skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what is the performance delta between a $2,400 ioDrive and a $400 X25-M for an "ultra-fast" gaming rig? I actually own an ioDrive (not for personal use) and it's hard to find a real workload that can saturate it. I think some people here are on the wrong end of Amdahl's Law.
"Social Collapse Best Practices" by Dmitry Orlov
I don't think you read the article carefully. He's advocating equal shares; 5% each. He's then advocating that further equity grants be structured around milestones, which is an alternative to vesting.
Fundamentally, it's heavily inspired by Rails. Although it doesn't have an ORM, there are ActiveRecord clones available for .NET anyway. The components that resemble Rails resemble it a lot. ASP.NET MVC was not meant to recreate the entire Rails environment and tool chain. So it does not have things like database migrations, automated deployment scripts, etc. built in. These things are provided by third-parties however.

I wouldn't choose ASP.NET over some other open source framework because of this MVC framework. But it would make ASP.NET development a lot less aggravating if I were forced to do development on ASP.NET.
You know what the real test of HN is? Whether we can be redditish without becoming reddit. Until we can do that, we're just fooling ourselves.
Some problems: LR parsers are usually more general than LL parsers. That is because building up the context that the author refers to actually takes up more information that not having a context at all. Once again read the dragon book and consult its section on the classes of language grammar LL and LR parsers can work with. However, error recovery in LR parsers is much more difficult and it is a rare human who can write an LR parser.
> Not really... It is not so hard to setup SVN, Apache, WebDAV, and NetDrive, and you got your own Dropbox...

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The dominant player for an industry isn't always who gets the first implementation (though that's sometimes the case, like eBay), it's often who does it for the masses. Digital music players were common before the iPod, but the iPod made it easy. That's why Rios don't even exist anymore and iPods consistently outsell the bible. Dropbox is easy like the iPod is easy. My mom sees its value.
You know, I don't have anything bad to say about the guy.

I understand what it's like to put your persona out there. (And if you don't believe everything we put out on the Internet is, at a minimum, part persona -- you're full of shit.)

Wearing your passion on your sleeve can be intoxicating, but also painful. (Notice my last parenthetical statement, I'm passionate -- but I'm prepared to have folks zoom in and focus on one statement and disregard the argument.)

Would this world be a better or worse place without Zed in it? Even if he's a ball of ranting passion -- I think it makes the world a more beautiful place to stay.

You can be a hermit on the internet and just attack. Or you can be a passionate soul and take risks by sticking it all out there. Take your pick, but I'm betting the latter won't have nearly as many regrets as the former.

This guy is a passionate hacker. This guy has physical pain when he can't code. This place, Hacker News, should be the one place where he's definitely a hero.
According to the article, the same Indilinx firmware is available to all vendors, so there's probably no difference.
Wow. I've written LL (handwritten recursive descent) and LR, and worked with GLR generators, and apparently I didn't really understand why any of them worked that way. This guy is amazing.
You may well be right.

Regardless, the article is clearly less than great.
“Meta-Local” & “Vast Horizon”: Google is pulling the long tail from under the rug
What worries me about this trend is that I don't think the free lunch can end without websites/services getting in bed with the ISPs. Having to deal with hundreds of subscriptions to websites/services is just not going to fly with your average consumer. I highly suspect what will happen is that your ISP will negotiate with websites/services and offer up bundled tiered Internet packages like they do with cable TV. Should that prove to be successful, that will mean the end of the world wide web as we know it. Then again, that may not be saying much as the world wide web as I know it today is not the same one that I knew even 5 years ago.
Distribution of Internet Explorer 8 by Automatic Updates will begin shortly after the final release of the product, which is expected in 2009. Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/updatemanagement/dd365125...
We are still in the process of getting approved by Apple.

Direct links:
http://www.pikitchen.com/cleanbook.html

http://www.pikitchen.com/cleanbook-jr.html
> Not everyone gets the Amazon shipping rates.

No, but almost everyone can take advantage of Amazon's discounted rates.

http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

It won't work for shipping food, but it can be a real money saver for non-perishable items. You don't even have to pay shipping costs if you sell the items on Amazon.com, just pay the fulfillment fee and the customer can use Prime or Super Saving shipping.
Slide: Cheetah templates. But we are moving toward making the whole apps in JS
IBM is experimenting with reselling waste heat: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/abstracts/rd/533/brunsch...

In theory you might be able to run an absorption chiller on server waste heat, but I've only seen it done with generators.
So-called "cloud", "warehouse", and "megascale" data centers are designed to be pretty hands-off. 20-minute shifts would probably work.
I've never seen this before, but it's definitely a case of being about organization, not tech. It's the difference between "wiki technology" (trivial) and "Wikipedia" (non-trivial).
Philip Greenspun: Printing Money American Style
It's a good argument and all, whether it's made by Matt or the economist. But, why does everyone focus on money? Is wealth relevant or not? Surely giving away free stuff creates more wealth, if it is sustainable. The real answer to this dilemma is to somehow redirect the outflow of wealth partially back to the producer without the use of money.

For example, say you created free, online computer games where people spent all day reconfiguring proteins. The game is completely free, thus providing wealth to people, and people pay the service back by using it.

The only reason money is ever mentioned is because it is the simplest, catch all solution. But, like the no free lunch theorem for search, money is your Monte Carlo baseline. For a limited problem domain there is quite likely a better technique than random sampling, and therefore a better wealth redirection technique than money. People just need to be more creative. (And, perhaps the comp sci analogy is more than just an analogy)
Ideally, people are vesting on a share of stock proportional to their contribution. That's all I mean. If people are "passive" compared to what they are expected to do, they shouldn't be there any more.

Some investors are passive, giving money and doing little else. They don't vest and their roll is clear.

My comment is a bit black and white, but was commenting in the context of the thread: employees getting stock and expected to contribute proportionally.
Service looks good but the main page needs work: explanations are impossible to understand if you don't already know what the service is all about.

Good luck with the rest!
Certain behaviors, such as long chains of sarcastic comments, should be avoided, even as a test. In fact, sarcasm itself seems pretty dangerous to a social site.
Thanks for the suggestions, I like them and will probably implement some variation.

I hope to be able to run it off a minimal VPS account as I am doing now. The architecture is very slim (no disk access, no interprocess communication) but uses unproven libs. Still loads fast for me, though.
Shows up blank for me.
Your app’s stories on a user’s new Facebook homepage with Feed Forms
The WinForms model for web development is absolutely atrocious. It has an event model that only makes sense on the desktop. To get this event model working on the web, they literally shoe-horned a size 6 stiletto onto a size 12 male foot. They invented all sorts of hacks like viewstate just to get this event model to work. And in the end, it does not buy the developer anything other than lots of confusion when they initially begin working with the framework over the order of events.

Seriously, if you've ever been to some beginner/intermediate MS conference lectures, they need to cover topics that no other web developer needs to even worry about, like how to keep your viewstate nice and trim, how to ensure that your web app works across a cluster and doesn't cough because the viewstate was generated on one server and consumed by another one (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998288.aspx), etc..

It's a terrible terrible terrible monstrosity that should only be interesting in the academic sense of "I wonder if it's possible to do that" kind of way.
I suppose that 'future earnings' holds a pretty nebulous value. Still, to the writer's point, how long do you think today's children will be working/investing? My bet is that it's more than 5 years. IMO, now would be a good time to start a child's college fund.
Exactly. Significant amounts of wealth were never there (e.g Madoff, Stanford), and significant amounts of wealth were destroyed due to the fact that people/businesses made plans & investments that were based on a perception of reality that is now known to have been wildly off the mark. Think of all the half-done construction projects that are now sitting idle because they were intended to satisfy demand that no longer exists.
Be careful with the number of iPhone app beta testers you provision.
If this information is accurate, does this mean one should never have 100 beta testers for one app since then you can't have any different testers for your future app(s)?

Or does this issue arise only on a per app basis?
Although it's not on the list, WSGI is the framework. The most simple and flexible one (it must be, as all the other frameworks on the list are based on it).

Frameworks are great up to a point. If you burger flip web sites all the time, then they make your life easy.

If you only deal with one site, you will never get the flexibility of pure WSGI with some prefabricated framework.
Is Cisco/Flip the US Robotics/PalmPilot of 2009? Hope not
Cool!

However, I would be concerned about the other links that might appear in the email. For instance, click here to link your site cookies with the MSN ad network, or click here to agree that everything you submit will belong to Bigcorp.

Some (admittedly poorly designed) sites might even have "click here to cancel your registration" links. Can your link follower tell what each link means? I don't think so. But yeah, for most cases, it will work beautifully.
While I largely agree with your response, the second link is a trojan, not a virus.
WordPress users may want to avoid Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8
Seriously, if just a few advertisers said that they'd start using AdCenter, they could get Microsoft to fix IE.
Caching != Scaling
At first glance the name is unfortunately similar to "clitoris" - wonder if this deliberate?
Tito's Blog - How Much Is A Trillion Dollar?
"the tech is mostly out there but no one is bringing it together to really reshape communities and help spread information"

I beg to differ! :-) That's exactly what we're doing at EveryBlock.com. We do the work of bringing together news and a whole lot of public data for public benefit.
P2p online storage firm Wuala acquired by LaCie
Thanks, I don't really intend to run it as a business. Without being a forum spammer, I personally used Mailinator a lot and saw the chance to make it easier. I warned about the danger of stealing the account in the FAQ, on the front page; I hope this will be enough.

I will write some code to avoid the auto-clicking trap you mentioned, thanks! :)
Poll of Facebook Users Finds 94% Hate Redesign
August Capital Raises A New $650 Million Fund
Six years in the Silicon Valley
Which services have the fastest domain name registration, in terms of the user experience?

I'm NOT asking about how long the record takes to become active and propagate. Just the UI.
Yeah, it seems to take Firefox more than 0.5 seconds to open a new window, where as Safari is as close to instant as I can imagine. That's what really annoys me about using Firefox.
My vague recollection is that RPS is the subject of AI competitions. You can't "beat" random selection, but you can't lose to it either. So if you want to win a tournament, you have to try to guess what your opponents will do, assuming that they too want to win, and are guessing your actions.
Again, Andrew Cuomo: "AIG chose to lock in bonuses for 2008 at 2007 levels despite obvious signs that 2008 performance would be disastrous."

Are you saying AIG is only now going to have trouble hiring people, since they won't be handing out lavish bonuses to people who don't deserve them? I'd have thought they'd be having trouble hiring people for other reasons.
Google's Marissa Mayer Tells Lesley Stahl What's Next
Link to print version on 1 page:

http://www.wowowow.com/print/242531
Ellington does not run the entire Washington Post site. A number of specific applications on washingtonpost.com use Django (e.g., projects.washingtonpost.com/congress), but the main site (articles, columns, etc.) does not use Django.

Signed, the guy who introduced Django to washingtonpost.com
It would be the latest stable release that you would get by running all of the software updates in OSX.

it would not be a nightly.
HN a couple of years from now?
Is there some kind of opportunity here for solar power?
CPU may not be your bottleneck... Mailinator is handling up to 2 million emails an hour off a single server. Bandwidth though is an issue, 3TB a month. You pay for all those connections that spammers open.

http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/11/so-our-core-duo-serve...
Summary: state of the solid state drive world
So what does exactly equal scaling then?

I'm not disagreeing that scaling isn't only caching, but it's often a component just like anything else. Caching often helps scaling, as do multiple databases, working out bottlenecks in code...whatever else.
Ask PG: How would you respond to the VC's "how can I help you?"
I'm at a seed stage funded by friends and family, launching in April '09 with 300 beta testers. I've been chatting with VC principles -- each offers to help. (I'm assuming their not blowing me off with that offer.) However, I'm somewhat perplex as to how to take advantage of their "help" offer in an intelligent, mature, and progressive way. Any insights greatly appreciated?
You are aware there are lots of sites that do throwaway no-reg email right? Mailinator has been around for years and is incredibly popular.
Wow, for all your ability to rant, your two ideas are so humdrum I can barely believe you offered them as "unsolved" examples. Microsoft Passport and 1000 different anti-malware programs have been around for a long time. The first one failed because no sane person would ever trust such a thing.
Yep, Everyblock is doing exactly that, and I commend you all for your work on that. What DIYcity is trying to do is spur more and more projects along these lines to happen - we want to sow the seeds of 1000 Everyblocks. We're doing that by providing a community where people all over the world can exchange ideas on how best to do this, collaborate, and find support for their ideas and their applications.

That may not be worthwhile to you per se, but 500 people in 50 cities around the world think it's useful.
10 Worst Plastic Surgery Disasters in the World
So does beer, music, naked woman
That's not a discussion that any of my posts in this thread have been about.
Ideally, I would always like to be able to up-vote a submission while reading it. Since most submissions are of off-site content, I don't always have the capability to do this. Instead, I have to come back to HN after reading, search the list to find the submission again, and then click the up-arrow.

It would be ideal if a link to off-site content opened up a viewport page, with the content in one iframe and various HN-related controls in another iframe. Users could opt-in (or opt-out) of this behavior.
what a strange assumption.

Why would Hacker news naturally progress into reddit?
I've worked almost exclusively as a webforms programmer for the last few years and transitioning to this over the last month has been surprisingly challenging for me. I'm definitely a newbie to the "real" web and I never knew how much of the web webforms actually hid from me.

Despite the difficulties, I've been encouraged by the flexibility of MVC and am thinking about making it my framework of choice for my coming projects.

IMO, the best bits of MVC are:

-Separation of concerns. No more mixing business logic with the presentation ("view") layer. I can swap out layers of my architecture more easily

-More control over page elements. I always found the ASP.NET controls a bit lacking...

-Leaner apps. I understand that this is mostly the developer's fault as there's always a way to do things better, but most of the apps I've seen written in webforms just feel bloated. There's too much cruft built into and around webforms to make it seem desktop-y

-Better support for TDD. I've not used this part of it yet, but the MVC model does lend itself to TDD much better than webforms.

I'm not saying that WebForms will be completely gone from my development cycle, though. It is still good for many things. I think the most glaring benefits are:

-Rapid development for internal/quickie apps. This may just be my experience and familiarity talking but it's very easy to throw up a quick and dirty app with webforms. Great for internal projects.

-Legacy applications. This benefit will fade over time, but I was hearing that there were problems with MVC on II6. Also, I don't believe it's supported on any version below II6.
A related article I'd like to see is how to take the lead in a divided market. My (unlaunched, in progress) startup is in a space where there are a three or four competitors with a large customer base, and a dozen or so others with significant ones. They're almost all offering the same (aged) feature set. But it's not like the service has become commoditized the way basic web hosting has.

I feel like we're going to have strong differentiators, and a much easier time getting adoption from the slice of the market not already using one of our competitors. But what's the best way for us to get all the people who have sunk their money and time into a competitor's service (and its learning curve)?
Officials Hoard Valuable Databases Funded by Taxpayers
Let me start by saying thank you very much for acknowledging and even responding to my thoughts. Apparently you were the only person who thought they were worth replying to.

Secondly, you misunderstood me. I am NOT suggesting they wait a year to implement canvas. I am suggesting that they include one of the existing implementations (although they could probably do it themselves in about a week or two if they took advantage of the existing SVG code). Microsoft should then use their automatic Windows Update to deploy IE 8 to most XP and Vista machines.

It is interesting that you feel the entire rich internet applications industry is unnecessary. This sort of comment makes me wonder why I even bother trying to discuss .. anything with anyone anymore.
Very impressive - it's a good thing large sheets of plastic with ridges are so expensive.
Very interesting idea.

I've just finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, and one of the characters there is what he calls an "agalmic entrepreneur". He doesn't actually start businesses himself, just has half a dozen brilliant ideas before breakfast, finds the right person to implement those ideas and gives that person the idea (and the crucially missing connections to make it happen, etc). In that novel, he has no money - lives off of favours that he can call in at any time from the numerous people he's made rich.

Now, that's obviously not very realistic, but perhaps a mix between those two ideas might bear fruits.
CherryPy is a hugely underappreciated project in the Python community.

Its HTTP implementation is top notch, its tool system is a great way to write custom modules, it has excellent WSGI support, and it's just about the fastest HTTP server in Python that takes a thread-based concurrency approach.

I was the first engineer hired on a team that built an online survey-research company. We started using twisted/nevow, but eventually moved to an in-house web framework on written on CherryPy. Lots of tools have come and gone (mostly, we've rewritten components we found lacking) but CherryPy has never let us down. We even ended up hiring a large portion of the CherryPy team.

Our experiences with it were positive enough that I'm building a startup right now on a similar CherryPy-based stack (at least partially--there's also a bit of Erlang involved for the high-concurrency stuff).

If you're considering stitching together your own Python Web framework--as many shops eventually do--I highly recommend CherryPy be used as the foundation.
I've spoken to him over email before. He comes across as a pretty good guy, unlike the perception I had of him from his writings. His article about understanding statistics should be required reading for any good programmer. It's a pity that he decided to focus his efforts elsewhere (e.g., not Ruby/Rails) about a year ago.

I've worked with people before that have his "blog" personality (for lack of a better description) but in real life. Most of the time these are really smart people, and they are difficult on others because there are a lot of stupid ideas out there. One way of ensuring you filter out the crap is to shut the door on everything. The good stuff will knock again. I had a boss that called a lot of things I suggested stupid. So when I had to fight to implement an idea, and I was adamant about it, he knew that it probably wasn't stupid, and let me go ahead. Think of it as being skeptical, assertive, and intimidating. In the end, about half of my ideas got implemented. The other half I ended up being glad were not implemented, usually about a year after the decision. He'd been correct, and made me look better by keeping me from making a mistake.

It's a lot like picking up girls at a bar. The good ones are hit on so many times that their gut instinct is to shut you down immediately if you approach them. You need to be persistent and stand your ground in order to win them over. Most guys will cower and retreat at the first sign of rejection. The ones that get a girl's number are the ones that know how to stay and do battle, so to speak.

Zed shows that he's willing to think about issues long term. Most people would simply live with and forget about what they wrote in that rant. Zed goes and makes an update to it saying that he wants to retract what he said. I think that's an admirable trait.
summarized:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=523775
No. The power (energy rate per area) is very high, but the total energy is not.
Create a social-networking BlackBerry application with open source tools
Bad form replying to myself, but one more thing worth clarifying:

All the above being said, it's only fair to acknowledge that this isn't quite apples-to-apples when you look at CherryPy vs. something like Django. CherryPy isn't really a full-stack web framework, it's an HTTP server attached to a configuration and tool system that facilitates the creation of custom web frameworks.
Develop an Ajax Chat program
Is it necessary for the agent managing the subscriptions to be the same as the agent providing you internet services? Maybe you can have a webapp which provides an easy interface to both users and website owners. Website owners provide usage info & bills, and users see all charge details in one place. Something like what credit card companies do but also managing any extra details specific to websites.