skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 until June. Overcoming customers' performance fears was a major impediment in the early years. Every fraction of a percent we gave up relative to native ruled out whole classes of applications. Nothing other than C would have been conceivable. Even C++ would have been wildly inappropriate, as it is for most kernels, because so much invisible code can hide behind a close-brace.

The mapping from source to machine representation in C is relatively trivial, which is the source of all C's ups and downs. If you ever plan to count microseconds, cache misses, TLB misses, mispredicted branches, etc., you had better start with a toolchain whose machine-level output is grokable from the source.
There are many elements of getting a 6 figure developer job. The things you mentioned are important, but answering interview questions are important as well. If you can't answer interview questions, you can start up (nothing wrong with that), but you won't be able to land jobs.
A user's perspective: http://yardley.ca/2009/05/04/when-blockers-block-the-blocker...

"Finally, NoScript is still blocking Ghostery through a Ghostery-specific CSS rule. This is especially vile, since Ghostery doesn’t affect NoScript’s revenue model in the slightest - it’s just the tool I use to be informed about the analytics and advertising technologies in use from site to site. The site owners’ claim that he doesn’t like the look of the CSS overlay is completely unacceptable - my browser, my computer, my ability to view the content in the manner of my choosing."
Love the video!

But a small nitpick about the headline: While entrepreneurialism is a word, entrepreneurship or entrepreneurism is almost always more effective for its brevity.
Come work for Blue Frog Gaming. (well, close to 6 figs, and def there once we IPO).
It's a strategy that probably also works brilliantly for helping the kids you coach have a lot more fun than they'd have if they got beaten soundly in every game they played.
EC2 kicked my ass when they started their public beta. that's right, something like $70 a month for 1.7GiB was cheaper than I was. I upgraded to new hardware and lowered prices.

Under Xen if there is available CPU, any user can burst to it. I use the credit scheduler, which means you spend scheduler credits to get that CPU. You gain scheduler credits by not using as much CPU. Your weight determines how fast your credits accumulate, so a domain with twice as much weight, assuming contention, gets twice as much cpu as another domain. I weight my domains based on the amount of ram they have, so a 64Mb domain has 1/4th the weight of a 256MiB domain.

The ceiling on how much CPU you can use when nobody else wants it is set by the number of vcpus you have. I give you one, and in this example, slicehost gives you 4. this is in an effort to make the jokers who run mprime all day (I'm looking at you) from dragging down the service for everyone else. And they don't. I see some users who regularly use as much cpu as they are allowed, and it doesn't cause problems for my more restraned users.

my standard system has 32GiB ram and 2 quad-core 1.9Ghz opterons. (I have one with 64GiB and 2 2.1Ghz shanghais, but most of that ram is being used as cache for my experimental ZFS domain, so it shouldn't have more contention than the 32GiB servers)

As for the number of domains, depends on how many users sign up for what plan. 62 domains are on the system that the user who ran this test is on.
Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives
Opening in SF hacker house
Anyone know if Vimagi got acquired by Facebook, or did Yariv just create a Vimagi facebook app?
The best way to find out what skills you need for the kind of job you want is to look at job descriptions. Some of them have a lot of fluff, but the best ones are very detailed and the requirements are truly what they want you to be able to do.
VentureHacks is a great resource for this. http://venturehacks.com/articles/plans-ndas-traction
The hacker house is home to 3 hackers (including one YC startup) and would love to get a roommate from the HN community. Email sf-house _at_ googlegroups.com or sam at odio d0t cøm to schedule a time.
An alternative to Amazon Cloud (CDN, S3 and EC2)
The message is kind of insipid, but the affecting music and connection to kid-spiration certainly made my girlfriend tear up. So there's that. :)
Scitable brings peer-reviewed credibility to the Wikipedia age
Just looked it up... looks like you're right. The whole blog post is nonsense.
Erlang Factory 2009 (Erlang Con) writeup
as for dedicated servers, the big question in my mind is "why don't they give you more ram?" there's no reason to run a single socket with less than 8GiB and a dual socket with less than 32GiB (well, not no reason, but in the general case. Ram speeds up disk, usually, which is horribly slow, even if you buy expensive disk.)

I've found an interesting model for renting servers; I charge a kinda hefty setup fee (like $500 for a core2quad with 2 disk and 8GiB ram. within a couple hundred of the parts cost) but then charge $70/month ongoing. (for one of my 8 core 32GB ram systems, with some disks thrown in, it was $1200 up front and $175/month)

It does lock the customer in, which is not providing value, but on the other hand, if they stay for a while, it's much cheaper than market rates, and I'm ok with it because the customer has covered most of my capital outlay.

I think the thing is that most of us small operators are leery of capital outlays that take many months to repay, and I think the large operators actually pay more for the hardware.

No, I'm serious. every large company I've worked at bought pre-built servers from HP or Dell or whatever, and they always ended up paying a large premium over what I would pay buying parts (when they are on sale) for servers that did the same thing. I think part of it was that salesmen are professionals, and part of it was that in a large corporation, the guy making the buy decision, well, it's not his money. He's more concerned with making a decision that looks right than a decision that is right.

On the other hand after making an especially bad mistake I once said "Hey, that was my Porsche."
Cuz what we all need is another way to waste companies' time and resources by browsing porn. It's our right after all, and how dare those prudes frown on our proud and righteous lifestyle. No one's getting hurt are they? After all, beautiful people need some way to make money too, am I right or am I right?
Yes, because if Apple decides to do something, the rest of us should pack up our compilers and go home.
Download Windows 7 RC now
Download Windows 7 RC now
Slashdot has been useless for at least the last 2 years. They even removed the link to the "developers" section from their category list on the front page, though "idle" and "games" remain.

Never heard of dzone.
I'd like to see the c code to support this, it's very hard to imagine anything you could do this wrong in something like a block cipher that would ever make it as slow as smalltalk. I'm sorry, I just don't buy this...
Hackers Break Into Virginia Prescriptions Database, Demand Ransom
Anyone here use Sugar as their primary desktop-environment?

I don't know much about Oberon other than this article and it was founded at the school he graduated from, but Sugar seems like the most modern and feasible alternative to a GUI akin to something like this.

Oberon V4 appears to be orphaned, there are almost no changes since 2000. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_operating_system
An update on the Palo Alto house: All of the original residents (including myself) have moved out. However there are 8 new coders (mostly YC S09 I think) moving in for the summer. There's probably going to be availability in the fall if anyone's interested. Email Jared Tame to organize: jmtame at google's email service.

Also: If anyone wants to start a HH in their local city send me an email: my first name @odio.com.
A New Marriage of Brain and Computer
"but answering interview questions are important as well"
Agreed - it's very important to interview well.

answering crappy and stupid interview questions : Disagree strongly.

Anyone asking these idiotic questions 'why are manhole covers round?' is more likely trying to prove to themselves how clever they are at asking tricky questions than finding the candidate with the right fit and skills.
Especially amusing since he wrote in January( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001206.html):

"If you're a moderator or administrator it is especially negligent to have such an easily guessed password."

Actually, I find just the apparent fact that he uses a 3rd party openid provider (whichever one it is) for his StackOverflow admin account disturbing. The OpenID provider has the credentials - they can therefore log in as him any time they like. Only their integrity / reputation prevents them from doing that. I think it's fine for individuals using the system to trust a 3rd party like that but I don't think it's fine for someone with admin powers to do so.

* Ignore this whole comment if he runs his own OpenID provider :-)
Windows has a debugging interface? toolhelp, drwatson and the debugging "api" are a joke. Everyone does debugging by circumventing the OS, hooking system calls and patching "protected" memory. Windows debugging is a messy witch-craft, so much so that everyone stood in awe, helpless and hapless when Rustock.C struck; a fine piece of malicious engineering that becomes part of the OS, a rootkit's rootkit that's gotten rid off only by disk formatting and a fresh install :-)
Find Homes For Sale by Owner
This is a smart response. Some addons have millions of users. That's a lot of users, and there should be a better way to get some compensation.
Well put :)

Do keep all of us posted on what you're doing next!
It's "follow your bliss" not "follow the sparkles". It's not about avoiding sacrifice -- Americans especially believe that suffering can be avoided and we tend to live our lives on a junk food high -- but finding what makes you happy in the long-term and generally focusing on that. You will sacrifice and suffer a lot in your life, no matter what you do. Running away from it is not the solution. The bliss he's talking about, if you can find it, winds its way like a ribbon through the average day.
I really love hearing advice from people who just "took the risk" and quit their job. It's one thing to take a risk, but what I want to know is how they could actually DO it and still, you know, pay the mortgage and pay for food and such.

Is it just that they accumulate massive savings for just this purpose, or what?
Integrating Xcode and Vim
You want a massively upsized CS department and an absence of hard-and-fast rules enforced evenhandedly throughout the CS reps. This is "not a combo".

As it stands, it's anyones guess what is and what is not allowed.

See, right now, everyone knows what is not allowed: 650 accounts? Not allowed. Its written right in the TOS.

With the massively increased CS department making individual decisions in an arbitrary fashion, it would be like "650 accounts? Not allowed, unless you're really a cool tech demo and drew Mary out of the pool, because she's a softie."
Hmmm...this sounds eerily similar to all the people who predicted that the Kindle would be a failure because of the iPhone's existence.

Even if Apple releases a kickass tablet, I still want a Kindle. I hate reading books on an LCD screen and having to worry about battery life. I want a simple, thin device that doesn't strain my eyes that I can leave in my bag and not worry about. Oh, and I can buy and download books instantly without worrying about wifi. Sold.
It's a little hard to tell from those screenshots,but it looks like Oberon's text-based interface could have been influenced by the Xerox PARC Cedar environment or possibly the XDE/Tajo environment that Xerox used internally to develop the Xerox Star. Cedar would be the more likely guess because Wirth spent time at PARC.

Modula 2 was influenced by the Mesa language developed at PARC and used to develop the Star and various PARC projects.
I don't know that this argument is necessarily valid. I own an iPhone but I don't own a Kindle, and haven't used one for more than a couple of minutes, but a lot of people I've talked to who own both swear by the Kindle's e-Ink screen. From what I hear, for long periods of reading, and for outdoor reading, the Kindle beats the iPhone (and because of things like screen and battery, not form factor).

Certainly, an Apple tablet could do a lot more than a large Kindle, but it won't necessarily "render it moot." The Kindle might still provide a better experience for the one function is it meant to: reading large quantities of text... and if there is a market for for a device that just does that (and there seems to be judging from the Kindle's early success so far), then it will likely continue to do well.
Or at least, it was. Shows an error page now. Seems Microsoft once again couldn't handle the load.
Why is it so hard to prosecute these people? At some point, the bots are going to have to phone home, and that's got to be discernible. I mean, just purposefully infect a machine, feed it some CC numbers and keep an eye on it. What's the problem?
Is this a joke, or did he actually mess with yet another add on? If this is true, and wasn't fixed in the latest version, it seems like a death knell for No Script. The Adblock business was bad enough, but apologizing for one and doing nothing about the other is wrong. He obviously knows that messing with a users addons pisses them off, and has ignored that.

However, that's only if this isn't just a joke in poor taste.
I am definitely Interested.
Books are probably not "hip" enough for Apple to do
Yeah, I don't trust him. I'm afraid it's going to happen.
Incoming messages in India does not cost anything to the recipient, and smsgupshup is mainly a one to many broadcast system.
It's simply a bad argument.

Task: read a book. Choice 1: miniature computer, 5 hours battery. Choice 2: a book with digital annotation and search, 20+ hours battery... is there a choice?

Oh and did I mention the task is to read a book?

Sure, there are people who are fine with a glowing, back-lit reading device that lets you check email simultaneously. But, the mobile phone replaced the tethered phone. The computer did not replace the book. ebook devices are what will replace them. Where the line is blurred, does not warrant a discussion of "don't mean squat if..." at least not in the next 10 years or so.
A followup to "I want to believe in  (in Lisp vs. C performance)", and a challenge ...
I see no reason to spend a lot of time learning Common Lisp at this point. The Clojure community is helpful, because everyone is so excited to have a Lisp they can really use. Stuart Halloway's book is a good enough introduction to Lisp concepts that one could go on to the more academic books to learn more. The book consistently takes pains to show idiomatic Clojure--a good first step away from the Java/C/C++ mindset. The core syntax of Clojure has been stable for several months now, and the implementation itself has been stable for much longer.

Learning Scheme just to read SICP (for instance) isn't necessary either. Since Clojure is a Lisp-1, it works well for the exercises in a Scheme-based book.
There's something that bothers me about Clojure, and anything else that runs on top of the jvm and encourages heavy use of java libraries. It's similar to the thoughtful post in the "It's about the Libraries" thread regarding Clojure not being a completely coherent system because it is not a Lisp system. Same could be said for Scala.

For one, if the libraries are what's important, then just keep on with java. For another, so what if we get to use all these features, like coherent concurrency and stm? It seems to me that the use of one shitball java library could negate any value that Clojure brings to the table. So is it really the case that while java library interop is fully realized with Clojure, and this is a major selling point, for mission critical software we should not use java libraries that haven't been thoroughly scrutinized? I believe it is the case that there are libraries that are acceptable for use with more java, but their use will be discouraged if Clojure is thrown into the mix. Clojure just hasn't been around long enough to have to deal with these issues yet.

In a similar vein, this is something that has always bothered me about Ada. Why even have a version of Spark Ada that runs on windows, or any other OS that itself is not written in Spark Ada?

I wonder if Wirth was at all driven by this issue, because he always seemed to include a machine as part of the language he was developing at the time.

So is it the case that any advances to Lisp like Clojure require that we just accept these less coherent systems just to get some work done, even though it really would be preferable to have all the libraries you need on something like a Genera with concurrency and stm realized, even though we don't want to admit it? I'd like somebody to set me right on this point.
There is a good collection of free material here on Boyd and maneuver warfare at http://www.d-n-i.net/dni/strategy-and-force-employment/boyd-...

A good one page business summary is at http://ceo-notes.us/boydcycles2.htm

For some background on the Osinga book see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/5555.html and the thesis at http://chicagoboyz.net/blogfiles/OsingaBoydThesis.pdf that was revised into the book.

Boyd didn't invent these concepts--which were certainly part of the principles of blitzkrieg warfare used by the Germans in WW2 and by many others--but he codified them.
Well, that didn't last long. They pulled the download page.
First, I think you'd have a hard time finding anything good to read if you only stuck with writers who sound wrong when they're wrong. Second, Stein's anti-evolution thing is a religious belief and you'd be wise to forgive someone's apparently irrational thinking in that area. Religion is special.

(But anyway I'm fine with ad hominem judgments. They're useful.)
The truth about electrosensitivity
"The developers behind the two extensions turned the browser into a battleground as their conflict escalated."

"Maone found new ways to work around the filters, but Ares2 consistently retaliated by adding increasingly draconian rules to the filter list."

"Eventually, Ares2 added rules that fundamentally broke the NoScript website. Maone lost patience and decided to use his own extension to fight back."

I am sympathetic to the notion that there are two sides to any argument, and Adblock is certainly an issue for many websites. However, framing this like a "controversial altercation" between two loose cannons does not do justice to the facts.
Unemployment Initial Claims Peak Predicts Recession End
Good point. However, using a guide such as Programming Clojure from the Pragmatic Bookshelf is a pretty quick way to try out some of the 'Lispy' concepts. I'm literally beginning the book so cannot comment further but it seems an accessible way to begin.
Apple's Interest In Gaming Isn't Casual
Poll: Do you use Adblock Plus?
Reading all this about the Adblock/NoScript saga has made me curious. Mozilla shows only 7 million active users (of perhaps 250 million Firefox users), but I bet they skew very heavily toward the "power user" crowd.
Windows 7 RC now available for download
-- Wired: By contrast, e-book readers are good at basically one thing: Storing and displaying monochrome text and simple graphics.

E-ink is the best technology just for that purpose and if I'm going to buy a Book Reader I want it to be perfect for reading books, not a half-assed compromise for surfing the web and spamming useless Twitter updates to all my friends.

-- Make no mistake: There are many more people who would be interested in a general-purpose tablet than in an e-book reader.

The "many more people" are called tech nerds and their holy grail has already been realized as the open-source CrunchPad, which will be far cheaper than any mega-sized iPhone.

The only thing I'll be doing in response to this Apple rumor is day trading AAPL options.
James beard awards 2009 winner
Link Building Service
I will not argue the merits of CL since I would be biased, but Scheme? Clojure is no scheme. It can barely do tail recursion cleanly without resorting to a keyword (recur?)

Scheme, along with Mozart/OZ are the perfect candidates for delivering programming skills without platform obstruction. Admittedly, it would take an specific implementation Scheme, a large and feature-rich one, to properly introduce someone to the real powers of Lisp.

Go thorough a series of complete Lisp systems, say MIT Scheme and CMUCL, and see what a complete Lisp system looks like.
And notably, Mercurial written in python is much faster than Subversion written in C.
You can disagree -- fine -- but we've been using entreprneurship, entrepreneurism, and entrepreneurialism to say the same thing (i.e., the act of being an entrepreneur). At least two of the previous three cases are fine. The third misses the mark because it describes "the act of identifying with those who do things an entrepreneur would do." It's muddy (not to mention inaccurate).

I just think it makes sense to be clear on a board where as many as half the folks identify with that cohort.
What's insane about it? It's brilliant!
Say no to Bangalore, yes to Buffalo: Obama
One unreleased product is doomed because another hypothetical unreleased product might be coming? Amazon should just pack it in, they don't have a single product in their entire warehouse that can compete against the hypothetical products of six months from now.
> Google needs competition in the search space, and only Microsoft can compete on that scale.

Jeeze, Arrington is such an idiot. Google were nothing when they took their position as kings of search.
The thing I find laughable is that they're depicting it like a giant iPhone. From what I remember HP had a fully touch-screen tablet, however it seemed to get removed for a return to a full-function tablet (at least from what I've seen in Canada and the UK). So I highly doubt Apple would enter this market, again like depicted.

Apple has a strong history of entering existing markets and reinventing it. The brought considerable style to desktops, they brought sleekness to laptops and they turned an mp3 player from an exercise/geek accessory to a fully fledged consumer product and they're doing the same with touch-screen phones.

Apple has never been the first into the market. It waits, looks and acts. Unless they have some truly amazing idea for a touch-screen-only tablet, they won't touch the market with one, because they all seem to have flopped (or ended up getting shipped with a docking station with a keyboard that could collapse to the body of the tablet: something Apple would never do, after the whole iPod nano thing in Europe of having to ship with a case, I doubt they want the embarrassment again). Honestly, I can see Apple shipping a fully functional tablet, however it will be running OS X and not the iPhone port.

Honestly, if I saw something like their mock-up it would be instantly rejected by me. I wouldn't, nor couldn't touch the thing. The iPhone is cool, making a foot wide iPhone is not cool.