not going to take off with hardcore twitch FPS, so they seem to be targeting the wrong market (probably just for a more exciting demo). It's niche audience might be more like for the Wii: they don't care it's less powerful and not HD, but they like it because it's more fun (and cheaper). A similar story for casual games (whose success surprised some people). I'm not saying it will find a niche; just that it's possible. And then over time, latency improves, and they're ready for it.

The argument I've heard about coping with first day demand spikes is a bit silly. Of course it won't handle that - but it doesn't mean it's useless. What about all the other days? Demand spikes are a problem for physical distribution channels too.
I really think you're going to lose this argument. You're defending a blog post that says that Kestrel was a far worse choice than a single-developer C project with no major success stories. I don't think, and I don't believe that you think, that Scala is as likely to be a failure mode for Twitter as MQ is.

However immature Scala is --- and I'm not using it --- the Scala runtime is absolutely rock solid. I'm sure that's true of JRuby as well, but the comparison isn't between JRuby and Scala, it's between MRI and Scala, and for a company that tolerated high-volume messaging servers in MRI, we both know Scala is going to be like shangri-la by comparison.
Haha, I'd never seen that, and it's made by Contrast.io - one of my favorite web development firms.
Awesome comment, thank you.
This is in response to Dave McClure visiting Startup Weekend SF this weekend. Your pitch is selling a problem, what are problems that you have? What products that you would like to see solved... generally on a smaller app basis (us being at Startup Weekend and all).

We used UserVoice for this, btw.
I think HN needs to have more discussion on this point. For instance, I used to listen to Art Bell: his callers gave numerous anecdotes about UFOs, but I wouldn't say those anecdotes added up to evidence of any sort. On the other hand, if you know 1000 people, and 20 of them have seen UFOs, that's definitely evidence, all else being equal. (The people you know don't exactly constitute an unbiased sample, but they aren't a meaninglessly biased sample either.)
an Ajax toolkit for building flowchart style UIs. So many web apps could benefit from more visual, floating, drag & drop UI
I really doubt you could buy a CDO for a fair price. The banking crisis basically happened because banks had their assets overvalued and over leveraged their securities.

And I believe that through some accounting tricks, most bulge bracket banks are still overvaluing their securities. And in some cases once the securities are correctly valued, the banks will be insolvent. That is one problem the bailout money is for, to enable banks to correctly value securities.

So I believe that if a bank actually sells any CDO's at a fair price, there will be major problems with keeping the rest of the securities overvalued.

And from the way I understand it, most of these over valued securities are based on multiple assets, so one CDO is going to track other CDO's, you can't pick a CDO that is solely based on correctly valued assets.

Compare it to a local bank that is insolvent.And this bank has overvalued their assets. So I am looking to buy a house, and see that the bank has called the loans on two houses that would be in my price range. Except one of the houses has been used as a meth house, and the owner would have to pay an extra 60-70k to make the house habitable. Well, it would be an easy choice for me, I would want to buy the other house for less than the value of the loan. Only in this comparison that doesn't work. See, the bank found out that if they grouped the mortgages together, they could sell overpriced pieces of the mortages. So I would not be able to buy anything from the bank that would give me legal ownership of property. And the mortgages are grouped together, so for every dollar I invested in one property I would be investing a dollar in that meth house.

Nobody really knows what the CDO's will be worth in 10 or 15 years, but I do know that the banks don't have a strong desire to price CDO's low enough to actually sell them.
Charity: water
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Note that right now the movie scene is more blockbuster than it's ever been, while at the same time the indie scene is blooming.

When lots of people focus on superexpensive, it means that a lot of talented people suddenly get interested in the cheap indie scene. Look at the games of Rod Humble, who used to work for Sony and is now doing some of the best stuff in the indie gaming world.
The difference was expectations. The Sims billed itself as a life simulation game, and as such it was a very fun one. Spore claimed to be a revolutionary worldchanging game. People called it the Citizen Kane of games. It was the end-all be-all to the history of gaming, the game that did it all. Turns out it was just a lifesim game, and a lot of people who thought they were playing the best game ever stopped playing within a day. I know I did, and I'm still a bit mad at Will Wright for that.
This is kinda disingenuous.

1) Vouchers do not cover the cost of most DC area private schools. They provide approx. $7500, but most top tier schools cast approx $20k, so the school is expected to kick in the remainder.

2) If vouchers became universally available it would simply inflate the cost of all private schools by the voucher amount, with no increase in student achievement.

3) A largely overlooked element is that private schools get to /choose/ whom they accept. This allows them to preselect the voucher recipients that they think would succeed.
I'm pretty sure it's tricker than that because there are a number of high profile executives with their $1 salaries and now even some of the bank folks that are in non-executive positions that have elected to take no salary. It seems like those would be more prone to scrutiny than unpaid interns.
The threat of a run is only available if you lend out demand deposits, which is something that could be eliminated.
private schools are not allowed to deviate significantly from the idiot producing processes of public schooling:
* Teacher Certification: Children instructed in private full-time day schools by "persons capable of teaching" are exempt from public school attendance under the compulsory education law. Cal. Educ. Code § 48222.

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing must forward to private schools on a monthly basis a list of all teachers who have had their state teaching credential revoked or suspended. The Commission must also send on a quarterly basis a complete and updated list of all teachers who have had their teaching credentials revoked or suspended, excluding teachers who have had their credentials reinstated, or who are deceased. Cal Educ. Code § 44237(g). Private schools may request information regarding the fitness of any applicant for a teaching position from the Commission. Cal Educ. Code § 44341(d).

Curriculum: Students attending private schools are exempt from California's compulsory attendance law if the schools offer instruction in the several branches of study required in the public schools of the state. Cal. Educ. Code § 48222.*

is it a shock that performance remains the same when you have the same teachers and the same curriculum?
The coolest part of git bisect is the run option: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/10/01/git-bisect-run/

If you can write a shell script that returns 0 when the test passes and 1 when it doesn't, git bisect run will do the tedious part for you.
I agree with everything you said but I would take it even further. One doesn't even have to go to chemistry or finance to find better things to invest time in than learning new tools. There are plenty of areas within the domain of computer science/software engineering/hacking that are more worthy of effort than learning a new programming language (let alone a new text editor or version control system.) How about learning how to write code that matches regular expressions in guaranteed linear time. Or implementing a compiler. Or looking at the networking protocols used by QuakeWorld and how they are different from the protocols used by the original Quake and why.

I'm not against learning new programming languages. Everyone should learn a few different languages. I just think many people fetishize them out of proportion.
> If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive

Hadn't thought about this factor, and it's interesting food for thought.

But wouldn't that only mean proper ISPs would limit external traffic (unlimited internal p2p) ? Now we're right back to that conflict of interest where the incumbents stall on providing commodity bits because they profit through proprietary services.
I'm not defending the post, but countering your points. If my points happen to line up with his opinions, then that's merely coincidence. There are a lot of MQ options out there, many of which I've used with great success (with Ruby no less). To argue that one of those is less acceptable than a home grown solution in Scala is, at best, dubious.

But you just danced around the real question: why not JRuby? Scala's runtime == JRuby's runtime. They're both JVM languages, and if they were to use JRuby, there wouldn't be some big crazy rewrite. The only difference would've been "jruby mq.rb" rather than "ruby mq.rb." That's the decision that hasn't really been explained.

Even further, I'm not sure why you're insinuating that I think they should write a message queue in MRI. Either use JRuby or use something else. I totally agree MRI is not acceptable for something like this (but 1.9 may be; I haven't tried it but its performance is only a hair slower than JRuby), but there are other ways to solve the same problem that don't involve rewriting tons of code (either by using JRuby or by using a proven, solid drop in replacement, possibly with an API shim if they really needed it).
subsidizing private schools doesn't help as long as the taxation structure supporting public schools are still in place. all that will happen is private school tuitions will increase the way college tuitions have.
Nope. "Public" education implies that everyone can have it. Vouchers don't provide admission, just a means to pay tuition if you are accepted.
Apparently my login for Uservoice is only half correct, because it doesn't throw an error but sends me to your site still logged out. I'm very annoyed with the whole thing so I can't even vote on your projects. Have fun with uservoice.
there is a time and place for everything. everyone is being allowed to express their opinions. just not in the headline.

snark is never productive. it only serves to harden other people's opinions against you. if you believe techstars is in the wrong here, you're certainly not going to change their minds by mocking them.
No, his point is that a communications company in Japan can "wire the whole country" and peer with fellow network providers, while building such a comprehensive network in the US is prohibitive, and thus ISPs have to pay for transit.

Basically, a bigger and more distributed (between "autonomous systems") network increases the asymmetry of the interconnections, leading to more billable events (antithesis of "the internet").
this just in: products with low demand sell poorly. what is happening to sony is a case where company gets so big that it loses sight of the fact that you make money by giving people what they want. sony thinks it can dictate consumer preference. I will laugh as they crash and burn.
Programming is more than software engineering. Some things don't need to be engineered.
You're right, I stand corrected. Interesting that this aspect hasn't been hyped up more when people mention Rails.
That's odd I use Gmail contacts every day and I've never had a problem on Chrome or Firefox. The old gContacts was finicky but ever since the version with merge, it's been A.O.K.
An idea I've thought about but abandoned personally: Getting market prices/reviews for services (contrasted with goods. That is, the prices charged by plumbers, auto mechanics, etc.) It's easy to find out the going rate on a 1 TB external hard drive. Not so much regarding replacing brake pads in a given zip code radius.

Not a weekend startup, of course.
Sorry, forgot about this thread. I mean include their profiles into your website. They may not like it since you are redirecting potential viewers of their ads. You guess you can mitigate this by only showing little information and then redirecting a user to plentyoffish.
About the page view argument: this article shows a lack of understanding about the HTTP request. The browser does not add additional headers to a request indicating that a page is loading in an iframe. Therefore loading a page in an iframe has the same effects (from a traffic standpoint) as loading the page normally.

About the ads argument:
Eh...maybe. I work on content-based websites everyday and a lot of thinking goes into ad placement. Digg/Facebook/Stumbleupon/whoever else are altering the presentation of these content sites and essentially placing ads on every site a user visits through their pages. Maybe that is the cost of having your content promoted on these sites. A 20 px toolbar won't affect most sites although it does look unprofessional and sloppy. At the end of the day, the content publishers have the right to control the presentation of their content and I would expect many to just break these toolbars using js. To my knowledge the top.location hack can't be stopped...believe me. Whether, as a content publisher, you support the toolbar doesn't matter. If you are in support of it you don't need to do anything otherwise you can insert a little js on your site and call it a day.
But doesn't the current crash highlight the superfluousness of the 'accredited investor' limits? Even investments poor people are allowed to make -- like common stock of giant financial institutions, even those with government sponsorship (Fannie/Freddie) -- can essentially go to zero.

The general markets are down 45% from their peaks. Why should submillionaires be denied the chance to put 55% of their portfolio in T-Bills, and 45% in highly-risky unregistered private securities? That wouldn't have done any worse than the public stock market... and might do a lot better, if you understand the private companies involved.

And if submillionaires are such easy marks, why not any limits on how much they can gamble in casinos or even state lotteries?

The 'accredited investor' limits are silly; a phony security blanket at best, an unfair impediment to broad-based entrepreneurship and investing at worst.
F.A.A. Scrambles to Replace Retiring Controllers
Is it an error because we are using a subdomain? i.e. you are logged into uservoice.com but not problems.startupweekend.com?

Just a guess.
Good point. I had forgotten that people still do that :)
I think Atwood means heroic programming is programming that does something really neat, but is not worth the time it took to write. It is nice to emulate a GPU in software and get good performance, but it's easier to walk over to Best Buy and get their $20 graphics card instead.
Cute. Imagine what you can do with 3D printing in plastic (http://www.shapeways.com)

Also see Sam Buxton's MIKRO men from chemical milled stainless steel:
http://www.designmuseum.org/design/sam-buxton
https://www.divire.com/
If its just Flash that is eating up cpu or crashing Safari, give ClickToFlash (http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master) a try.
More on the so called "entire" data center seizure
there is already a pdf of the book on the linked site. how is yours better or different? i'm not a kindle user, so i don't know the details.
Reposted from reddit. It looks like this was more about telecom fraud than anything else. Its highly possible also that all of the servers seized were involved somewhat in it. It's also highly possible that Verizon and AT&T are being bullies again.
I AM my brain. All of my experiences happen within the physical construct that floats in the calcium construct of my skull. The physical processes of my neurons happen within the same physics that allow everything from quarks to quasars to function. There is a physical process, not yet fully described, that will describe how experience is formed and perceived. We're still getting the data, and are working on the answers.
It's the kind of thing that can't be priced (as AIG found out.) The distribution of the default rate is unknown and unknowable (fat tails and black swans and so on.)

Also, if you increased the price of FDIC insurance, banks would need to make greater interest rates, and therefore would need to make riskier loans. You could make FDIC insurance contingent on taking less risk, but that sort of regulation always seems to backfire. (Of course we already have such regulation, the article even alludes to it. But increasing the strictness of risk-taking regulation would just solidify the major players.)
That 19% represents some subset of the people that received vouchers but didn't use them AND said that the reason they didn't accept the voucher was because their kid got accepted into a charter school. The "other 80%" also didn't use the voucher, for some other reason. We can't use this statistic to say that 20% of people prefer charter schools and 80% prefer private schools. In particular, we don't know how many people sent their kids to private schools without applying for charter schools, and we don't know how many people applied to charter schools without accepting private school vouchers.
Looks fine in lynx. What browser are you using? ;)
Yes. He was one of the early warning voices (2003?) about the dangers of complex derivatives.
To my knowledge the top.location hack can't be stopped...believe me.

I did a quick experiment. If you set top = null, then top.location stops working.
This is a idea I've had for a while that solves the short-url problem... with a bit of work.

I call it ^url

It would work like DNS servers.. replicating the content between each other (the map between fullurl -> shorturl). You submit the sortURL to any one of the participating services, and that server will push the new url to all the others servers as well.

A browser extension would make any ^url (yes anything starting with a ^ symbol) and the browser would be configured to use any one of the servers (just like how you would use a domain name). You can make it so a mouse over will resolve the ^url and show the linking path (solving yet another issue).

I wish I had a bit more time these days to dedicate to this...
I've found the 'The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web' to be immensely useful. http://webtypography.net/toc/
Below, another commenter said that special education consumed 25% of the public budget. I don't know where he got that statistic, but if it is true then clearly we can't consider it to be a "small portion" of anything.

The Taliban is a religious organization that indoctrinates people similar to other religious organizations. What does it have to do with public schools? Are you suggesting that public schools are not secular enough and not objective enough? If so, I totally agree with you. But, it can be fixed. Religious schools are fundamentally broken as they have indoctrination of children at their core.

You make a lot of unsubstantiated claims in the rest of your message. I don't even know how to respond to them. If you have a claim with some substance then maybe I can respond to it.