skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing that a lot of people seem to forget in this debate is that there is room for all 3. On a personal level, I make extensive use of commercial software (especially MS SQL Server) for some things, wide use of open source software (FireFox and Python are first amoungst many) and some cloud software (gmail, google calandar come to mind).

On the business side though, I would be hesitant to ever advise an employer or client to make use of cloud resources for a few reasons. One of them is the lock in as mentioned in the article. Another is the risk of loss of data that is outside the businesses control. Another is the fact that the cloud service could upgrade the software in a way we didn't like with very little recourse on our part.

After all, there are times when you want to keep the older version. For instance, numerous businesses have declined to switch to Vista and I will not be leaving python 2.54 until some of the libraries I use finish their updating process.

Of course, all of the concerns I mentioned can be addressed, but it would require substantial due diligence on the IT side to verify that the cloud computing company has adequate protections in place and then on legal's side to ensure that they are contractually enforceable.
> And the graph itself says nothing about the skill level required to obtain the exhibited performance.

In all fairness, neither do most people promoting C++'s performance-at-any-cost design.

I think a large spread in the performance correlates with requiring skill level, though -- it means that some people using the language get good results, but that many also get very bad ones. Ruby is a really slow language ("reasonably good" < great), but it's still good enough for many purposes, provided your algorithms are reasonable.
15 Essential Interviews For The Creative Community
Mother Earth Mother Board - Neal Stephenson
a very fuel efficient motorcycle (like 100 cc displacement) runs like 30 kilometers per liter, that's about 60 mile per gallon

the fuel tank volume for small motorcycle is like 4 liter, the bigger ones is like 10 liter, so the tank ranges from 1 - 3 gallons

so for 60 miles roundtrip expect to fill the tank every day or two (about 5 mins wasted at gas station)

but still it's much cheaper unless your hourly rate is 100+ dollars

it might be safer (paradoxically, riding a bike makes you feel unsafe, just like driving small car which in turn increases safety)

i use it to train my perception (more feedbacks from wind, noise, smell, sights)

but yeah, once you ride motorcycles, you'll never look back

i agree, consider motorcycle, if you turn out not liking it the risk is very low (like < $500 USD)

also, maintenance is super easy and cheap. just unscrew, dump dirty oil to recycle bin, screw back and fill 1 quart of motor oil. no filter required! total maintenance (tire, oil, lamp, gaskets, etc) is like $30 USD per year
how counterproductive their entire culture is

What a sentence! Instead of arguing and pointing out obvious, I highly recommend you read something about Japan, other than "internet news".

Putting a label on someone's culture at least calls for a few years of actually living there. After 10 years in US I still wouldn't dare giving a grade to American culture, it would take a tome (and I'd still be wrong), let alone labeling it with a single word.

Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese

P.S. Canon&Nikon, despite their "counterproductive" cultures, pretty much destroyed American and German photo equipment industries. These days it feels awkward to say "Kodak moment", most kids will probably ask "who is Kodak?"
This is old news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436299
This particular design seems to be the official one, but twitter and its lackluster architecture has spawned an industry of twitter optimizers. Everyone and their brother is trying to do something about the fail-whale: I mean, "how hard could it be"? the test implementations are usually benchmarked off of 127.0.0.1 and the "lab" results are, theoretically, impressive.

A similar thing happened when reddit switched to python from common lisp; a flurry of reddit clones in Lisp, each smaller/faster/"eleganter" (pick two) than the other.
Its funny at how much of European culture was shaped by American influences on the world :)

Point being: Everyone influences everyone else. Pretending one culture is somehow above another is idiotic and irrelevant.
You are quite correct, BUT at least for the forseeable future a university is the most efficient way to get those things, and especially to get all 3 at once.

I could for instance create a facebook page and start gathering a group of other people interested in math to ask questions. But it would take time to find that was worth the time to actually talk and listen to and then of those the ones that were actually interested in my specific topic. With a class, those are ready made. You rarely find foolish people in upper division math classes at all so I know everyone there is (most likely) worth my time to deal with and we have the class in common so we are all looking at the same broad field at least.

Similarly, we could create certifications for math skills similar to certain technologies, but it would take a long time (if ever) before employers and HR departments in particular gave those the same weight as a normal degree.

Universities are certainly not the only choice, but for the meantime they are the best choice for someone who wants that combination of a ready made, (partially) vetted community of peers along with later certification of the skills gained.
If this is a port of Sinatra that is an option to make a very small concise webservice. You can choose to do seperation, but if you want something very simple and compact a single file can be easier. We have a Sinatra app that has the model,view,controller, and tests in a single file that is less than 250 LOC. It would be more obfuscated to have 5 files of less than 50 LOC each (Some with as little as 4 lines).

If it doesn't provide any option for separation that is bad, but for micro services it can be really nice.
The Psychology Behind Item Collecting And Achievement Hoarding
I would fly someone else first class, but not myself. Never underestimate the pressure of custom and hospitality in maintaining niche, luxury markets.
This is one of the best things I've seen on the Internet in a while. :-) Definitely worth taking a look.
VLC player handles it nicely.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Well, I'm not privy to the Harvard accounts, so you're probably right on that front. Yeah, probably signed up to some deferred payment thing. Well done.

But the other part - the $40m bonus payments (a figure from another article) - that is obscene. Doubly so for a so-called educational institution.

Yeah, capitalism, blah blah. Yeah, market rates, etc. Yeah they "made their money back" etc. Fuck all of that. Paying someone, anyone, $40m a year is obscene.

Seriously - step back for a minute and think about it. Harvard uni. Pays their top professor $250k. Pays their money managers $20m+. What does that say?

I'm not going to answer, fill in your own; but it says something, all right.
ACM has almost all their journals/conferences digitized already.

IEEE has most stuffs since 1991 on line in computer society. I am not familiar with the giant IEEE database.

SIAM has all stuffs on line. SIAM put new one in journal format. They put old SIAM journals in digitial library.

AAAI has put all their stuffs on line. I think now they allow non member to read them online also.

ACL seems lacking of enough funding to put all their computational linguist research on line.

The other way to check the CS research is relying on Citeseer's cache. Most of living/no-retire CS researchers put their papers on line for review after 1990s.
THQ and the UFC doing slick advertising for their video game
Just a guess, but: Squeak only uses text files as an export format, and that format is more verbose than file-based source code would normally be. If you only counted the code and not the metadata, it would probably do better.
Don't feed the bastards; IEEE and ACM shall never see a dime from me.

Instead of paying them $200, pay ~$100 to your local big university library, and get all the books, papers, and other research materials you can handle. I am a member of George Mason University's library (go Patriots!) and I paid $150 because I am not an alumnus. My perks include the entire ACM/IEEE publications, of course, along with all the books I can handle :-)

(only bad thing is the parking, which can run up to $20 sometimes; but I learned to go there after 7PM and stay til 12AM; taking home whatever books I like.)

Online? CiteSeer + googling author's names and hoping for their .edu/~home-pages.
Of course not. Now shut up and finish your acorn gruel.
In terms of what it does for me, it's a solution, since it gets rid of the problem I have.

You could say the same for theft, robbery, and murder. At some point in deciding how to act you must consider the effect your actions have on others. I call it an exploit because it exploits the broken nature of the system which rewards dishonest behavior. Your "solution" merely perpetuates the problem for everyone.

academic dishonesty is necessary

It is not necessary to achieve either of the aims you have described (not wasting your life away and getting into a decent university). The former can be achieved by not doing the work. The latter can be achieved by doing the work to earn adequate grades. Neither requires dishonesty.

It is not even necessary to achieve both. Withdrawing from school and getting a GED avoids wasting one's life away there, and getting into a decent college can be facilitated by enrolling in a community college and obtaining the appropriate test scores. This does not require dishonesty, wasting time, or forgoing educational opportunity.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm being downvoted.

FWIW, it isn't me. I don't like drive-by downvoting either.
Where are you located? GitHub's average page response is 400ms according to our NewRelic data.
Nokia Bounce Game Cheats Codes Tips and Tricks | repairmobiles.saaqi
Necessary? As in life or death? No.

Worth it? Can be.

If I can afford it, do I fly first class? Abso-fucking-lutely ...

PS for extra points, rate the likelihood of picking up that attractive stewardess if you are sitting in (A) first class or (B) economy

correct answer:
(A) 80%
(B) 0.01%

QED.
I'm not sure what you mean - is it illegal or something? Motorcycles split lanes all the time here in NH.
It's illegal outside of California.

Out of curiosity, why do people need to split lanes in New Hampshire? Is there traffic there? Just kidding, kind of. (from a former New England motorcyclist)
Too bad there is no 64-bit version. I've been on 64-bit for five years. Why is everyone else taking so long?

(8GB of RAM here on main workstation.)
Fuck facebook. No seriously, who gives a shit.
I upvoted you because I agree in this case, but I disagree with your principles.

> Putting a label on someone's culture at least calls for a few years of actually living there.

No, it doesn't. To give an example, I have no problem labeling Aztec culture as violent.

(Here's the long, boring thread debating this point:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=548429
)
Airport lounges are for "expense accounters and heiresses who didn't invest with Madoff."? This is just not true. I fly myself to a few open source conferences a year, and end up with enough miles to get the "status" needed to use the lounges. This is not some amazing benefit for the super-rich, it's just a simple benefit for people who fly more than once or twice a year.

I also don't see premium cabins as going away anytime soon. Their existence is a great reason to fly an airline, even if you aren't going to ever pay to sit there. You can spend miles to upgrade into the nicer seats, and when flights are overbooked, you can be "rolled forward". (I often take the last flight of the day from Chicago to London, and this plane is always wayyy overbooked with people that missed their flights earlier in the day. It leaves too late for people to get to 8am meetings in London, also, so the premium cabins are never full. The result is a free upgrade almost every time.)

It's a good way for the airlines to keep people away from the competition. With a nice reward for collecting status or miles (i.e. flying, and not on the competition), it's probably pretty good for their business, even if very few people pay $15,000 to sit in first class.
I must have missed something, why does it not belong?
So we've learned that Windows has the best desktop system? Title is misleading here.
He's talking about a very special case were a group of people need to agree to buy your product (that is, where everyone has "veto power"); but it's not acceptable to one of them.

He says one way is to make the product acceptable to more people - ensure it has something that each of them wants ("a bit wider"). Another way is to make it so compellingly wonderful for one particular person that they will "bully" their colleagues into getting it ("much deeper").

I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. Often, it's just one party that needs to be satisfied. But... it can also be an organizational purchase, where the users have to be happy, the tech support guys have to be happy, accounting has to be happy, management has to be happy, etc. Each party has sufficient power to veto a purchase (this isn't always the case!). Seth is saying you can sweeten the deal slightly, to try to please the hold-outs a little more (just one of: easier to use, easier to support, easier to pay for, easier to justify ROI). Or, the other approach, is to make one attribute so astoundingly amazingly good, that it's so far more than "acceptable" to one party that you galvanize them into action, to champion your product, calling in favours, making sacrifices, doing deals to get the other players to agree (like a senate, right).

He didn't say this, but I think he's implying it's easier to identify the hold-outs and just please them enough for the purchase to be unenthusiastically acceptable to them (Oh well, I guess we can get it), instead of exciting one party so much that they move heaven and earth for you.

I reiterate that the starting point is the very special case where several people have veto power, and the product is not acceptable to one of them.
If, like me, you get stuck on a regular basis in a hub for several hours, an airport lounge can be the difference between a productive day at work and reading paperbacks at the gate.
The Sokal affair happened because the so-called Social Sciences (an oximoron) tend to have zero standards...
This is just alarmism for alarmism's stake.

Don't make a suggestion engine because it could become massively popular and cause Google to change the way it does search. Don't introduce a new way of collaboration because it could take the world by storm and replace the linearity in communication we have now.

The flaw in that logic, as I see it, is the idea that one type of product will "conquer" another. An example: Lets say suggestion engines become massively popular and Google decides to replace their search with a bing-type service. Don't you think another service will pop up to capture the customers who don't want that type of service? Do you really think a large group of users will become disenfranchised with all the startups out there vying for any customers they can get their hands on? I doubt it.

So given that why wouldn't you let the people who want non-linear solutions have what they want?
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Document is titled 'Google Wave Overview' ?
Can you really tell? Choose the perpetrator from the lineup.
What a stupid poll. Most people flying in first class didn't pay full-fare first class. They got upgraded. I flew every other week for a year in my last job --- that's a light travel burden for someone in sales or consulting --- and I got upgraded for free on 80-90% of my flights.
Bruce Schneier on the risks of cloud computing
Thanks for asking. I'm in Melbourne, Australia

ping github.com = 192ms

loading http://github.com/bmizerany/sinatra/tree/work = 11000ms (11 secs)

wget of the same took between 1000-5000ms (1-5secs)

If there's a lot of javascript, that might be slowing it down.
Unfortunately the article like so many others misses the point on Google Wave. It really shows how much people can be distracted by visuals. Google announces a entirely new protocol for internet communication (not just for the web) and people are complaining about UI complexity? And it's not entirely their fault, Google really, really hyped the UI.

Google Wave is potentially a new real-time (in the interactive sense) protocol for the web, one that easily supports many different languages (robots talk to waves across a protocol). And by open sourcing the server we have a new scalable distributed ecosystem for user generated content. Extensions (built on robots) are parasitic, this opens up incredible interactive possibilities. From the keynote it is clear that you will be able talk to a Wave server as easily from Vim or Emacs as it is from Google's fancy HTML 5 UI.
Agree. If Robots can work on more than 1 wave at a time (eg manage/monitor input on one wave and send summary updates to another) then it also opens up possibilities for lazy distributed processing applications. A (superficial) look at their proposals so far gives me the impression that the robots will make great quick-n-dirty FSMs and DSPs. There are many commercial opportunities here, but I also think think there's massive potential for pro bono and free-not-as-in-beer projects.
Index of Compute articles by Jim Butterfield
rather than the Perl-beating and PHP-matching Ruby 1.9

Maybe I just can't read, but Ruby 1.9 appears to still be slower than Perl on more than half of the tests. I wouldn't call that "Perl-beating".
It was all real, then I moved like 5 times.
I could see this being useful if Facebook evolves into more of a LinkedIn; people could put their Facebook URLs onto their business cards.

Also, when I meet a stranger, it would definitely be easier to find them if I could just go directly to their vanity URL, which might be more mnemonically accessible.
My only complaint about the ads is the quality of the video on ESPN in particular is rather crummy... could cause consumers to think the game footage is poor (which it isnt)
Three Truths about the App Store
Just regarding "stop energy", the thing I love about software and startups is you can just do something. You don't to convince a corporate manager, nor an academic panel, nor the board of developers. All you need do is make something useful, and let the people know about it who need it.

Yes, you still have to convince people - but they aren't gateway guardians whose good opinion you must seek, but people who have the problem that you are trying to solve. Your interests are aligned.
Why do people want to kill you?
Its great to see Ruby so much faster with 1.9 because 1.8 speed was such a stumbling block in data intensive stuff that I pushed towards it.

However don't count your chickens just yet with regards to Ruby 1.9 being "Perl-beating" ;-) Don't you think its odd that Perl 5.10.0 sits only just above Ruby 1.8.7 in the current alioth shootout? Quick look at the tests and I can see a problem with a known 5.10.0 speed issue bug. Fixing this in a quick local test here makes all the difference ;-)
Hasselblad had a near death experience because it fumbled the transition to digital photography. This a good article about an industry where major players failed to make the transition because "core competence = core incompetence." Hasselblad developed a digital system early on but dropped it because they felt it was so inferior that it would damage the brand. As a consequence they missed out on the learning experience. They should have read and deeply understood Clayton Christensen's "Inventors Dilemma."

My SO is an artist who uses digital photography to make studies for her paintings. She started out with a 6 megapixel Nikon D70, but the resolution was inadequate for her needs. Last year she moved up to a 12 megapixel D300 for around $1500 with a new lense. At the time I looked at the new new Hasselblad, 52 megapixels at $35,000. Needless to say out of out budget. The thing is a Hasseblad is not worth it for nearly anyone. With the Nikon software and Photoshop, the can take 6 overlapping images and stitch them together and get a 50-70 megapixel image. May be Hasselblad will last a few more years, but by then your under $5000 Nikon or Canon will have surpassed it.

Also the HP z3200 printer produces superb prints. So much for phot finishing labs and print shops.
I guess I have an answer to my rhetorical question: those modding me down give a shit : D
Ask HN: Startup founders, would you walk us through a day in the life?
(Or a week in the life, if a day is too small a sample size to be particularly meaningful..)

How much time do you devote to coding, marketing, sales, support, biz dev, modifying your website?

How many hours a day do you spend working?
How many hours a day do you spend on recreation?

These are fascinating questions to many of us.
The Dignity of George W. Bush
Briefly, I disagree that the jobs I listed are "last century blue collar." Many of those people are knowledge workers that just happen to use their hands as well as their minds.

Secondly, in my younger years I worked as a software developer at a Tier 1 automotive supplier. I've got a lot of friends in the business.

I wasn't being an alarmist. Many of these companies are on the brink. On top of that, there aren't many "strong" auto companies to "bail out" the suppliers.

Right now the forecast is a pitiful 9MM autos sold this year. At this rate, we're going to have serious problems, even Toyota may face bankruptcy.

And about Chrysler... they were bailed out, invented the mini-van, and, by acquiring Jeep via AMC,ignited an SUV market.

That's a corporate success story. It's been 30 years, there's been titanic shifts in the global market.
Are We All Synesthetes?
There is no open-source replacement for Excel or Photoshop.

Excel is the language/IDE in which many of the world's financial models are developed. Everyone I've heard from who's in a position to say something on the matter has indicated that it's virtually irreplaceable. It has many hidden features and tricks which cannot be replicated in OpenOffice Calc.
Ah, ok. Also, it seems to be missing about half the benchmarks.
For sure. I'm just using XML literals in the example because it looks cool. But I'm also using this for a client job, and it's producing JSON.

It's not nearly as powerful as the real Sinatra, but it saves me the shenanigans of warbling Sinatra apps for servlet deployment.
Neither, I click the facebook bookmark on my toolbar.
Actually Google Trends is a great measurement tool. You just have to know how to use it and understand what the measurements actually are ;-)

Checkout these two instead....

http://www.google.com/trends?q=python+scripting%2C+perl+scri...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=python+programming%2C+perl+pr...

In fact all languages have declined. Which isn't surprising because Google Trends is just showing you the frequency of these search terms used over time.

There is a lot more things to search for now on the web compared to 2004!
tech, fear-mongering, culture.

In this story a liberal arts major who spends a lot of time on the internet writes an attention-grabbing headline that appears to have substance since it addresses "culture," the ever-useful buzzword of the collegiate essayist.
not intended as a character attack at all... any more than Zed's was an attack on Guido's character.