skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The disparity between rich and poor is something that society actively decides upon, and society would be well advised to take into account the ramifications of its decision. Part of that information being that the absolute value of an individual's wealth is far from the only important factor - relative values are important to. Humans judge their wealth relative to other people.

To look at it in a nice, emotive context, which society do you suppose is happier: the one where the cure for all cancers exists, but is so labour intensive that only the rich can afford it, or the society where the cure does not exist at all, and all are in the same boat? I'd caution you not to underestimate the pain of knowing that your loved one could be saved, if only you had a bit more money.

Whether someone is ugly or not is not really something that society makes an active choice about at the moment - I'm not sure it's relevant.

NB: No, I am not a commie, and I am in full favour of some income disparity as a motivator towards useful output. I just find the assertion that it doesn't matter if the rich have an ever-increasing share of the pie as long as the pie keeps growing a touch disingenuous.

edit: formatting
No one understands Facebook's API. I won an fbFund grant, and I still don't understand the API.

If you ask me, Facebook plays it a little fast and loose with their API, and it's hard-to-use and under-documented. I am pretty good at using APIs - Google Maps, Flickr, Beautiful Soup, etc. But Facebook's API has had me up at night beating my head against a wall.

Though, I haven't touched the API in a couple months, so maybe it's rapidly improved.
Right or wrong, for Twitter it's not even worth the risk or effort to test if that is true or not. Google/YouTube operates the same way: killing the account and taking the PR griping is cheaper than paying lawyers to sort it out.
"Offensive Material: Link may contian offensive content such as references to religion, abortion, 9-11, or the devil."

First of all, there is a spelling mistake. Secondly, how is religion, 9-11 or the devil offensive? You may think it's an ironic joke, but most people won't get the joke, and frankly, it's not that funny. So if I were you, I'd not try to joke on that page, but give examples that genuinely describe what could be offensive.

All the same, it's a really great service, and I think it will be big.
This article has some thing that I didnt know before, and I have a pretty high interest in the area. The 10^500 possible universes in string theory can be narrowed to those that allow eternal inflation and a baby universes can tunnel around in the multiverse landscape until it comes to a place that allows eternal inflation. The tunneling causes gravity waves, polarizing the photons of the cosmic microwave background. There are other tests too.
DSP is one domain where performance of a tiny part of the code (say 1%) is far, far more important than everything else. If you need to apply a filter to remove high frequencies, or if you need a Fourier transform, no high-level tuning or special algorithm will cut it: you need the filter or the transform, even if it's very costly. The bottleneck is real and unavoidable.

I work in data acquisition and in this domain C/C++ is king. The raw number-crunching is essential (for our applications anyway), and any bonus that can be had from SSE operations, cache locality, loop unrolling, software pipelining, etc. can have a major impact on the overall performance. Assembly is still common on DSP processors and the like (they typically provide a special instruction set). Even in C++, we tend to use the bit-twiddling and pig disgusting optimization hacks that low-level access provides :)

Some people use higher level tools such as LabView but the performance is a huge step down. It's OK for prototyping and learning.
May The 4th Be With You Happy Star Wars Day 40% off Star Wars posters TODAY ONLY
It appears, from skimming the source code, that they use "unsafePerformIO", which is Haskell's "I want to trick the compiler into thinking that this imperative code is pure" function. (It's not part of standard Haskell but I think all implementations provide it.)

You can use unsafePerformIO in your own code if you really need it--it's basically a giant loophole in the type system, so if you don't know what you're doing, you can screw yourself, but if you really need that power, it's there.

More here: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IO_inside#Dark_side_of_IO...
Google App Engine accepts Java bytecode and even supports run time loading of bytecode.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/04/many-languages-a...

So even though there are limitations (e.g., single thread), the following languages can run on App Engine through the Java back door: PHP, Clojure, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, Scheme, Beanshell, ...

Here's a wiki page with some info:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java/web/wil...

Also note that it's possible to run multiple languages against one datastore by using the built-in versioning system.
Licensing DOS to IBM instead of selling it.
Indeed. OCaml is an interesting exception, though: it's very high-level, yet still quite fast. (The trade-off, if you can call it that, is that you have to work within its type system.) It's not necessarily as fast as (or faster than) C, but even relatively naive OCaml code is often only about 50% slower.

There's often a point of diminishing returns in spending time and effort optimizing C, and OCaml can get surprisingly close with much less work.
Why Facebook Can't Become Twitter: Its Closed Nature
perhaps redirect to a google search for disney. That way, there is a slight joke, but we still get our google fix.
Userplane going out of business
Aside from that Twitter's API is very unreliable. I wouldn't recommend putting Twitter API anywhere near the center of anyone's business plan. Again the lesson is: don't trust the cloud.
Even if it is just a eBay scraping service, I thought this quote was good: "So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process."
Unleashing a Green stampede within America’s energy industries | Accruit
disney.com made me laugh :)
Being Hungarian I'm watching the story. It took years of civil movement to inform the public about the Microsoft-Government monopoly.

In January a ~120 million USD Microsoft tender was canceled, from April we have a free competition.

I think this could be a good example for other countries too.
...except that in this case, when you take full control of the memory management, you slow things down. The problem with using pointers (without using the restrict keyword) is that it can seriously impede out of order processing on modern CPUs. Now, the author has missed the existence of the restrict keyword in C99, but in the absence of that his point is good.
The Trickery in "MapReduce vs. Parallel DBs"
I fixed it, thanks. What other mistakes did you see?
As currently structured, the tax code encourages energy firms to reinvest in fossil technologies when they sell old equipment. A (relatively) simple change in the tax code could provide a one-way swinging door - fossil-to-green - that could pump a trillion dollars or more into green energy development. And it could do this without negatively impacting the budget. This would have major implications for energy companies and the tech providers serving them.

Full disclosure - I work in the tax industry. So that either makes me informed or too self-interested to be trusted... :)
I remember reading this article years ago :)
X-Ray Scans of Gaming Systems Old and New
I just love this image of Battier defending Bryant:

http://www.nba.com/media/lakers/0903mailbag_battierkobe.jpg

Getting a "hand in the face" of a shooter is rarely more literal than that. It must drive Kobe nuts (though he would never admit it).

Will be interesting to see if Battier can disrupt Kobe in the upcoming series.
Things I've learned from my startup
Why does this article sound eerily similar to xkcd.com/341 - xkcd.com/345 ?
Yes, but they do give you an entire dump of your raw Genome that you can save to your PC... soon enough you'll be able to download a free program to analyze that data :D
This post is a bit of a bait & switch.

Thanks to JRuby-Rack you can run any rack compliant application framework on Google App Engine (sinatra, merb, rails).

However, ActiveRecord (Rails modelling component) can't actually interface with the Google App Engine datastore directly.

There are tools that have been built by some guys at google to wrap the Java API, but i don't see these instructions including them.
yes the world is getting more simple than social.

i'm using delicious from the beginning, mostly for bookmarking. to get more news / for discovery today there are plenty new ways than the delicious network.

keep up guys!
"Premature optimization" is another hoary old argument that gets dragged into this debate every time it comes up. But I don't think it's valid.

C programs start up faster than HLL programs. They run faster. They consume less memory. They tend to be more responsive.

From "looking up an object by its string name" to "splitting a string on the comma character" to "running the following functions on a 10hz timer", simple operations that all programs do have less overhead in C than they do in many high level languages, because the C program isn't creating and disposing of hundreds of little objects every time it does one of those things.

Hey --- I write most of my code in Ruby. I'm not saying you should use C. But you shouldn't make up bad reasons not to use it when there are so many good reasons to cite.
Sorry, man. I never worked at Woodcraft camp. I went to upper camps during high school and that's where I worked years later. During my three summers working there, I met some great counselors, but a lot of people were just there to have fun. This gave us an advantage. After two summers of getting squashed, my kids and our staff were determined to win. And that was a lot more fun in the end, though I was receiving death threats from other people on the staff by the end of it all. That part wasn't so much fun.

The convention was that the jock-iest group of kids and counselors would win every summer. That's how it was when I was a camper and for my first two summers working there. Turning that on its head, if only for one summer, was one of my proudest moments.
The standard approach I heard was to code in a very high level language (like python) to get the algorithms right, then rewrite in C for performance. Python then becomes a sort drawing board as part of the design stage, instead of "coding".
Ask HN: What to do with a worthless law degree?
Hi all-

Next year I'll be finishing up law school at one of those ivy league places. I was a CS undergrad and would like to get back into the startup scene. Is there any work for hackers-cum-lawyers? Thanks in advance.
is it just me or is the 'i'm at work' functionality redundant? if you didn't wan't to see NSFW content, you woudln't have clicked on the 'isnsfw' link. What if you built in the category into the link, like http://isnsfw/xxx/KJ89F
No, it's not an entire dump. 23andMe only decode certain bits of your DNA which are known to be interesting - they call this "genotyping" as opposed to "sequencing", which is decoding the entire genome.
There is at least one piece of solid gold in this article:

"Ask to speak to the assignment editor when calling TV stations."

That alone will save you days and days of cold-calling failure.
Lua's great for this, too (and rewriting just the few hotspots is usually enough, Lua's pretty fast). They designed it to be embedded in C from day one, so it's quite easy.
Yes, I completely agree that there are many bad ideas (or even some whose quality cannot even be measured). But that is different from saying they are irrelevant.

I have seen many bad ideas, but I have also seen very smart, hard-working people stuck on a problem for a few months, while they really needed a new idea to move forward.

Also, if a good idea saves you a month of hard work, it is worth exactly as much as the month of hard work, isn't it?

In academia, smart, hardworking people are a dime a dozen, and a huge success is usually at the end of a string of many good ideas. I don't know mch about building a company, but I doubt it is very different.
> Seriously, Wikipedia?

Yeah, that's a modern Wikipedia for you. Hardly a surprise, really.

The only thing that's strictly notable according to their policies is a Pokemon. With a list of Starwars planets coming next. I used to contribute a lot for more than two years, but then left after a wave of morons overtook reasonable editors and started purging articles left and right just for the sake of complying with the Policies. I have stopped donating too. /rant
so why do they charge $199 per month for core2duo with 2 gb ram and 250 gb sata? i really dont get it. server prices are this low but cost for dedicated servers are very high.

lsc, can you say a bit more about your # of VPSs per box, average cpu usage by user and disk contention. in your system if there is available extra cpu and one user wants that he cant, can he? your prices seem to be too good to be true comparing to others. is there any drawback?
The legal industry is fat and ripe for disruption; with CS and legal knowledge you could be doing the disrupting. See Agree2 as an example. What is a startup topic that non-lawyers are afraid to touch?
EU urges Internet governance revamp
Maybe controversial instead of offensive.
Right. C is a power tool. You can use it to create something blindingly fast. You can also use it to create something dog slow. I've seen Smalltalk programs outperform C programs. I know of an instance where a coworker benchmarked a C implementation of a block cipher vs. a Smalltalk implementation, and the Smalltalk ran 3% faster. Why? Naive manual memory management in the C implementation.
Poorly sourced article tagged for POV bias is better than no article. Especially considering how much effort it takes to resurrect the article once it's deleted.
Tokyo is a KV store, but it's not a distributed KV store, so saying it is an alternative to Amazon Dynamo is misleading.
This post seems to assume that Facebook wants to be more like Twitter, without bothering to support that. Let's take a look:

- Facebook likely has 20-30x the number of users that Twitter does, despite only being a couple years older.

- Facebook brings in hundreds of millions in revenue; Twitter brings in zero.

- Facebook is composed of real people, many of which have rich and deep connections in real life. A comparatively large percentage of the users on Twitter are corporations, marketers, and spammers.

- Facebook has tens of thousands of applications on its platform; Twitter has hundreds.

- Facebook has raised hundreds of millions on valuations in the billions; Twitter has raised tens of millions on valuations in the hundreds of millions.

- Facebook has twice the retention rate that Twitter does.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of both services, but this post is a clear example of being blinded by the latest hype (and yes, I'm aware that Facebook is high on hype as well).
Mercurial is a great example of this approach. Overall, Mercurial is comparable to Git. (Git does maintain an edge in speed, but they are still competitive.) Most of it is written in Python, though.
Another classic HLL vs. C argument: the anecdotal slow C program. Clearly, of these, there are many great examples. Unfortunately, it's a crappy argument, because there are also a zillion incredibly slow HLL programs.
The Wolfram Alpha- can it change the Internet forever?
sorry , there is content here, but had to mod you down because of that last word. I actually have NEVER seen that word here in all my reading, to the point where i took it for granted. Please keep that word off HN. Thanks.
Next week's article:

How Facebook Can Become Twitter: Open up

I mean come on, it would be a weekend project to allow public posts and "follow" instead of just "add as friend".

The real interesting part is if Facebook/Twitter can actually make money.
My goof, sorry. [EDIT: I thought I had mistyped the title, but I just checked his site to see if he'd posted anything new, and found I had got it right the first time]
I don't know if the term "netbook" even applies to that. Link?

Even if you got VGA, there is readability and control of the few inches (mouse contra big fingers which needs big buttons and backtracking because there will be errors).

Again: It is a different world, which needs either a new paradigm for use (iPhone) -- or new interface mechanisms.

I'd love a good chording keyboard and an EyeTap. Sigh, maybe in five years.

Nice chatting, but I have to finish another page of code today... :-)
Java: 1 minute 20 seconds.

About a year later, testing a new JIT for Java, the Java time was down to 0.7 seconds

I've been surprised at the speed of Java recently. I wonder how much improvement is left in dynamic compilation.

The HP project Dynamo was an experimental JIT compiler where the bytecode format and the machine code format were of the same type; the system turned HPA-8000 machine code into HPA-8000 machine code. Counterintuitively, this resulted in speed ups, in some cases of 30% since doing this permitted optimisations at the machine code level. For example inlining code for better cache usage and optimizations of calls to dynamic libraries and many other run-time optimizations which conventional compilers are not able to attempt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation
It still reads "Basic Paxos handles a single failure; it can be extended to handle multiple untrustworthy nodes (the Byzantine generals problem)." which is incorrect.

The correct statement is "Paxos handles the failure of a minority of nodes" or "Paxos can make progress if a majority of nodes is alive and connected". Paxos does not deal with nodes that do not follow the protocol (ie. lie, have been hacked, etc, this is what 'byzantine' means). Paxos only deals with non-byzantine failure.
Small C programs start up faster than HLL programs. Small C programs run faster.

When they get bigger, they quickly bloat up to compensate for how hard C makes it to write large-scale software. Oh, and it takes a lot longer to modify those C programs, for the same reasons.

C's malloc() time is also a lot slower than GC'd languages. For them, a memory allocation isn't much more than a subtraction.
Great, so Twitter is different from Facebook because Facebook is "closed".

I don't see an argument re: which is more desirable (to the common user) though, an open system or a closed one. Without that argument, this article is mostly useless and uninteresting.
There has been quite a few reports on this (even a patent?). But can this be legal? Wouldnt this be similar to car manufacturers outlawing fixing your own cd/mp3/casette players in your cars?
I'm not MS-hating. I tend to agree with the article that very few companies do something completely new, including MS and Google.

MS did a brilliant job marketing. Regardless of whether you agree with their tactics, they executed on them in an amazing way.

Google had a really good technology that by itself would have amounted to nothing. However, they executed very well on the business side. Now people say "Alta-who? Isn't Vista from Microsoft?"

The point is that, as technologists, we get really wrapped up in the cool technology we are building, but that is a minuscule part of making a successful business. I've even been involved in a startup where it was actually detrimental, because everybody patted themselves on the back so often, they forgot they needed customers.
Rewrite only those pieces that are consuming a lot of time or memory, leave the rest in Python, which is particularly good at integration with C/C++. Many programs are a lot of setup, error handling, and edge cases where performance is not an issue. but LOC is.
"Premature optimization" is just another way of saying "use the right tool for the job." Look at Mercurial. It's not quite as fast as Git, but it's just fine for its purpose. Most of it is written in Python, with some speed critical parts written in C. This strikes me as using the right tool for the right job at the right time. Write most of the app in something like Python. This makes it easier to write concise, understandable code that reads like pseudocode in a short time. When you have the system running correctly and get it factored in a way you find nice, then rewrite the speed-critical parts of it in C.

Having a running model of your system to profile is one of the best tools you can have for optimization.
Ask YC: Sites similar to News.YC
I know it's been asked before, but I spent 30 minutes using Google to search the YC archives and the keywords are just too abundant and the first 20 pages yielded no results.

I'm looking for sites similar to news.ycombinator.com -- Just quick blurbs about what's new and happening in the nerdosphere.

On any given day about 10 items interest me, so I'm looking for other sources for more data.

Anyone?
How did T-Mobile do it without Google doing it for them?
I don't know. It just seems like it would be a natural candidate if the claims about the size and fault-tolerance of the kernel are true (as opposed to reinventing the wheel and writing everything from scratch).
Even though I'm not much a Python hacker I think I will definitely attend this event. Anyone other HN people going to be there?
GCC C vs Intel Fortran : http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all...

Intel C vs Intel Fortran : http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...

(I'm not even going to link to the GCC Fortran benchmarks. They're embarrassing.)

C is no slower than Fortran on any of those benchmarks, and on some it cleans Fortran's clock. The aliasing issue is the only thing Fortran has going in its favor, but clearly its not ubiquitous. The n-body benchmark, for instance, is fairly typical numerical code. You might even think, since it's simultaneously reading and writing through multiple pointers of the same type, that aliasing is an issue, but its not. And in the rare case that it becomes an issue, there's compiler hints (e.g. C99 restrict) for that.

Picking Fortran over C solely because of aliasing worries is premature optimization of the worst kind.
A Video Tour of McDonald's Mechanized Meat Factories
Lookahead (B-frames) is optional in most codecs already. OnLive can be viewed as a form of one-way videoconferencing, which is a solved problem. It's merely expensive.
MySpace had 20-30x the number of users that Facebook did not so long ago.
Of course I read it. I still think none of this is even remotely insulting. PHD doesnt mean your good, MS dont spawn brilliant ideas, and ideas are pretty much nothing, as paul graham seems to agree to.
RPX in SF is looking for hackers to automate their patent trolling business. A lawyer-hacker would probably be even more valuable. If you're into evil, might as well go all out. No half steppin'.

I worked on infirmation.com back in the day and the lawyer who started it sold it for tens of millions of dollars. Starting a startup that preys on the insecurities of other lawyers (does someone at Dewey, Cheatem and Howe make more money than me?) seems like a good bet.
Website Overhaul Requirements
"Also, if a good idea saves you a month of hard work, it is
worth exactly as much as the month of hard work, isn't it?"

Still, ideas are nothing, any can have an idea, my idea is to set up a super cheap supermarket and become rich, the idea is worthless, it's all about the execution. Ideas are like talk, talk is cheap.

Even in academia, an idea is nothing if you can't execute it and produce good results. In terms of importance I would say that idea is worth 20% and execution is worth 80%.
Removed the reference to Byzantine generals and used your language for basic Paxos; clarified Tokyo Cabinet.

Thanks, let me know if there are other issues.