skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A press release would be a good way to get this across to a different audience -- advertisers and competitors, mostly. (Actually, the company I'm with does some PR work; email address is in the profile).

Just imagine reading a post like this from, say, the reddit guys. They might say "In the coming days, you'll see fewer Lolcats and conspiracy theories, and more thoughtful essays and insightful humor." But there isn't a clear path from here to there, and once we're there, we'll know about it -- so you're announcing something that either a) will happen, and won't need to be announced, or b) won't happen, making the announcement dishonest.
An interactive music video
Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers - Ghostery
Found via http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/01/mesmerizing-soy-tu-aire-int...

Pretty damn cool concept. You certainly pay more attention to a song when you're basically creating a visual representation of it (dancing on mouse?)...
My sentence needs the period moved to the left a bit.

Not if you're English.
I will live to be a happy old man if I never read another blog post telling me in absolute terms what I must do and why I'm an idiot if I don't. I blame Joel Spolsky for this, his tone and style seems to have kicked off an entire sub-culture of blogging where the posts read like a lunatic standing on a street corner demanding that we repent before the end of the world and the coming of the messiah.

Bloggers, please try a kinder, gentler tone, one that suggests you and I are colleagues. One that suggests you have discovered some neat thing and won't I have a look at it and isn't it interesting to play "what if" games with it and maybe, just maybe I might experiment with it.

Looking back on my own posts, I would say the strongest ones are those where I found a more reasoned voice. An essay can be strongly opinionated without being imperative.
Totally serious. Nowhere I've read about those 4mins you claim.

Here is what I've found:

The Washington Post:
"among the key questions are how long the plane kept flying after its last automatic satellite transmission and why no mayday call was received from the pilots."

"the aircraft emitted a series of automatic messages via satellite indicating that its electrical system was not functioning and that it had suffered a loss of cabin pressure. Those were the final signals from the plane. "

As soon as it explodes, the transmitters start sending info about electrical failure and cabin pressure, of course, and they do so for as many minutes as they fall from 30K feet.

Why there was no mayday call?

They were already dead. Remember Columbia.
My Barduino (shameless self promotion).

Ruby + Arduino = Drink dispensing Barmonkey driven by a Ruby DSL that cost me like $50 to build.

Example recipe:

drink 'Screwdriver' do

serve_in 'Highball Glass'

ingredients do

2.ounces :vodka

5.ounces :orange_juice

end

end

Code, video, photos:
http://www.matthewdavidwilliams.com/2008/10/17/introducing-b...
Why would anything need to go to db? :/
Going to db should always be a last, final resort.

People often seem to think a db is the only way to write any webapp, and that everything must depend on the db. That's bad architecture.

In the case of Mibbit, db access is only done for writes, lazily, in the background.

The bottlenecks for me, are CPU, network, and ram. And yes, you can throw servers at it, if you're frivolous and don't intend to make any money. I decided to go the other way and be profitable ;)
I was lucky enough to work on this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2008/12/the_rockterscal...

The hat of rock was my invention :-)

Abdel A Saleh, https://twitter.com/abdels
So roughly how much would this cost for a small team, say <10? I'm assuming far too much for me, since it's not visible anywhere, but I'm still curious :)
one more: http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5518/arcbluew.jpg
Usually we test this on our own soldiers. So you have a valid concern.
The point of CSS is to separate presentation from markup. This approach uses a hierarchy of divs to define presentation. If that's alright with you, may as well use tables.
Actually, the problem isn't compiled vs. non-compiled, the problem is C vs. languages that you can actually safely manipulate strings in without segfaults, buffer overflows, and other "own the box/own the webservice" flaws.

Arguably, all the languages that show up down near C in the Shootout would be fine languages to write webservices in, since nearly all of them are as fast as C without the eXtreme danger.

Some web services are "shovel strings from the DB out to the user", like CMSs, but for those that aren't, this isn't a terrible point.

(It's easy to forget when you're the type of person who hangs out on HN, but for most people, compiled == C, or C++ if you're lucky.)
Exits with VC and Angel Investors
the blog misses a central point - its not the choice of language thats a bottleneck. I'll trade performance to large number of users any day because I know I can solve the performance issue.

Personally I'd go with perl - as thats the language Im most comfortable with.
Which do you prefer (and why), HtDP or SICP?
CodingHorror: I Stopped Reading Your Blog Years Ago
I have done this in c++... not write an entire web framework, just use compiled c++ code to do some heavy lifting on a shared web server. It worked great. Before, I was using python/django. c++/cgi did the same task and was about 30 times faster.

I'm not sure I'd throw away the scripting languages entirely, but making it easy to integrate c or c++ into these languages in this manner is probably a good idea. It's not that hard to write very highly optimized c++ and it can have a huge impact on performance... at least that has been my experience.

While the article was inflammatory, I think the guy has a valid point. He just needs better people skills ;)
If you must write web apps in C then consider writing it as an Apache module. But how much traffic would you need to justify this? Web app developers have an unhealthy obsession with performance and scalability that distracts them from building what really matters: features. Twitter proved you can be just as successful if you work on features now and scalability later.
Dick. USE IT. OR DON'T. NEXXXXTTTTT.
Beware of the complicated deal
XP and SCRUM can increase my productivity up to 300%. But, after 5 years of successful XP and SCRUM practice, I burned out. I just cannot think about work. Long vacations helps me a lot, but for short period of time - 1 month vacation restore my productivity for about 6 months only.

How to classify that? As success or as failure?
Wait, so MS isn't cooperating with China and giving them a special search engine? Microsoft's product is actually being less evil than Google's? Is this some kind of topsy-turvy world?

Well, this is the first compelling reason to switch to Bing I've seen to date. Maybe I'll give it a spin later.
I semi-agree with the comment about this sounding like a press-release - re-read it and you'll see that this reads like advertising copy.

However, I'm perfectly willing to believe that you wrote it specifically for the purpose of "advertising" your site here. To that end I think it's fine.

However, I observe that even though you say you're an avid HN reader, you haven't posted a "reply" with the URL to ensure that you get a direct link. You've left it to individuals to copy-n-paste the plain text from your submission.

I find that interesting. Perhaps you're not such an avid reader and didn't realise it would be useful, perhaps you're not technical, and didn't know it was necessary, or perhaps there's another reason.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts/comments.

For reference, here's a direct link: http://www.TheNextWeb.com
> Once you lower the the db io issues ...

It is highly unlikely that happens.
Once you lower your DB issues, if the application is responsive enough you start working on other features. By the time you're done the application got new users and the DB is a problem again ... it's a cycle :)

Fortunately HTTP servers do scale by caching and load-balancing.

The author of the post probably never worked in real-world conditions. You first have to have users and real needs for scaling, and that doesn't happen unless you deliver a useful application first, and you also have to deliver it pretty fast, otherwise you might lose to a competitor with the same idea.
But you're comfortable running a binary as root?
i think it might be meant at least a little tongue-in-cheek.
Yet another oversimplification. The 48 Laws of Power are certainly present in everyone's behavior, but it's a bit of a stretch to label them as the sole culprit for XP's failures.
Techurls: Source to keep track latest technology news and articles
I can't speak for the camera, but it should be remembered the XBox360 is no slouch when it comes to processing power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_hardware#Central_proce...

"The CPU, named Xenon at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM. The CPU emphasizes high floating point performance through multiple FPU and SIMD vector processing units in each core. It has a theoretical peak performance of 115.2 gigaflops and is capable of 9.6 billion dot products per second. Each core of the CPU is simultaneous multithreading capable and clocked at 3.2GHz. However, to reduce CPU die size, complexity, cost, and power demands, the processor uses in-order execution in contrast to the Intel Coppermine128-based Pentium III used in Xbox which used more advanced out-of-order execution.... A 21.6 GB/s front side bus, aggregated 10.8 GB/s upstream and downstream, connected Xenon with the graphics processor/northbridge. Xenon was equipped with a 1 MB Level 2 cache on-die running at half CPU clock speed. This cache is shared amongst the three CPU cores."

I don't think the processor will be the problem. The camera could be.
Southwest Airlines Callers Are Now Free to Hang Up on Hold Time
Why can't we downmod articles?
The vast majority of web applications are straight-up CRUD. Not making that all about a normalized schema is the stupid mistake.

As far as relational DBs being the problem, that's more a matter of the free ones not cutting the mustard. Oracle and DB2 can handle jaw dropping load in the hands of an expert.
Cheers for the honesty...about the URL...

The only reason I didn't post the link was because i didn't want it to appear like I was spamming...that is honestly it.

In regard to this being an advertisement, I can honestly say it was just meant to be a note to you guys in the hope that I guess yeah, we'd see more of our stuff shared on here. Nothing more, nothing less.
Has this guy never heard of op-code cache? You can easily avoid a lot of script compiling on a production web server.
Guys Left Behind
Guys, his point isn't valid. If you want to write things in C, the current implementation of ruby LETS YOU. That's the whole point of C extensions.

You can then ask, why bother writing in Ruby at all, and i think you'll find the answer to be, it's not anywhere near as much of a pain in the ass as writing C is.

The elitism argument is bullshit. We don't need fewer people programming. We need better ways to tell if someone knows what the fuck they're doing.

In my opinion the tools we use and develop should be as accessible as possible. Anyone should be able to pick them up and get what they need to do, done. Good luck doing that with C.
The problem isn't that your post is too glib. The problem is that:

1. Most of us have never heard of you before.

2. Nevertheless, you have somehow managed to appear at the top of the front page,

3. ...apologizing for a conflict that none of us can remember and that I can't find with Google.

4. Taking 1+2+3 together, you look (at best) like you're taking yourself too seriously, and at worst like a manipulative spammer.

Please don't take this as an indication of hostility. If your intentions were legitimate, I wish you the best of luck in raising the quality of your site.
This is seriously all it takes. All I want is some indication that someone has read the posting, and that they comprehend what we're looking for. Anything on top of that is a bonus.
I hope I never have to edit layouts coded like this. It would take me back to '99.
Some incisive social criticism but short on details, even philosophical ones, about what's going to make his foundation any different from the thousands which exist today.
I like Perl ... using modern Perl practices and CPAN modules. It's the best web development environment I worked with ... and I've worked on projects with PHP (my own framework :) + Symfony), Python/Django/web.py, ASP.NET, Java/Struts and Ruby/Rails.

You should give it another try sometimes. Take a look at Catalyst (the web framework), DBIx::Class, Moose and POE.
Is DB2 not free? I thought they had a free version?

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/about.html
It's a valid point for Mibbit, but Mibbit is not your average web app.

For the average web app, it's a lousy point, really (and, as pointed out by others, it's a troll/satire).

The fact that you take it seriously is a little worrying tbh. Are you feeling ok? :-)
I'm not sure that's accurate. c++ is a large language. Finding developers who use the parts of c++ that you need to get the task done is easy (boost, qt, stl, wx, etc). Finding developers that know all of c++ is next to impossible. c++ is large because it can solve very large, very complex problems, but not every c++ application attempts to do this. c++ can be used in very simple ways too and many people use it in that fashion.
NASA gets cold feet on Moon base plan
Lua is meant for embedding in C programs; that is different from running on embdedded systems. The latter typically features drastically less RAM and CPU cycles, so most interpreted languages (which are not shy about trading away some performance) don't cut it. There are some exceptions; FORTH, for instance, can fit in about a kilobyte and its performance isn't miserable. But putting e.g. Lua in a confined space would not work out well.
float sets the display back to block. display: inline is for an IE bug.
A bit more detail on HOW he's going to deal with said fiscal issues would have been welcome.
Reread what you wrote :) Once you lower the the db io issues, rendering does become the bottleneck.

Not really. Sending and receiving data to/from the browser becomes the bottleneck.

If it takes 50ms to receive the query from the browser, 0.1ms to retrieve the data from the cache, 10ms to render it, and another 50ms to send it back to the browser - the bottleneck is now network communications with the browser.

There are, unfortunately, limits on how much that can be improved.
Why write your own framework when you can use Silverlight?
Apple's Nehalem Xserve serves the need for speed
To my understanding "embedded systems" spans from something with 1k of memory to something like a cell phone or a router. Working with Lua is quite comfortable on the latter, hence my qualification. It's been ported to Lego Mindstorms (http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbLua/index.html), for example, which is "a 32 bit ARM7 microcontroller with 256K of FLASH and 64K of RAM."

It's not clear from the post which end of the spectrum he or she works with. (I don't work with embedded systems professionally, I've just tinkered with OpenWRT, cell phones, etc. as an enthusiastic amateur.) It would be usable in the same niches that SQLite is, for example.
Isn't that's what CGI is for? If you want a full blown web application framework in C is going to be a lot of work. String manipulation, parsing HTML with standard C libraries is not going to be easy. Java, C# and Python have pretty decent frameworks to do this I don't see the point of writing one using C.
Do the needful and reply to me the same.
Powerful Version Of Google Search Appliance Can Grow Exponentially
I don't think it's a troll, but just someone who is really in to performance, like I do, and I agree with him on some points.

But what I don't agree is using just C. C is too low level and is a horrific unfit task for web development. Instead C++ would be a good fit (and writing in C mixed in). The STL/Boost provide a wonderful abstraction layer that does pretty much anything you throw at it with ease, plus there are lot of other libraries for anything else you can ever think of. I've written several web applications in C++, and it was actually very much like writing in Python/PHP/Ruby and at time prefered writing it in C++ after writing a poc in a scripting language. They were just a little bit less readable but very clean, but the biggest plus the the multiple magnitude performance increase of the application it self with FastCGI. (all these applications were serious number crunchers and had lot of CPU and Memory Bound problems).

tldr;
C for web dev painful, C++ with STL/Boost good/easy/fast/clean.

Also I've heard of wt, a C++ web framework although I've never used it http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt
Been there, done that. It's bittersweet closing down the old project in favor of the new one, especially when the new one came into existence mainly to promote the old. On one hand, you're happy to have had something catch on. On the other hand, you're unhappy to have had something not.

But onward and upward, and best of luck to the AppJets (or now, the Etherpads). They're super bright guys, so it's not surprising at all to see them succeeding.
In this case you're left with a lot more than an apology. You're left with all you need to just host it yourself.
I'm quite sure that, if we had HN memes, your 2nd line would spawn another one. It's very HN-ish.

Example usage: "Yes, he can write well, but has he ever really a webapp?"
If you, like me, were wondering what the Peter G. Peterson Foundation supports, look here: http://www.pgpf.org/about/faq/

I would have appreciated more information from the article on what the 1 Billion dollars was going to be used for.
Would you not agree that the web is becoming more "real time". People demand webapps to update as they view them - ajax,comet,getNextBuzzword(). Those demands place a higher load on servers, especially when you scale to large number of users.
PbLua: Lua on Lego Mindstorms
IE:8 Defining Document Compatibility (render page with older version)
I'm not sure how to react to that to be frank...

I'll try though.

1. I introduced myself, and have been active for a while but an (RSS)subscrber for a long while.

2. I wasn't expecting the post to get to the front page. At best, I thought it might receive a few points and a few people might comment and appreciate the effort I'd made.

3. I didn't really apologise. I just wanted to start afresh, and hope that you guys would consider reviewing our content to potentially share on HN in the future.

Also, there wasn't a conflict, but there have been comments that have said stuff along the lines of "I've never enjoyed TheNextWeb" and some other slightly harsher stuff.

4. Maybe I am taking myself or ourselves too seriously, I don't really know. I do know I'm not a spammer though and genuinely just wanted to do something which I'd been thinking about for a while...I also figured it was rather personal & bold, in the sense that very few other tech sites/bloggers would consider doing it.

And hey, I admit it did feel a little hostile at first, but thanks for updating your comment with that last line.
The pointer and the accelerometers are two separate things. I haven't heard many complaints about the pointer accuracy (which is what Rayman uses for the section you're thinking of).
Viaweb used C on the backend.
It's in the CNN Article (the four minutes). Here is the relevant bit:

"But about 4:15 a.m. Paris time, Flight 447's automatic system began a four-minute exchange of messages to the company's maintenance computers, indicating that "several pieces of aircraft equipment were at fault or had broken down," he said."

You can read the full article here:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/06/01/air.france.braz...

My instincts tell me that if power was lost, they wouldn't be able to send a mayday call. Of course, if total power was lost, how was the plane able to communicate with the server?

A bomb could have caused this explosion, but doesn't fall within the usual terrorist M.O. No group has stepped forward to claim the attack- half the "fun" of a terrorist organization is spreading fear through your message.

Additionally, it would not make sense for a terrorist to blow up the plane 4 hours into the flight over the Atlantic Ocean. It would make more sense to blow it up as soon as it takes off or lands, to maximize damage on the ground as well.

I am not a pilot, nor a security expert. This is all just my street-instincts talking.
The NY Tech Meetup Showcase (today btw 3:30 - 6:30)
60 New York City startups are putting on a demo pit (free to attend) today from 3:30 to 6:30 at FIT's Great Hall. We are one of the companies, but I know of at least a handful of other Hacker News folks that will be there too. It's free and should be a good time.
60 New York City startups are putting on a demo pit (free to attend) today from 3:30 to 6:30 at FIT's Great Hall. We are one of the companies, but I know of at least a handful of other Hacker News folks that will be there too. It's free and should be a good time.
Hey, look at that, China is a dictatorship. Amazing, isn't it??
Inventions That Changed The World
I'm struggling to come up with some kind of reasonable measure for "complex subjects" that matches any of the entries

I would argue that the reason the subjects appear straightforward is because I spent the time to make them so. Making your application viral, or starting up with a friend, are both complex topics with many issues, side-issues, loops, tangents, etc.

I'm not saying that whatever this guy is trying to talk about isn't more complicated. Perhaps it is. I'll never know, since I can't be bothered to read something that's so badly presented. However, the fact is he's made no effort whatsoever to make his ideas intelligible to others, other than jotting down his thoughts and posting them online. That's a lazy attitude.

I'd say we need more people who make a conscious effort to present complex information in a simple way, and fewer of those who feel that the world owes it to their brilliance to either make the effort to decipher their ramblings or keep their little minds occupied with simpler thoughts.

PS: http://danieltenner.com is my new blog, stated in February. Yes, I should update it more, but running my start-up does take up most of my time. Before that I ran http://inter-sections.net, for about a year and a half.
The thing that makes me most wary about XP is its origins. They developed XP practices while working on the Chrysler Corporation Compensation System, which was eventually scrapped in an unfinished state after 5 years.

However, XP is touted to be a system of practices to enable people to get software created on time and under budget that is more adaptable. The skeptic in me just screams, "But your first big test case failed on all those accounts. How can you recommend these practices when, in practice, they didn't work?"

Also: The 48 Laws of Power read more like the 48 Laws of Douchebaggery.
I wonder - would people learn science if they couldn't gossip the newest pop philosophy without it?

(Who am I kidding, we call it the intertubes, of course not.)
Pixel Qi screen demo Live from Taipei
It sounds like you're trying to terrorize TechCrunch. Why do they care if they're blocked in China, much of their traffic comes from elsewhere.
Endless original, copyright-free music
Here is my twitter based home security system. I'm using phidgets but I have ordered an Arduino and will update the code. Making software do things in the "real" world is a lot of fun.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Combining-security-system-wi...
Some Interesting Answers To Questions You Might Not Yet Have Asked.
this is notable because it's the first totally free expo for startups too. no pay for play! all abt the community, baby!