skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"For FriendFeed to have put this out I think they must be confident it can scale."

I am not sure FriendFeed has to worry too hard about that yet, compared to Twitter: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com+twitter.com/
It's amusing how people attack C++ from both directions. You get the main article apparently complaining that C++ isn't retarded simple and verbose like C. Then you also get people like in this link basically complaining that C++ isn't Lisp.

Allow me to clarify: C++ is a replacement for C. C code rewritten as C++ will almost always be shorter and the same speed. The structure and function of the code will also tend to be clearer in C++.
It's a shame that profiling/performance/cache utilization analysis tools aren't nearly as common/standardized as the rest of a developer's toolbox.
Yes, deploying FatFree CRM on Heroku would be incredibly important for me!
To me, market segmentation is different when it comes to software.

In your text editor example, the author can add an SFTP feature, but once it's coded it's coded. There's no extra cost to ship out all software with that feature after it's coded, except perhaps some extra support costs. (I imagine those would be pretty minimal.) At that point, I only see two reasons to segment the market from the users' perspective:

1) To not confuse your less advanced users with more features. This is a pretty weak reason, IMO.
2) To make sure that the people who actually wanted the feature are the ones paying for it. After the cost of development is paid for, this reason goes away.

Beyond these reasons (unless I'm missing something, which is entirely possible), releasing different grades of software just hurts your users. It makes you more money, though, so maybe that's enough justification.
The first rule of being in a hole: stop digging.

Snarky, overplayed comments are never well received here.

Even less well received are complaints about being downmodded.
OK, picked one random whine:

"When an invalid program finally crashes (or enters an infinite loop, or goes to sleep forever), what you're left with is basically the binary snapshot of its state (a common name for it is a "core dump"). You have to make sense of it in order to find the bug."

If you write an invalid program... Then you are doing it completely wrong! (http://lemonodor.com/archives/2007/10/youre_doing_it_wrong.h...)

There are two types of peope: those who belive what they read and those who want to try out their own and then read and after that whine or ... :)
My entire family uses aol on top of their broadband and won't let me explain that you can still keep your email if you aren't paying for it, it is like aol has brainwashed them.

And the ads attached to their email and yahoos are extremely annoying to me
One size fits all life philosophy is a little annoying. "If you examine your own life, you'll see what I'm saying is true for you, whoever you are!" Even if it's true for many people, it's not true of all people, and the author makes no effort to distinguish.

edit: deleted example paragraph
If you don't want to spend 5 or 10 minutes writing a cover letter for the job, why are you bothering to apply at all? And why should anyone bother to spend the 5 minutes to read your resume?
"Rock Star" is a misnomer. Avoid it, and job descriptions that use it.
There certainly are. But not many people choose to go into it, and you're suggesting limiting that pool even more.
Freebase Hack Day in SF
This article does not talk about Vi vs. Emacs. Is the title editorializing?
I can say that when I'm writing code, I'm writing code. Reading HN, checking email, etc., don't have the same feeling.
Nah. I'm using Firefox 3.5 on a Mac (OS X 10.5.7).

Still blurry for me... ah well.
I don't think he is the type of person that is going to go on record conceding that his massive investment is losing out to a competitor. He is right about sharing music (can you create artist pages on fb?), but he's wrong about sharing everything else, photos, videos, thoughts. Facebook is more then a directory.
I don't think you understood the post. The point isn't that people look forward to holidays, weekends, or whatever particular things were mentioned. The point is that people are too often living looking forward to something.
Freebase FTW yeah!
From the article "Modes are not always bad. (1)Modes cause issues if they make computers behave in unexpected ways. However, if the modes themselves are obvious to the user, (2)if it is always clear how to exit the current mode, and (3)if the modes interfere with as few of the user’s actions as possible, these issues disappear."

VI screws up in all of this (1) (2) and (3).
From the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

From what I can tell, jokes are not tolerated here because they lower the signal-to-noise ratio. It's not that HN voters are humorless, it's just that they don't want HN to be a place people come for humor, because there's plenty of other spaces on the web for that. I'm starting to think of it as a college discussion group - you go to learn, not to hear Simpsons jokes.

Also the "overlords" joke has a long and tired memetic history in the hackersphere, which would explain the quantity of downvotes.
Can someone post a link to his actual thoughts on C++?
I say, pick your battles. "fail" as a noun rankles far more.
Killing "(epic) fail" would be truly awesome. I'd even be willing to bring back "tubular" in trade.
This actually reminds me of people buying stuff, they eventually don't even need, only because it is on sale.
I'm really looking forward to this. The last one was great.
Not practical technology yet, note the "multiply the necessary computing time by around 1 trillion" part of the article.

Discussed on HN already, here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657859

And here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678975
Why do you make this assertion? Other than with a proprietary solution (e.g. Oracle RAC), what options are there to easily add/remove capacity on demand from an RDBMS?

Now, you can just add additional "shards" of a MySQL database, but that breaks the whole "R" of "RDBMS" (can't do joins across the shards). In addition, you're limited to a ring-style Master-Master replication scheme vs/ a grid/mesh. There's also MySQL NDB_Cluster engine, but I have never (to date) seen it in production (there are just too many limitations).

Proprietary solutions like Oracle RAC may scale on demand, but require a DBA team. The cost overhead offsets any savings gained through on-demand provisioning of resources.

Not to mention Oracle RAC (and even MySQL) aren't exactly friendly to commodity hardware (which is what both official cloud computing solutions and de-facto clouds used in high-tech companies' data centers are built on).
Texting vuln turns iPhone into remote bugging device
It's been a long time since the last time I saw spam in a blog. Totally embarrasing.
Ah, I see you can pause it only if you are logged in.

The jsonp requests I was seeing in FireBug did not exhibit the normal kind of long polling behavior I have seen on other sites, so I might have been wrong. Apologies.
Isn't it really calculating max * 11, since the functions pointed at by func_table[max] are 11 bytes long?

I'm not much of a C coder, is there a more idiomatic way to do this?
I mean, I guess this article is true to some degree.

But, really, if by 'doing the dishes to do the dishes', doing the dishes takes me twice as long, I don't want to do it that way. I'd much prefer to rush through it in half the time, to spend the other part of the time 'really living,' doing something I truly do enjoy or want to do.
Where is the source of the iPhone OS to fix it? ;)
True but scaling vertical is really a luxury, in most situations especially free to play or open systems for a certain level of usage, this is typically not economical. For a good vertical scaling strategy you need servers that reach into the tens or hundreds of thousands of $$.
Yes it is on purpose. The idea is to think about the more general theme of editing modes, not the discussion about the iPhone the article narrows the topic to.
I couldn't find any useful information in that thread. A couple C aficionados basically scream they don't like C++ and baselessly claim it has performance and portability problems.
It could be max * 11, yes, but with optimizations turned on the compiler could produce something that wouldn't be that easy to calculate in a more general case. It's just that a file with one million functions is practically impossible to compile with optimizations.
I've had a problem like this. I solved it by closing the ajax object when I was done with it.

It's not actually reloading, it's just the spinner keeps spinning in older browsers until ajax is all done.
Doesn't work in IE6!
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 92 – The Internet Groan
I get that your title is sort of a joke (I hope), but if you just go by this article then it seems to me that it's suggesting that Emacs is more "usable" than vi! Emacs uses quasi-modes like crazy. Maybe I didn't understand.
Never seen it happen :-)

I'm sure if he shared his actual thoughts, it would bring him some serious hassle, what with people wanting to debate with him. Much easier just to make it clear he isn't willing to be reasonable on the topic.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/2067
Given that animals and humans who don't produce (or are insensitive to) myostatin appear to be otherwise healthy, I think it's a safe bet that myostatin's main function in mammals is to limit muscle growth. Muscle is metabolically expensive to build and maintain, so inhibiting unnecessary muscle growth would be advantageous when high-calorie/high-protein food is scarce.
Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry.
Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No.
EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-olds].
If the point were valid it would be troubling, but I'm not convinced on the evidence provided.
Anybody can vomit text into a file, rename it ".html", and have it rendered to something by a web browser. When they try the same thing with XHTML, they receive an error page. Even otherwise reasonable programmers, who would not expect invalid code to be parsed by a compiler, blithely contribute to the spread of invalid HTML. For example, the front page of news.yc fails with 143 errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...

A second factor is that IE does not support XHTML. Any features that rely on XHTML support (inline SVG, MathML, custom attributes, &c) are unavailable in a "portable" application. IE 6 is still a very large chunk of the market, especially among non-technical users, so relying on any features it doesn't support is iffy from a business perspective.
Valgrind/cachegrind are fairly common in the UNIX/C world. Our company uses it as part of the automated build/test run.
In general, people like emacs for its programming environment and vim for its ease of use after familiarity. So... the title's a bit misleading?
Always looking for the home run shot
Aye, you've caught me. Let me rein myself in, then: equality makes sense for value objects only (as value objects have no sense of separate identity; for value objects A and B to be equivalent means that they're also a singular entity.)

That's still a minority of the objects we deal with in programming, though, and again, there's no reason to say "equals" when you can specify "is equivalent to" or "is identical to" instead; value objects will happily give you your expected answer under either comparison, and it will force you to define the comparison for business/model objects (that is, those with IDs) as well.
not all jokes are frowned on here. we just have very high standards. repeating a catch-phrase you heard somewhere else is never going to fly.

also, jokes are ranked differently. if you make a non-joke comment that is polite but not very interesting, its score will probably stay at 1. if you make a polite joke that isn't funny, it's probably going to get downmodded.

that might seem cruel, but i'd say it's necessary. a joke that falls flat tends to drag down the level of commentary.
reminds me of "a meeting without an agenda is a chat"
I'm old enough to remember white flight. To make an analogy with MySpace migration to Facebook is absurd.
The Zappos Way of Managing
more playfulness (:
Teaching code optimization to 11-year-old son.
Right. What I meant was that (func_table[max] - func_table[0]) is equivalent to (in the example assembly given) max * 11.

When I asked if there was more idiomatic way to do this, I meant more idiomatic than the original code, not actually using (max*11) in the code.
You cite a piece detailing how the use of unseen modes makes interacting with a computer difficult and infer this as a boon to a strongly moded editor that offers nothing resembling the sort of modeless simplicity the author was advocating. The saving grace given in the article for modes was that they be evident and easily disabled and that they be fully under the control of the user to toggle on and off.

Emacs modes come closer to this than vi. When you type it enters text at the cursor. All special modes are entered via holding key chords. Modes which are not done at the end of the chord are generally recorded in the status line so it is evident they are active.

At any rate, the piece, having nothing to do with this traditional browser debate, though of token interest in itself was slighted by your title used to link it.
I don't know if anyone else reads "Inc." magazine, but there was a terrific article on Zappos last month (I just submitted it to HN):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685301

Read it if you get a few minutes. It went into great detail about Zappos' success and their corporate culture, and what they did to put their company on the map.

P.S. This month's "Inc." has a front-page article on PG and YCombinator which is also a pretty good read.
5 nines is not something you get on paper worth the ink normally. SLAs in the civil sector generally top out at 3 nines. Very, very rarely you talk about 4 and those are dealt out by the insurance company, not by the service provider.

I'm talking about real SLAs with compensation here, mind you, not the toilet paper you get from every cheapo ISP.
He was being sarcastic. I am being pedantic.
>There's no extra cost to ship out all software with that feature after it's coded

By this logic, Chipmaker should only sell their most powerful processors, because the actual manufacturing-cost is not really the reason for the price difference between a top of the line i7 processor and a different one with lower specs.

You can look at it from a different angle: Let's say you have a powerful program and you are charging 1000$ for it (e.g. Photoshop). Your market research has shown that a lot of "casual user" are looking for a product like the one you are selling, but are not willing to pay the 1000$. So you develop a version without the more advanced functions and sell it for 200$ (e.g. Photoshop Elements).

It's not really about "not confusing the user", but about offering another option. How does this hurt the consumer?
Whenever I hear FriendFeed, I can only think of FriendFace:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg
thanks for the post. reminds me of a time I was totally relaxed, did what I had to, and liked what I did. It is a great feeling to focus just on single things.

What helps are repeating rituals. Like brushing teeth right before going to bed. Therefore one is able to switch different tasks more easily and separated.
He didn't say that opensource is better; he just said that you always get the best, 100%, full edition of it.

However, this might be not true for dual-licensed software.
Have you considered a straight razor (the old kind they used to have in barber shops)? A good one is a little expensive (a couple hundred bucks for a brand like DOVO) but will last you for decades if you take care of it. I've heard they're good for people who get razor burn or ingrown hairs from normal safety razors (since they are way sharper).
original paper is here: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html
Is the article attributing a racist agenda? Or is it talking about an empirical reality. If the average facebook user is indeed more educated than the average myspace user, it's certainly worth talking about. Even if it is not the case, it certainly seems to be the general perception--as a friend of mine recently said: "myspace if for pedophiles and dropouts, facebook is for everybody else."
I'm not sure how having different editions of the same software hurts users, but maybe I'm just applying a different grade of the same meaning to the word "hurt" ;)

I suppose that the author could let users drive new features by making a list of proposed features and having users donate money towards the implementation of those features. I'm pretty sure I've seen that somewhere. But the segmentation seems to be the easier way.

Going back to the editor example, suppose you have two editors from two different authors; one is cheaper, the other has SFTP feature. The author of the one with the SFTP features put a higher price on the overall development effort than the author of the cheaper one. And he's charging you more than the other author per every copy, even though he coded it only once. Why is this so drastically different from having two editions of the same product from the same author?

To take your logic a step further, why is the author charging money for every copy? Once he coded the whole product, it's done and there are no per-unit shipping or manufacturing costs. The alternative would be to somehow get the money, upfront, that would cover the development costs and net him some fixed profit for it. Who knows, maybe if we could switch to that business model piracy would no longer be an issue. But until then, as long as charging per unit of software is accepted practice, I don't see a difference between two editions of the same product and two products with different features. (And I'm not talking about unscrupulous feature crippling here, that's different)
i think you misunderstand homophilia.

ok, voted down, maybe for not explaining. alli can bring myself to do is say: the point is not barrier to entry but self-segregation.

starting a comment with "Utter nonsense. <article thesis> is rediculous" is entertaining but poor form (in my books). i think there are real issues here that are being belittled simply because sociology and media studies do not fall into the IT/web realm you are comfortable with.

i regret having risen to the bait to begin with. this article, ironcially, cannot be seriously considered in this community.
Personally I think the sale will fall though, and TPB will shut down.

Or more accurately, they will say they will shut down, then there will be a big tumult, and someone else will take it over.

When people want to sell something like that, it's because they are tired (or bored). And they just don't want to do it anymore.

And I don't think the sale will go though because the plan makes no sense.

So that leaves shutting down.

But because it's their "baby", they don't really want to kill it - they want someone to take it over. So they will say they are shutting down, wait for the tumult, and someone to offer to take it over.

Time will tell if I am right, but I have seen this pattern many many times.
I'm with the initial commenter's: this is crap.

What I find ironic and laughable at the same time is the article doesn't mention usability of the software deployed by the two sites and how that might actually factor in. Assuming it has a racial connotation is absurd. IMO, Facebook has a better interface, making it easier on the eyes, makes use of less ads, etc. etc. -- any part of that racial? I'd like to answer by using more derogatory words in this space because the assumption by this author is simply ignorant, but then I'd be lowering myself to this author's level.
OR it's just the new geocities. This article doesn't even provide numbers - just hunches and hearsay. What a crock.
I think you need to figure out the why of tags.

In general, I recommend not spending a huge amount of effort (equivalent to a big bet) without taking some effort to vet the concept in a low-cost way.
i agree that the "white flight" analogy is a bit much. that reminds me, there are some good comments here:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/30/pdf_tal...
Everything when you're talking about real world implementations and not some abstract theory in your head.
It's nginx that eats so little RAM. Apache is a huge!
> I predict there will be a lot of rude awakenings and failed projects in the next 10-20 years.

As opposed to the many many failed or stuck projects out there now because they made the mistake of using a relational database as an integration point between many applications and can't risk changing anything now because that one big global variable (the db) can't be touched without breaking 15 applications.

The relational folk don't like to admit their shortcomings either.
That's an argument that's in a way true, but it's also a non-sequitir comparison: in order to live in a middle class suburb (or especially a middle/upper class section of an urban area, e.g. Pacific Heights in San Francisco) there's a very high monetary barrier to entry. There's no monetary barrier to entry for Facebook (especially since it's no longer just for college students-- which may have been the seedling of the current phenomenon).
Side anecdote to your SSD note:

I have a bit of code that steps through a binary file made up of blocks that are of a known size, in an arbitrary order, and come in N different flavors and save them into N output files, one for each flavor. It actually does much more too, but lets pretend this is the only operation. The simple way to do this is to step sequentially through the file and load everything into memory in N different structures and then save your files. But the problem is that sometimes you don't have enough memory to do that, so you have to loop through the file N times, loading a type, saving it, clearing memory and repeating. Since that seems very inefficient, so I thought I'd be clever and on the first pass through the file, load one of the flavors and also save file pointers to all the other blocks so that each subsequent pass could be done more quickly by seeking to the exact black that I needed to load.

Long story short, on regular hard drives, thanks to optimized sequential reads it can actually be faster to just do the dumb thing and loop through the file N times than seek though it randomly.
Well, yes, it's still a bit of a leap of faith. But a slim chance is better than none at all, right?

As long as it doesn't influence one's life choices - ie, relying on a successful reanimation to fulfil some goal or what not - I don't see why anyone would not at least give it a shot. Best case scenario, you wake up healthy and hearty in the magnificent future. Worst case scenario, you're dead. But if you don't freeze you're dead anyway, for sure. So why not?
Actually, I was being generic with the "razor" term. I actually use an electric shaver. I never had much luck with razors, though I never tried a straight razor. (The issue I had was that once it grows past a certain length, I have to let it grow out for a week and whack it with a beard trimmer before I can use the electric razor. Otherwise, it hurts.)
Not sure I understand your question, but all kinds of juggling with pointers is I think idiomatic in C.
Quite a turnaround. The GP was at -2 when I wrote the above.

HN is a fickle mistress indeed!
You wouldn't build a low level filesystem in Python, however, Tahoe is a distributed file system built using python:

http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html