skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Want to clarify and expand on (a) for us? Impossible is a big word.

As to (b) - The voice recog Buzz looked pretty amazing to me. Some of the mini games - not so much... The face tracking stuff was cool though.

(I think MS might be setting themselves up for a fall though - I agree this comment makes it look like this tech wont work as well as the ad makes it out to be)
> So this is why I’m writing a web framework in C.

Why C, why not assembly? In fact, you know what real programmers use? -- http://xkcd.com/378/

> Grow the fuck up...
> finding Rails developers is fucking impossible...

You grow up

> ediblepet.net is proudly powered by WordPress

When will you release your compiled blog platform?
It's tragic that this article even needed to be written, but at least the people the author is responding to are aware that wave is a protocol, huh? Baby steps...
Thanks for putting this together Rusty. I had a good time.

For the next one, I think crabs at Quarter Deck would be great.
Ranting aside, this seems like a valid complaint. Scaling and performance seem to be reasonably important in web applications, so why not write them in C? If the only complaint is the lack of good tools, why not build those tools?

Disclaimer: I don't actually work on web apps, and therefore have no experience with these things.
For the longest time I wouldn't have agreed with you but I had a change of heart while exhibiting at this one conference and this 21 year old guy came driving up in an expensive car while my 2004 Chevy Cavalier was being parked. There is a certain amount of hardship a person can take but it can go too far. Even going from Ramen to Cup of Noodles would be good sometimes.
I wrote the upload and download handlers for droplink.me in C as FastCGIs, anticipating performance problems. I built it; but they never really came. It was a fun exercise, but if I wasn't interested in having fun with C, I would have written it in a dynamic language.

I think the reason there isn't a "C web development community" is that programmers are more than willing to trade time for performance. Safe, readable code can be written in high level languages in a snap. You can see your ideas happen very quickly. If you run into performance problems (which I think is safe to say is a fairly rare occurrence for the average web developer who produces decent code, in any language), you can a) refactor or streamline what you already have or b) start fresh, lessons learned, in something lower level.

An aside: the site http://halfbakery.com is implemented entirely as an Apache module.
It's been done. http://advogato.org/proj/mod_virgule/
It would be quite a trump!

I'm sure it could be amended to remove that impression, but I don't have the time to look into that now.
Have you ever done business in Tanzania or Senegal or Kazhakstan or Peru?

Would you want to start a company in any of those places?
Ribbit, Sprout join forces for ad campaigns with phone features
Wouldn't a taser be less messy?
Business.view: Innovation through regulation
Cool hack is cool.
Well, I don't know that it really matters. If Microsoft knows what they're doing, the only way they're going to release this thing is either bundled with a game that's expected to be popular, or as a part of the next Xbox.

Console perhipherals released in other ways have historically not been successful, no matter how good they are.

Given this, I'd bank on them shipping the thing with the next Xbox. That should give them a few years to work the bugs out.
In web the model is different: You develop an app, push it live and find out what works and what does not, change and iterate.

This means that doing the iterations with minimum time and effort are important than worrying about scalability and performance.

You can always throw hardware at the perfortmace problem. If you get enough traffic to become worried about performace, that itself is the mark of success. But to become successful, first you must build the app and get it live somehow instead of worrying about performace issues or wasting months coding in some very low level language!
Twitter's Next Project: Location
The increased productivity of writing in a scripting language typically outweighs the cost of extra servers. Whereas with a desktop application, you only have X resources to allocate to a task, you can always "just throw more servers at" a web application to some degree.

It is done occasionally though; last I heard, large portions of Amazon.com were written in C.
Twitter, Flickr, Bing, *.live.com, Hotmail blocked in China
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"Terrorism has been ruled out"

I hate it when they try to manipulate mass opinion when they haven't even found the damn plane.

The first thing that comes to my mind is a bomb in a suitcase blew the plane in pieces.

Occam's razor.
From 2008-09-28:

The old blog software, Typo, is nowhere near as good as Wordpress. I only used it because it was written in Ruby on Rails and I am a Ruby on Rails coder. This is a very poor means of choosing software.
Oh, you haven't heard? He ported WordPress to C. I was pretty impressed.
Substitute code with prose, finagle a bit and this is great writing advice.
Colaab looks great
HI there.

I really like the colaab site. I am new to Silverlight and have started to look into some examples of annotation. In the ECG example of the silverlight Healthcare site they used layering, where you would figure out which sub-image you are on and then from there draw eg. a rectangle on top of the image. Then as the sub-image move, the rectangle will be moved and resized accordingly. This causes a bit of a eye-sore though.

If I may ask, what do you use to do the annotation on the deepzoom image? Please assist.

Thanks.
If your site starts to take a performance hit in rendering pages, you can simply write a module in C to handle the part of the script that's using an excessive amount of CPU time, and keep the rest in script.

But for most web apps, rendering HTML pages from script is not the bottleneck, it's the interaction with the database, and the solution is intelligent caching to reduce load on the database. The tools to mitigate these problems are already written in C (memcached, etc).
If you're going to write it in C, why not just write it in Java? You could use the Google Web Toolkit..
I think you don´t have to stick with C (or any another language ) for everything. Each language are good for something. Right now, for example, i´m working in a financial intelligent software analyzer. I wrote the web crawler in ruby (not rails) and now i´m planing to write the core of the system, the decision maker, at Lisp. I think a programmer should not be sticked with just one language, there´s a lot of cool things out of the C world. You dont have to write an entire C framework to build an web apps at C ... it´s just too troublesome. You have another challenges. But when it comes to process data very fast in your server, so maybe you should consider another language.
Tell HN: Starting afresh
Hi there Hacker News,

There's no telling whether this post will get read...but on the off chance that it does...

My name's Zee, I'm an avid HN reader and the newly appointed Editor (in Chief) at TheNextWeb.com.

I did some research on HN when I started writing for the site and, amongst some other sites, I discovered we weren't being held in high regard by some of you guys. In some cases, I can understand why.

Without dragging this message on though, I'd like to let you know that we've made some changes over the last couple of months and want to start afresh with you guys.

Along with my appointment, we've brought some cracking (means 'great' in the UK :]) writers on board and I genuinely believe our content is better than ever. We try to break stories when we can but when we don't, we attempt to make up for it with interesting angles and in depth thoughts. At the same time, we still pride ourselves on incorporating a bit of fun into the site, so when possible, you can leave our site with a smile.

So why am I doing this? Well, because I genuinely love this community and would love for you to enjoy ours.

We're completely open to criticism of our content when its not up to scratch and would appreciate support when it is.

So why "starting afresh"? Because if possible, I'd like for you to consider us as though we were a brand spanking new site and visit our site every now & again for a couple of weeks to see how you find us. With any luck, you might just find some genuinely interesting stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Zee.

PS. We've also got a big design revamp coming which should hopefully brighten up the place
Constructeur Maison Vosges (88)
From the article, "One of the things we need to do is find really cool products. We're building some but we'd also like to broaden out our offering and buy a cool product with a good development team and add it into the service."

So what kind of products/services do you think would be a great fit for LinkedIn?
more importantly the concept of free will cannot be defined in the first place. you can make claims that the future is perfectly predetermined, but there is zero possible way to justify that claim to be true or false.

you could also easily make the case that randomness does exist, and quantum theory would support that, but you still wouldn't be able to say that any of your actions were restricted from occuring or not.

the bottom line is, you are always going to do what you chose to do. regardless of how locked in that sounds, you DID make that choice. thusly your free will was executed as good as it needs to be. analyzing it further creates no useful discussion
I don't want to be harsh, but I took a look at your blog, and I'm struggling to come up with some kind of reasonable measure for "complex subjects" that matches any of the entries. And with 8 entries the "all the time" bit doesn't seem that spot on either.

It's late here so that's probably a little grumpier sounding that it's meant to be. Just slightly gobsmacked by the wording is all.

Edit: I just re-read this and it does sound pretty snarky and I don't want to come across as a troll or a nuisance, but really, read both the perils of pop philosophy article and the blog and you'll see where I'm coming from.
why don't twitter just open a metadata field and let the user fill in what ever data they like?

e.g.

This is a tweet
Datetime: 2009-06-02 21:07 GMT+8
Client: Ping.fm
Location: 40.460237,79.101563

another example, for private dynamic metadata fields:

This is another tweet, check this out http://bit.ly/chromium_win32_zip
clicks: 213

And twitter just sell the API for 3rd party metadata providers.
Most sites aren't CPU or memory intensive. If you are lucky enough to have enough users for that to be a concern you can add more servers. Sites normally bottle neck around the database and writing front end code in C is distraction from fixing the real problem which should be scaling the database.
why is a documentary on religion even here in HN? downvote me if you want.
That is why there are things called "application servers". Java is not perfect but it has a fine feature called JIT (Just In Time compiling) that produces machine code whenever it makes sense. Raw compiled language goes against the current trend for virtualization, whose goal is to save energy too. So in my opinion JIT is a good solution.
creative contortions = hacking.
It's a valid point. I wrote the Mibbit backend from scratch in Java for these reasons. I can only start to imagine the horror I would be enduring if I'd chosen a scripting language.

Having said that, choose the right tool for the job.

edit: Downmod me all you like. A scripted language wouldn't handle 2k req/sec on a couple of VPSs.
Web site performance problems usually don't have much to do with the raw executing speed of the language they're written in. The problems derive from poor understanding of how to handle concurrent connections. If your app is written in C, but is accessed through a CGI interface - starting a process for each request - then it's going to be slow. Similarly if you write a web server which makes blocking connections to a backend database, your server will be slow. If you use threads to handle concurrent connections, you're going to allocate 2mb stacks for each user - and your website is going to suck. This all has little to do with how fast a language can invert a matrix.
You can always throw hardware at the performance problem.

No, you can't. That's what scalability means. If you don't have scalability, then additional hardware will only take you so far before you begin wasting it.
I chose C because C is the dominant language right now

Good bit of satire. I wouldn't call it a troll because it's funny and just unbelievable enough, rather than inflammatory and merely misguided.
Did he outsource it to Tim Ferriss or something?! I thought he was busy finishing off Duke Nukem Forever.
Using i and j as loop or temp variable names when working with complex numbers should get bonus points ;)
Pushing the web forward can only be a motive of joy.

Kudos!
Just Get Going: The Single Most Effective Marketing Trick
Does this mean twitter's API is blocked in china? It seems like an open API is a great defense against getting blocked, if you already have an active developer community who can work to unblock it.

It would be cool if someone could make an open source project deployable on GAE or heroku to proxy twitter. It could self redirect daily to another instance of the app, making it unblockable. I don't know much about blocking btw.
It's only a matter of time before we see a story of a VC funding a "CSS framework startup". After all, we've had bit.ly.
I'm really excited by this, but I'd love to hear some guidance on pricing. Is this for hacker shops like mine, or for the IBMs of the world?
No. You really don't want to do this. Really.

I have worked with a project for the past several years that, by necessity not choice, required a web application framework written in C (it's an embedded platform) and I can tell you it is pure hell. The most mundane and simple tasks, often trivial one-liners in scripting languages, require many lines of error-prone C code even with a fairly rich set of libraries available. Working in this environment, you'll quickly realize why the rest of the world doesn't do it this way. Thankfully, this project is finally moving away from this architecture and I couldn't be happier about it.
Because most scaling problems in web apps are ultimately architectural. Yes, you may need to buy a second server sooner rather than later if you run Ruby instead of finely tuned C or C++, but for most apps you're going to need to worry about a second database server and replication before that, and long before reaching either you will have enough traffic that you'll need to prepare to handle front-end scaling properly soon anyway.

An example - from messaging middleware, not web frontends since it's somewhere I do have proper data:

I did a messaging middleware system in C a couple of years back. It's easy. I've done it before. After a while needs were changing and I decided to try writing the replacement in Ruby. It was a lot quicker to write (1/10th of the code size for roughly the same feature set).

We were handling 3-4 million events a day, which could easily result in 2-10 messages each.

The Ruby replacement spent 10% of a single 2Ghz Xeon core handling those messages. Of that 90% was spent in the kernel handling system calls that would've been roughly the same in a C/C++ version.

Even if the Ruby part of the equation was 10 times slower for the userland part, the most we'd have saved for our load was 0.9% of a single core. The most we'd save overall, regardless of scale, would be around 9-10%.

Doesn't mean there aren't things for which a language like C is better suited - I did my MSc. thesis on reducing error rates for OCR, and some of the image processing I did was prototyped in Ruby, but then translated to C for the final version because processing literally would've taken days for things that took less than an hour in C.

But scaling is very often constrained by other things than the performance of the laguage you write your app in. Especially in the web space where most interesting apps are database backed.

If your DB gets maxed out, having a hyper-optimizing compiler is not going to help you. If your app isn't designed to be scale across multiple servers (or at least cores - these days you can rent managed hosting on a 24 core server for less than $1k/month) you could very likely be screwed in ways that no compiler will save you from.

The extra developer time spent doing web development in low level languages is unlikely to be worth it unless you're at a massive scale.

If you can fit in 24 cores with a language like Ruby, your best case saving from switching to a compiled language these days is around $10k/year on hosting if you're ok with a single server, and about $20k if you want redundancy.

That doesn't pay for a lot of wasted developer time. Most web apps can fit in that, and for the lucky (or unlucky, depending on reason) that need to scale beyond that, the CPU time spend on the actual web app is likely to be a relatively small fraction of the total CPU time spent (on databases etc.) - architectural decisions is likely to be a far more important cost driver than the language of the web frontend.

As for developer availability - good luck to him finding good C programmers, and even more so finding good C programmers who aren't expensive and knows web development.
I like it though, I'd just remove the split at the bottom of the A personally, just have it as an arch.
RGallery: a free image gallery script
This is old stuff, but it cracks me up every time I (re)read it. My favorite one is:

#define TRUE 0

#define FALSE 1
I believe I just went cross-eyed.
removed ... i'm embarrassed at the wrongness of what i typed
Yeah, I heard it only took him four hours, too.
Could I make a request for an example of good documentation?
Obviously this is hilarious, and for the most part "do the opposite" would work just fine; but a readable, friendly, best-practice "this is how you should document stuff" article would be appreciated.
We do something similar for our apps on ec2. We use userdata to configure our ami, which then connects to our puppetmaster with the node details and everything happens like magic (ssl certs, web adresses, databases, web apps, security, users etc).
Actually the same people he bash, did it before him. Remember Campfire's poller was written in C?

Only recently they decided to change it to a must robust Erlang based implementation - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1728-nuts-bolts-campfire-...
So, do sunglasses that block green wavelengths render this ineffective?
Well, best of luck to you. I've never heard of your site before (that I can recall), so it will be starting "fresh" in my case.

Produce interesting content for us to consume, and we'll be more than happy to have you in our community!
The split is meant to be a lambda, and it's left part is supposed to evoke a lowercase a.
Respect for reaching out to the HN community the way you did. Will take a look over.
Funny article, I hope the author was not being serious. C is everything when you need performance, but having something done quick and maintainable - in C - no sorry. If somebody would dare to actually create a rails or django level framework in C it would simply have no community - not because it won't be 'hip' - I'd use it - but because implementing the same app would take exponentially more time. And that's what matters in the webworld.

No matter how many rps your app can serve, if there is no app you get no requests to serve...
Need to change it be based on phi.
Would Lua have worked there? It's a ~200k library designed to provide an embedded scripting language to C projects. (It's very similar to Python, but a tenth the size, and with a bit more Scheme influence.) While it may be too big for some especially tight embedded platforms, if you could fit it in, it would have likely been substantially less painful.

It's also a pretty good scripting language on its own merits, and has replaced Python as my default language. (Unlike Python, its design expects you to know at least a little C, but in exchange, it avoids cluttering the language with things that C already does well.)
Reread what you wrote :) Once you lower the the db io issues, rendering does become the bottleneck.

Luckily rendering scales just by adding more servers.

Rewriting templating code in C though rarely adds more speed, most dynamic languages tune their string handling as much as possible.

Also, utilizing http caching mechanisms are a (quite underused) great solution for lowering load.
Clearly, painting is a different skill than is graphic design. Not to beat on him too much, but I think the results speak for themselves.
This particular airplane (F-GZCP) was involved in a ground collision incident with another Airbus in 2006, where its wing hit the other Airbus' tail. The wing was repaired.

An improper fix would certainly lead to an in-flight breakup after many operating cycles (see Japan Airlines flight 123 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAL_123; China Airlines flight 611 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Airlines_Flight_611 for example), especially in conditions of heavy turbulence that this airplane obviously experienced.

Either that or a bomb is my educated speculation.
i have made no previous judgment on thenextweb, having never really read it before, but here are my immediate thoughts:

just looking at the first page, this is a segment of the headlines i see:

"All the 3rd Generation iPhone rumours in one handy image"
"Is Microsoft forcing Bing on IE6 users?"
"Microsoft brings Twitter and Facebook to XBox Live"
"Exceptionally refurbished Mac mini"

and all the rest are similar. these aren't the types of articles people here are interested in. they're tech fluff, things that will maybe bring in eyeballs from a digg or something.

start writing articles i'm interested in and i might start reading. and odds are, HN readers are on the same boat. if you want to know what types of articles the community likes, look at whats at the top of the front page.