skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, no. In fact, for services which are purely free, complaining is really the only way to push for a change.

But it does mean that if you're complaining about something very far outside the core of the product, you're a lot less likely to be taken seriously by either the provider or bystanders, and rightfully so. And if it's a freemium service, you shouldn't be surprised that complaints from paying customers warrant more attention than free users.
I ran a few preliminary EC2 disk benchmarks in September:
http://solutious.com/blog/2008/09/23/ec2-disk-performance-li...

The Solaris performance was really poor compared to Linux. I emailed Sun and initially they were really receptive but never explained what was happening. I'm hoping to re-run the tests again soon to see if the latest OpenSolaris (2008-11) has improved.
Speaking only for myself as a US citizen, I'm proud of the fact that the US has led the world in per capita income the last few decades. For a country our size to consistently be number 1 or near the top (depending on who's doing the analysis) is pretty amazing. I think there's room in the world for a country with an ethic that favors aggregate production. Why does everyone have to be the same?

People are free to move to a country with a value system that's more closely aligned with their own, e.g., one that seeks to flatten wealth disparities. But that's not what people want, it seems. A lot of people feel a strong impulse to convince others that their value system is the best.
"these people prey on organs from the recently deceased."

They're trying to save lives. Make no mistake, people's lives are jeopardized every time someone decides that the integrity of a corpse is more important.

Edit to add: the description of medical professionals as "preying" on the dead is an odd one. One cannot prey on dead bodies, which have no thoughts or feelings. The only problem with what they do is the effect on the feelings of the living (e.g. yourself) but as I indicated, saving lives is more important. Sorry.
The new Kindle can read PDF files. Just like the iPod did for songs, suddenly you can have any book for free, if you're willing infringe copyright. That's a big selling point in the student market (there are a number of textbook-dedicated torrent sites). Imagine, $500 for a semester's worth of books, or $500 for a kindle and copy the books from your friend.
This is a fundamental practice of quality management. In the 'Total Quality Management' approach (inspired by Deming's work) the idea is called Kansei and it essentially means: watching how the user users the product will lead to improvements in the product. We see how this has worked well for Agile and Scrum, methodologies in which customer collaboration and feedback are frequent.

The four main principles of the TQM idea are:

Kaizen: Continuous Process Improvement

Atarimae Hinshitsu: things should work as they are supposed to

Kansei: understanding how the user uses the product will lead to improvements in the product

Miryokuteki Hinshitsu: things should have an aesthetic quality, be pleasant
wow. I never thought a comment of mine would be tokenized.

But, I guess your parsing was spot on

...
This sounds like it had less to do with Java and more to do with a large number of short-lived allocations in your design. A garbage collector can be abused in any language that has one.
The kindle is in a strange position now.

The more features they add (like native PDF) the more people will clamor to make it more input friendly (like the talk of a wacom-esque interface below).

Here's hoping Amazon knows where to draw the line and it just remains a damn good way to read text.
It's a pretty useless metric. How many lines of code did the people who invented quicksort (pick great algo of your choice) write in their first implementation? It's certainly important to have some minimum # so you can say you know what writing software is like, but imho judging by counting lines of code is roughly equivalent to judging mathematicians by # of lines in their proofs... that is to say, totally ridiculous.
Love it!

Can we add this as a subset of an existing blog? So the readers can meet and talk on the P2 subsection while the main blog content still exists.
if something is not right, does it matter what the tone is? Why there is always such a defense to twitter?
Amazon.com: How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday
Personally, I enjoy working with PHP, but only because I work with a platform/framework on top of it. I would likely steer clear otherwise.

While PHP by itself can be a challenge to work with, various frameworks and platforms abstract those idiosyncrasies while providing a significant increase in out of the box features and functionality.

For instance, NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com) is one such platform. Others such as Yii and CodeIgniter, while not as robust in certain respects, do a good job of this too.

(Full-disclosure: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH)
What GitHub's Punch Cards Say
I'd spend ~$500 a semester on books while in college. If ebooks are cheaper (as they should be) by, say 50%, I'd save the money in a year.
The Kindle does support limited annotation — highlighting, bookmarks, and text notes.
Discovered in 1992, the enormous Mimivirus blurs the line between the living and the dead.
Yep: http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/nell/photo...

Every orientation you could want, even left-handed!
Github founder on how to become a famous^Wgood Rails developer
we use slicehost. amazing service.
How fast are page turns for the big Kindle? (Checked amazon.com but didn't find that information.)
I'm getting really tired of the Techcrunch and Twitter love affair.
Twitter ditches TinyURL for bit.ly
dont get me wrong: im not defending Twitter (it bugs the crap out of me sometime).

I just heartily dislike whiners (having experienced being whined at over a service). Fine it doesnt work, fine it's a problem: but if you've raised it with me dont remind me every 10s and dont posts a million blog posts lambasting me for not fixing it instantly. If it's not fixed next week tell me again, if it's still broken in a month THEN have a moan. But if you whine the second it breaks I wont bother fixing it till you ask nicely :)
Coming from a Java background into a startup that was built using PHP, it's been my experience that PHP is difficult to scale. This is for two reasons:

1) PHP isn't long-lived. Every time a request comes in Apache launches the PHP processor/interpreter and runs through the entire script. This means you don't get a heap that you can use to cache things[0], you don't get the benefit of JIT compilation, and you don't get the benefit of pre-compilation[1].

2) PHP development always seems to be tied tightly to a database. At some point an extremely high-traffic app will need to scale beyond what a DB (even a sharded DB) can support. To do this you have to think in terms of asynchronous processing, out-of-process updates, aggressive caching, and more.

The second point isn't really an issue of PHP, but more an issue of the PHP ecosystem - however, it affects the way I perceive the language itself.

Places that use PHP for high traffic sites seem to use it to build the presentation layer, which seems to work for them, but the majority of the work is being done by back-ends written in some other language.

[0] Yes, you can use memcache, but it still means, at the very least, a cross-process hop and most likely a cross-network hop.

[1] Compiling to bytecode (for Java) is still better than no compilation. Also, you only take the hit of starting the JVM once, not on every request.
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimivirus#Implications_for_defi...
Balcony music
Here's the thing: I got a Masters in Software engineering 10 years after getting a BSEE. I studied all the interesting topics in software development I could find in the 10 years before going back to school. During my masters coursework, however, I was exposed to a bunch of things I had absolutely no interest in or knowledge of and I was blown away by how little I knew about the field in general as opposed to my little slice of it.

The problem with most self-taught people is that the knowledge is deep, but narrow. To be an excellent, innovative, developer you need breadth in order to be able to consider alternate approaches to a problem, but with sufficient depth in certain key areas to be able to do analysis when necessary.

College provides in 4 years what could otherwise take decades of "on the job" learning.
Oh we're all well aware that transparency is a joke in the Chinese financial system. Let's frame it this way. Remember Jefferson's argument that banks are scarier than armies? Imagine if China actually HAD a working, efficient banking system.
At least a few years ago, when I did my undergrad, you didn't actually have to pay the fees if you were from a low income background though. Couple that with a student loan you don't have to pay off until you're earning, and it's not quite as evil as it sounds.
What I find fascinating in this short story is the concept of THE computer. That was the vision of the computer back only two or three decades ago (and I'm old enough to remember). Everyone has a terminal into the main computer, instead of the myriad of personal computers (handhelds, laptops, etc) that we actually have.

The concept of a major computer site taking up a huge amount of space might be superficially coming true with all the data centers we're building, and terminals are superficially like accessing the cloud instead of doing the computation locally, the concept of a single, massive entity is not really being pursued. We understand the limitations. We don't have the technology or even a theory behind how we would program one massive program, utilizing the zillions of little processors, as a single entity. We can't get multi-threading right even for comparatively trivial programs (compared to a Multivac, I mean) that do no AI.
Likewise Apple.
Let's Put This Meme to Rest: Global Warming ≠ Al Gore
I'm so tired of the netbook/iPhone comparison. It's apples and oranges. An ebook reader is a dedicated reading device. A netbook is a multi-function computer that could also be used for reading, but it lacks the ergonomics of an ebook reader and a screen specifically designed to eliminate the eye strain associated with computer screens.

Ebook readers and netbooks serve completely different purposes. You wouldn't want to buy a netbook for the specific purpose of reading ebooks any more than you'd want to buy a pair of rollerskates for transportation. Sure, they'd get the job done, but not nearly as well as a bicycle or car in most situations.
yeap.makes sense. i agree.
It would seem to me that "creating jobs" and "generating wealth" would mean that you aren't a parasite, and barring further evidence, that you're not an "exploiter" either.

Unless you think it's simply impossible to have a non-exploitative employer relationship, in which case all I can say is that it's great that you don't believe in the concept of an "economy" but personally I prefer it to the squatting-in-a-hut-that-I-made which is the other basic alternative.
I got one. I certainly enjoyed the experience. Original research is fun, and beyond that I had no responsibilities. Hard to beat that as far as jobs go.

It may not have been worthwhile in terms of career benefit (jury is still out). I don't want to be an academic, though I may follow that trajectory a few more years if the market stays bad. I may be able to spin off a research related startup, but that isn't guaranteed yet.

Regarding opportunity costs, I definitely missed out on getting into finance during the bubble.

(Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a python/c++ dev with solid quantitative skills, feel free to contact me.)
They do have one thing going for them. Unlike the narrow defined parameters of American higher education they do have a variety of outlets. You can stop your education at any time and basically have a degree (I think it's called a license) for each year complete: Bac+1, Bac+2, Bac+3. I have so many friends that have nothing to show after 2 or 3 years of school because they stopped for health, financial, or personal reasons.
Unlike Google, Apple can at times be overtly anticompetitive; if it was determined that Apple was defending a monopoly in online music, there could be trouble.
This is a great question. Who here has released iphone apps (paid or free) and what kind of revenue results did you get?

Does anyone have any tips they would pass along?
I might not have bought one myself, but I could have probably convinced my parents to buy it for me.
I think you should check your definition of unbearable. I graduated high school in 99 and was contemplating trying to exploit the first bubble but decided to go to school instead (I was obviously a bit too young at that time). A lot of life is a game and unless you are born rich, college is a big part of that game. We can't make life any more or less fair, we have to play the game with the cards we are dealt. College is an opportunity to meet people, get your day-to-day living paid for with loans or scholarships and polish your skills. Now, maybe it is best to go into the working world right away for some people, sure. However, a lot of software engineering is based on mathematical and theoretical principles and knowing those principles should help avoid various pitfalls. I don't know why I am writing such a detailed response to such a deep comment... I guess to suggest a more cold and calculating point of view. The other students are completely irrelevant, pleasures and what is "unbearable" are not really relevant. Taking a college degree gives huge advantages to those of us who are not trust fund babies and if you have some experience about how unbearable life can really get you make decisions based on long term benefit, not whether college kids annoy you for a few hours a week for a few years.
A software keyboard is much more likely. It shouldn't be too long before E Ink displays can reliably/cheaply handle touch input.
I don't know why so many people come to rescue twitter. So, the point of argument is don't whine if you lose tweets. Because the notional value of tweets is less compared to gdocs.

I guess there are four methods:
1. calmly complaining
2. complaining
3. bit of grunting
4. whining
Django is Rails, without the toxic company.

That's why I am unsure about Zed Shaw at EuroDjangoCon. I love to have smart and capable people around, but Zed still has to prove he can play well with others.
PHP doesn't scale? Facebook has > 200 million users. It's written in PHP.
Good question.

This is what has stopped me from even considering an ebook so far.
It's even tricker because there are a couple other doctoral law degrees that can be awarded in the United States (S.J.D. and LL.D.) that are much closer in spirit to the Ph.D., as they are research degrees. Although in fairness, in many cases they are given as honorary degrees.

Additionally, consider the LL.M. degree. It further complicates things because it is awarded after the J.D.
Worthwhile, yes; enjoy, somewhat; not my thing in the end, also true. I left the program after 2 years of research because you can get very forced into a niche to satisfy supervisors' and the academic world's requirements. I wanted to do something vaguely real-worldy, and had to leave the bubble of academia to do so. I don't regret starting the PhD or leaving it though.
Far from the most important point, but easily my favorite one-liner:

Would you pay $100 an hour for an untrained accountant? Because if your consulting rate is $100 an hour and you do your own accounting, that's exactly what's happening.
Mildly amusing in a completely juvenile way and inappropriate for this site. Take it over to Reddit.
What is your basis for saying this?

Thank you for asking the follow-up question. I appreciate anyone on HN who asks another HN participant a follow-up question to clarify the factual basis for a statement.

To briefly respond to your question before I take my child to a doctor appointment, what has always jarred me about this FAQ is the line

"The main answer to this question is that the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs are programmers, not engineers, and programming does not use math."

If this professor of computer science truly believes that it doesn't take much math to produce a competent programmer, he has a different definition of competent programmer from that found at some other computer science deparments, including most computer science departments overseas. There is a lot of industry demand for computer programmers who can program in a way that best takes advantage of what a computer can do best, by reducing a problem to its most mathematically correct representation.

I don't think a professor at MIT would dream of writing a FAQ with a statement like that in it about the computer science major sequence at MIT. There does seem to be a shortage of MIT-level programmers, even if there is not a shortage of UC Davis-level programmers.
From the article: "Scientists were the least affected, while artists and writers had increased diagnoses of psychosis."

My guess is that artists and writers are more creative than scientists due to the randomness of a flawed brain.

But obviously we can get randomness from other sources such as computers. So maybe normal brains in combination with computers can be creative too.
I use softlayer, mosso cloud servers, s3 and ec2.
Glad to be your unintentional hammer.

Dane Cook is a comedian who hit it BIG, in part, due to MySpace. He's been in a couple of movies, including "Employee of the Month."

He's got millions of fans, but also a sizeable group of haters, inlcuding many of his fellow comedians. He's just another in a series of people or items that hit it big, leaving many of us wondering why.
It still strikes me as very odd though coming from a Labour government to do away with free university for everyone. I think that's an incredibly important thing for a society to have.

The fact you can get off paying if you're from low income families I'd bet still deters a lot of people from going to university, who would have otherwise gone which is a shame.
PHP was a hack conceived long ago, in a time where there were no complex (as in "more than one page") web applications and little to no demand for them. It has the readability of Perl and the structural elegance of 70's BASIC.

Need I say more?
AWS and Mosso, possibly Slicehost in the future.
It depends on what you're looking for. His settings are mind-blowing (the more so when they were new and you didn't have Singulatarians running around blowing your mind twice as hard) and his stories dramatically sound, but his characters tend towards simplistic and dialog is pretty rough, even by contemporary standards.

This isn't a criticism he'd be surprised by. He said so himself, several times, in some of the books I have. Romance in particular was a weak point of the entire genre during his era, and he admits it's because they were all pretty stereotypical nerds.

Fortunately, that's not why we were reading his books.
I don't know if you're familiar with pattern matching in general, but you can think of it as a switch-on-crack.

The jist of that code is: we're going to look at Sys.argv, which is a list. If it's a two element list, ignore the first element (underscore as "hole") and pass the second element to search, then display the result.

If it's anything else, fail with a nice message.
But flame on . . . I'm done with the thread.

To quote As Good as it Gets

"Last word freak."
Or between people who dropped out of PhD programs and those who never started, which is also an interesting data point given the few high-profile PhD dropout startup founders there are out there.

(Dropping out of PhD = walking away with a Masters in some places, but not all; I had my Master's degrees before I started the PhD.)
Does everything we know have to eventually be proved wrong? I feel like I'm in 1984, except with inconsequential BS :)
a joke in a poor taste, but amusing none the less...
_ as a variable name means, "(match anything here, doesn't matter)". It's similar to . in a regular expression -- you're testing a list of multiple values, and while for your purposes you only care about a specific one of them, you need to verify that it has the right number of values. Much like "..e" will match any three-letter word ending in e, (_, 21, _) will match any three-value list whose second value is 21. ( (_, x, _) will match a three-value list parametrically, and extract the variable x for further use.)

That's probably a somewhat confusing explanation, but in practice, idiomatic code using deconstructive pattern matching is usually quite a bit clearer than the alternative, several layers of nested switch statements. It's also incredibly useful. Haskell has the same feature. (I'm pretty sure Erlang does, too.)

For one good example of this making complex code relatively simple, check out Chris Okasaki's thesis (Purely Functional Data Structures, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf), page 79, or the red-black tree balanced-insertion code in the book. (Note: That's SML, which is a different dialect of ML.)

In this case: switch on sys.argv (command line args) -- if it's a two-variable array, then ignore the first parameter, put the second in a variable called 'q', and then display the result of executing search(q). Otherwise, raise an exception with that error message.
I've seen this a few times on HN. I don't like it.

Somebody will make a criticism about the programming of the site and somebody else will say something like shut up and stop complaining! It's free.

I think any time a user of your code speaks, you should listen. There's good stuff in there. I don't care if it is free or not. If you're providing it, and I'm using it, then we're in some kind of a relationship. And that relationship means I get to provide feedback. I also think that people should be polite when providing feedback.

And I would like a pony.

Now can we get back to technical articles instead of "what's polite?" articles? Is this Ms. Manners or HN? These things will just generate unneeded smoke.
php is my virtual machine. It runs everywhere (and cheaply), Anything is possible with it - it's just really ugly - thus code generation is your friend. This is something I hope to drive home with http://lisphp.googlecode.com (nearly r5 scheme) and LET (my smalltalk w/ macro expansion) which is used in http://voltron.googlecode.com.
Somewhat useless, but not totally ridiculous.

I brought this up to show that the I have received 10x the education from the code I have written professionally than from all my formal schooling.

I realize as well as anyone here that the best code usually have less lines. At least mine does. But "years of experience" has less meaning, believe me. So do title, company, number of jobs, number of customers, etc., etc., etc.

Just like in basketball, there is no substitute for height, in programming, there is no substitute for actually having written code.

I realize "Lines of Code" isn't a great metric, but it's probably the best to quickly communicate my point.
Oh, silentbicycle is right. [| ... |] is array syntax, rather than a list.
Linode for *nix, VPSLand for Win2k3. Both awesome services.
How does TAOCP look in it? I'm curious to know what the limits of what this device can display are.
It looks great. Now let's compare it to the competition... Amazon's web page for the Kindle shows only one entry under 'Browse similar items in Electronics': 'Kindle DX'
Added - sorry about that, I forgot.
According to the article, the site which was compromised does not use OpenID.
Rubik's Cube Inspired Puzzles Demonstrate Math's "Simple Groups"
Network file transfer with on-the-fly compression
Yes. Programming is a complex skill, like using math or a foreign language, if you want to stay good at it, you MUST stay in practice.