skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For sure, but 99% of apps never scale to "large numbers of users". And when they do, they usually have the time to figure out how to do so without downtime. Often, that may involve rewriting part or all of the backend in a lower level language. If that's needed, so be it - but to do it before you have any performance problems is just premature optimisation.
Investigating the many frameworks and libraries available for Java would probably be a better course of action.

http://projects.apache.org/indexes/language.html#Java
I've been hacking C++ long enough to agree C++/STL/Boost is good and fast... but I can't remember the last time I heard anyone accuse C++ of being easy...
Not just faster Macs, but more frequent updates. And they were cheaper. I owned one. And a UMAX.

UMAX complained because their C500 model later served to be the exact hardware loadout of the Performa 6400 Tower. Apple let them do "research" on what chipsets could do what, and then took the result for use in their own hardware designs.
As I say, I'm content to believe that. I'm sure if you re-read with these comments in your thoughts you'll see what people mean. You would probably have been better, in hindsight (wonderful thing!), to simply say - "URL is under new management, and I hope it's now more relevant to HN."

Sometimes less is more, a lesson I need to remember.

Feedback about the site content. I'm confronted by a long page with articles that are more than a screen long. If I don't like an article I'm forced to scroll down in the hope that the next one will be interesting.

I won't do that more than once. And I didn't.
I agree, but TBH there have been a lot of ridiculously overhyped blog posts/articles telling us how totally awesome every scripting language is, and how it's completely a 'game changer' and how you can do completely revolutionary things in them really easily.

I guess this is just a reaction to the froth+hype. Both sides need to step away from the keyboard, and calm down.
Thankfully this is not a problem at all with Vim. No doubt Emacs can easily avoid the problem as well.
Okay, you win. Thread ends here.
Ask HN: Ad revenue with relation to RSS 
Ad rates on most sites are based on the number of unique visitors and overall pageviews. Enabling full feeds via RSS, as convenient as it is, drives a chunk of this traffic away from the site. Has anyone considered restricting their feeds to previews or just removing RSS availability totally in order to drive more traffic to the site? The loss in RSS ad revenue can be more than made up by the increase in on-site-ad revenue.

Take Techcrunch for example - over 2 million feed readers who take avail of the full TC feed. In all probability, there's a sizeable chunk of these people who don't visit the actual site. Restricting the feed, which is a bit inconvenient to the readers, can funnel these 'extras' to the site, thereby driving up ad revenue.

Apart from the inconvenience factor, is there anything else wrong with this logic?
If it increases your productivity up to 300%, that means that you can work for 5 months, then take a month off. You will still get ~30 months worth of work done in a year. So thats a huge success.
I find it easy. The bad thing about c++ is its size. It's large and that tends to make it complex. However, I find that I only use about 40 to 60 percent of what c++ can actually do. Focus on the parts that you use and you'll find a lot of the complexity goes away.
This isn't about the next generation of consoles, this is about the next generation of input technology.

Apple won multi-touch, so Microsoft is going to push the conversation ahead to gesture-based ubiquitous computing devices. Once they get the cameras small enough they can just stick these things on Accelerando-style glasses or a wifi-enabled necklace akin to the sixth sense TED demo- that's when we have true ubiquitous computing.
perhaps there was rapid decompression caused by the turbulence caught the pilots without their masks on, and they fell unconscious, thus no distress call, and a crash. there could have been a structural failure and the airplane may have broken up on descent to a lower altitude. remember the American Airlines crash in New York in October, 2001, where the vertical fin broke off, it was an Airbus A300. The BOAC crash caused by turbulence near Mt.Fuji in 1966 was a massive structural failure as well. Hard to believe the pilots would not have seen this weather on the radar and steered around it. Then again, they depend on meteorological reports and guidance from the ground in these situations, and may have been waiting for instructions. I've never flown through severe turbulence (few have and lived to tell about it) but I've experienced light turbulence, the kind where your butt leaves your seat very briefly, and it's not fun. 4 hours of that and you have a back ache.
"if total power was lost, how was the plane able to communicate with the server?"

The same way black boxes keep beeping even twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

The lightning was the first red herring, but it got quickly dismissed by experts. Now they say it's gonna take years to know the cause, so we can forget about it.
Funny how it's mostly people who are wealthy who are calling for higher taxes. It won't really hurt them.

Guilt, anyone?
Can anyone clearly explain how these "laws of power" prove the author's point regarding XP? I've read this twice now, and I still don't understand the connection.

It seems like French is saying that these laws explain why some people wouldn't want to pair with some other people. I don't think anyone practicing XP would dispute that some pairs just aren't meant to be. However, I don't see how that leads to a failure of XP in general.
Can't wait to see all of the great demos at tonight's NYTM showcase! I'll be there helping out so find me (the short redheaded chick) if you need anything.
I hope that every HN poster that loves to complain about Atwood's blog articles here reads this article.

You can accurately say that the message of this article, like many of his articles, is completely obvious. However, the typical HN response to his articles also points out that sometimes the completely obvious points can go unheeded.
Web Trend Map 4
Ask HN: How to create an rss feed from a site that doesn't provide one?
Even in 2009, there are some sites that don't provide RSS feeds. I'm adding feeds to my google reader and was wondering if someone could suggest a way to create an RSS feed for these sites that don't provide them?

Preferably, a free way?
This document is so extensive it's eerie.
UAW Local 735 President Don Skidmore uses Facebook
How is this superior to (or different than) Google's opensourced OAuth Playground?

http://googlecodesamples.com/oauth_playground/
Running a binary as root is pretty different from uploading all of your company's intellectual property to a foreign corporation's servers.
How I Write Code:

1. Copy the smallest piece of code I've already written and change it slightly to do something really small. Get it working perfectly.

2. Add a little bit. Get it working perfectly.

3. Add a little bit more. Get it working perfectly.

4. Repeat until it's not so easy to add anything, even a little bit. Print a hard copy. Holy shit! Did I write all that?

5. Mark it up like crazy with a red pen. Combine similar code into common functions. Rename variables. Rename them again. Rename them again. Rename them to what they originally were, but without vowels. Restructure unwieldy functions. Rewrite the stuff I can't believe I actually wrote myself.

6. Sit down at terminal and enter changes. Save every version (even though I never look at it again). Get it to work perfectly (again). Holy shit! What did I do? It's totally broken! Debug, debug, debug. Good. Now it runs perfectly. Time to add more...go back to Step 1. (Except every 5th time through this loop: Scrap it all and rewrite it the way I should have in the first place.)

7. Repeat until dead.
I just found it vaguely funny that on the front page of the CS Monitor was a story about a shuttered GM plant...and Facebook was caught lurking behind the scenes.
That's the case with most big companies. They have one hit - the initial product that made them big in the first place - and a bunch of acquisitions. In some cases (Microsoft), their big hit was even an acquisition.

It's because most new products fail. Whether they're developed by a startup or a big company. But big companies have the luxury of a lot of cash that they can use to buy the products that are already successful. If you compare internal efforts that have to pass through Sturgeon's Law vs. acquired startups that have already passed the "successful" filter, of course the ones that are already successful will be more successful. It's a tautology. ;-)

Google is actually doing better than most big companies, with at least three internally-developed products that are big hits (Search, GMail, and Orkut).
Here's our launch post explaining FI:

http://github.com/blog/441-launch-github-firewall-install
If a blog post says "wonderful, amazing, fun, life-affirming," we can always respond with "oh? what about..." My thought is that there's no need for a post saying "You're gonna die if you try to build a social bookmarking site in Lisp" regardless of how much fun other people are having doing it.

What have people got against enthusiasm, any ways? There's some kind of weird puritanical thing going around programming culture that seems to view youthful exuberance as some kind of a sin, like wearing buttons on a frock coat. Yeah, some twenty-somthing year-old has discovered something way-cool really neat amazing thing while hacking on a macbook in the café. Isn't that exactly the attitude you're supposed to have in your twenties? How would anything ever change if people didn't get super-excited beyond all rational limit?

Can you imagine Wozniak and Jobs trying to blog about microcomputers these days? They'd get flamed as hippies fiddling with toys :-)
In the demo
- They show a license agreement, but I don't seem to see it online to view and review.
- X86 only?
- Hopefully the password scott put in isn't the one he uses everywhere :)
Jeff does not help his case by being completely wrong much of the time and lacking insight the rest of the time. Many of us just assume that he is trying to drive traffic to his blog while wasting his audience's time.
On my wall at work, used to monitor the health of my servers.

http://www.82smugglers.com/blog/?p=7
One problem is that if you work with other people in c++, the 40 to 60 percent they use won't necessarily overlap with yours.
New for local business owners: the Google Maps LBC dashboard
Ask HN: Review My Startup: Twitter trends for your city
Url: http://thinking.me/

1 Line Pitch: Show Twitter trends for your city and allow you to compare buzz across cities/countries.

Looking for Feedback on:
i) Which cities should we add next? Should we grow vertically (trends in 3-4 mile radius in existing cities) or add more cities?
ii) Do you think we should go in direction of more charts and comparison tools or add more cities and try to get twitter clients to integrate using our Api?
iii) Would love to know what you liked/disliked about the site and what more do you want to see?
iv) Anything else on how we can improve it
When I am at my desk making something out of bottlecaps, business cards and spent NERF rounds and someone asks me what I'm doing, I tell them "I'm developing software. I'll type it in later."
Clickable link for easy access

http://thinking.me/
some great companies on the list, and the most I've seen together for a free event.
What type of pumps did you use, the link for them didn't work?

I've been trying to find cheap food-grade pumps for a similar project.
First Round Capital Office Hours SF June 11th
Perhaps free will seems unreal because you believe that you can only make one choice in any situation, and that this choice is predetermined by physics.

However, according to the many-worlds interpretation of QM, you do in fact make every possible decision, in every situation.
In this case it's the whole presentation I think we're trying to compare, not just the relative positions of individual results in the list. It would be fun to calculate Pearson coefficients for each query, based on hit-URL lists, but I suspect you actually learn more by just looking at the two...
The test suite will describe the desired behavior, regardless of all other dimensions.

The P=NP optimizer/generator will then generate an implementation that is optimal along one or more dimensions (like space or time efficiency).

Also-- regardless of that, It's "easier" in several senses to describe the desired behavior of an API than to implement that API.

Let's say we wanted to implement addition for a calculator. Here's a complete description:

-1 is the lowest number

-successor(N) is the successor to number N

That's a complete description of the natural number system, but it's not a useful addition function in any sense.
It's funny, because I have a simple AppJet app that I was considering re-implementing in Rails, having recently learned the basics of the framework. AppJet has just helped me make the decision. Thanks, AppJet!
> I will live to be a happy old man if I never read another blog post ...

I wish all I had to do to be happy for the rest of my life was to never use a computer again.
That's actually another gripe of mine. What the hell is the point of giving me a HDD to copy games to, if I still have to insert the disc to play it. Complete and utter failure.
Also on mine at any rate, the noise from the fans it most of the issue.
Have their big ears picked up Google Wave yet? ;-)

Seems like a knock-out blow for smaller startups focusing on collaborative editing.

But I suppose there are always niches one can fill that the giants won't touch.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=637462
It made me laugh. I liked the part about the "hippy shit".
but evidence doesn't always cut it with emotional debates now does it...
From Terrible To Terrifying: Newspaper Ad Sales Plummet $2.6 Billion In Q1 2009
> *Here we have tried to enlist more than 50 inventions ...

They're trying to "enlist" the inventions. For what, I wonder ...
The definition of 'alternative' in the article is "strictly, this is one of two, not one of three, four, five or more" and as such, the phrase 'two alternatives' is unnecessary.
"Twitter proved you can be just as successful if you work on a feature now and scalability later"

fixed that for you ;)
>> "99% of apps never scale to "large numbers of users". "

Maybe because they don't get past the scaling issues ;)
Many dynamic-languages frameworks (notably PHP) are more scalable than writing a custom webapp in C. This is because C encourages you to store state in memory on the server, because it's really easy when everything is a single long-lived process. Good for performance, terrible for scalability.

PHP (and Rails/Django, if you ignore their ORMs) encourage you to store state on some collection of backend servers and communicate via RPC to retrieve that. This is bad for performance, but good for scalability. The front-end is just a dumb intermediary that converts data into HTML, so if you need to scale, just add more of them. Scaling the backend is more challenging, but at least you can do it without dragging all the front-end code around.
"A: Pete has put his money where his mouth is. If the necessary reforms are adapted to address this problem, Pete will certainly see his own taxes raised. A proponent of fiscal discipline for decades and co-founder of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition in 1992, he believes the wealthy should pay higher taxes and forego government-subsidized benefits they don't need."

From what I've seen, the self-made billionaires don't mind the extra tax. Buffet doesn't, Gates doesn't. It's the millionaires, those still trying to put together their nest egg, they are the ones who are worried about taxes.
And then there's situations like porting a Rails app to Lift and seeing a huge improvement in performance without touching the database / storage IO: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2147

Granted, it's not from the most unbiased source, so take it with a grain ;)
When does a netbook stop being a netbook?
I write code by analyzing requirements and then breaking them into a series of milestones and attaching requirements to each milestone. I show the client how I have interpreted their requirements and make sure we are in sync. I then delegate as much non-core work as possible to others. I tend to separate the functional and visual aspects of each milestone.

Regarding the ordering of milestones, where there is some discretion available I tend to do things that will keep the client happy. The objective is to deliver the project on time with the minimum level of stress for all involved.

I don't lie about in bed dreaming about imaginary packets.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-a...

Heh, I love how Microsoft is running a Google ad on "search options" that points to Bing.
If I do base my business here, what's the upside? As a tech startup, I can make far more money in the developed world for a lot less hassle. Doing business from the Valley also doesn't require compromising my personal morality or professional ethics, and I won't be constantly looking over my shoulder just because I'm white.

I know what the "right way" is. That's why I don't want to play.
Wants to make a jump from developer to product manager?
A buddy of mine who is a software developer for 7 years wants to make a jump into a product manager. I don't know what kind of advice I need to give him, whether he should go for it or not. He has a solid technical skills but he also expresses his interest brainstorming product ideas and coming up with new features at times (mostly he wants to be more involved in the product lifecycle from end to end).

So I want to ask the collective knowledge of HN to see whether he should try it out or not. (i haven't had time to research what's a job description for product manager anyway) anyone wants to share his/her opinions?
Why joint ventures fail so often
There is a difference though; those of us who complain about inane CodingHorror submissions don't submit CodingHorror links. We're trying to Just Not Look already. If the CodingHorror links disappeared from HN, I don't think you'd see CodingHorror discussion threads just so we could complain some more.
Why not use clearsilver(http://www.clearsilver.net/) to wrote frontend code? They do have a few large projects using clearsilver.
http://feed43.com/
Cory Doctorow: Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google
Please see my greasemonkey script for making Coding Horror posts better.

http://github.com/zacharydanger/coding-horrible/tree/master

It's more of a joke than anything.
I notice comments on the blog post are currently closed. I wonder why. ;)

Although I understand the author's position, it is obvious this is a tech person and not a well-rounded business person. The thing about programming is it's not all about tech.

A program typically serves one purpose: to make a company money. This requires more than just pristine tech. First and foremost it requires time to market so that a company can stay competitive. It also requires the ability for more than just a handful of people to be able to write it for expandability and, God forbid, staff changes.

C is fast. But slow to market. And slow to pick up a program. And slow to test. That's why there is so much WYSIWYG.

Don't get me wrong: there needs to be a lot more code behind and a lot less script out there, but in the end coding is a balance. Anytime anyone says it's all this or all that, you know the position is not sound. It's part speed, part usability, part scalability, part development speed, part readability, part expandability, part pretty pictures, etc. Balance in all things.
2 Entrepreneurs Help a Monastery Thrive
Actually what I would most miss in C is really basic stuff like dynamic strings, dynamic arrays and hashes.
innonate, bravo for putting this together for the NY Tech community ! See you later today !
> "I am absolutely sick to death of hearing about Susan Boyle, both in the traditional media and online. Nothing personal, you understand, I'm sure she's a perfectly lovely person. But I don't talk about Susan Boyle, because talking about her gives Susan Boyle power and currency. I just ignore Susan Boyle. I wish I had two brains so I could ignore her twice as hard. I. Just. Don't. Look. And if we could convince enough people to ignore her, she .. disappears. Poof. Like magic."

Unbelievable.
Would be great if you could somehow figure a way to show only trending topics specific to that city.

For example.. A bunch currently have "Blocks Twitter".. thats not really helpful, while a few have "rain" which tells me its probably raining in that city.

Looking at Toronto, it appears there is probably a nine inch nails concert tonight. Any way to link that to specific info about the event or topic?

Boston?
Wow, astounding ignorance/ungratefulness on static analysis. Coverity (a static analysis tool) found many defects in the code (17 fixed). The number of defects per KLOC for SQLite is not that great compared with other projects. KDE is actually much better: http://scan.coverity.com/rungAll.html

Engler (whose students founded Coverity) et al. had an OSDI "best paper" last year on using static analysis (with constraint solvers etc.) to automatically generate test cases, which actually beats hand written test cases for glibc with years of development.

http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/klee-osdi-2008.pdf
Fast, concise and reliable code? Try Perl
Hey, that works! Thanks a bunch. Much faster than the SSH tunnel I was using.
Yeah, it's going to be a great event. I hope we can have one on the weekend sometime too. That'd allow more people to be able to show up.
I think I just got a bit fed up of the crufty syntax for object-orientated code.

Everything computer-related sucks, you just have to choose something which sucks the least where it matters for your project. And familiarity counts for a lot too.
Verizon Wireless Rolling Out App Store Based On Java ME
Why Aren't Airliners Constantly Streaming Stats Home?
Given how superior the internet is in every possible way (search, ease of updating, ease of distribution, price) for content and for ads, I am amazed that the decline has taken so long.

My perspective is probably skewed by being an early adopter, though, and the fact that society always moves far slower than I hope.
How do you guys do code obfuscation and allow your service to be packaged into a downloadable, well, package?

One of my startups is thinking about doing something of the sort, for academic institutions to throw our software on their own servers.
Do people create anything original anymore? I mean original in the sense that it doesn't involve other people's content.

If not original, at least something that takes a bit more work than regurgitating RSS feeds.
"...my mind was still sharp and my energy was good...My schedule had too many blank spots. I was liberated. I was free. But I was joyless."

Another way to get back some joy would be to share yourself along with your money. Many people here aren't really interested in your money (well, some of us anyway), but I bet almost everyone is interested in you. How did you do it? What do you believe? What advice would you give? Probably most of all, what do you do to stay sharp at 81? Inquiring hackers want to know.
The State of MySQL
You can use Git without Github, you know.
I am glad U pointed at the greatness and the depth.
Are fans telling friends? If not, improve, don't promote.
What I don't get is why you'd pay $35+ for an Arduino when you can get an AVR (the microcontroller at the heart of an Arduino) for $5+.
Yeah. Thats a nice idea. There is a service which does that for twitter trends (whatthetrend.com). Will checkout their api and try to integrate.