skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My recent allocator design is an attempt to address memory fragmentation in Windows XP & Vista. The unique problem I faced was that there was significant amount of code already in place which used C++ new/delete (about 300KLOC) and lot of coding is ongoing at breakneck speed. The allocator is written in C++.

My story:

- Profiled the code to figure out allocation sizes and number of allocations.

* Found most objects are 32, 64, 128 bytes and we allocate millions of them.

* Allocation rate is linear in the sense, rate of allocation is pretty steady within a time window.

* Life time of these objects are long; Majority of them (99.9%) lasts as long as the application itself.

* Found couple of large allocations in the range of 64MB to 128MB

Can you tell me yours? With such detail, then perhaps we can figure out what's best for you? :-)
>All the responses here have been solidly middle class condemnations. There are so many forces at work here, I don't even know where to begin.

Sorry, but no That story could have been written about my dad almost 30 years ago when gas prices climbed and manufacturing in IN collapsed. Only my dad didn't sit on his butt, drink beer, and waste money on lotto tickets and gambling. We moved to Texas so he could get a refinery job which didn't pan out and he took up with day laborers until he got a job managing a fast food joint. Then He put himself through college by working nights. You do what you have to do, quitting is for losers like this guy.
This article seems to be more of a thinly disguised promotion of SaaS than a real list of reasons to consider it. Many of them are always true of all companies everywhere. For instance:

"6. IT support requirements are siphoning limited resources away from my organization’s core business activities."

Even if your main business is in the IT field, supporting it is always going to siphon away resources without directly generating revenue (unless you happen to sell support contracts, and even then your INTERNAL IT support is pure overhead) and those resources are always limited.

A more useful phrasing would be:
"IT support could be more effeciently and cost effectively provided by another company."

This is certainly true for many companies, but also certainly not true for others.

This statement though is a good one:
"9. Our business needs do not require extensive or frequent customization of critical software or services."

If all of your needs could be met by off-the-shelf software without extensive adjustments then Saas is probably worth looking at.

The bottom line is that SaaS is excellent for many situations and is often worth serious consideration, it can often save considerable cost for one thing. But it also comes with many trade offs and drawbacks. It will be appropriate for some companies and not for others.

For the immediate future that balance will likely continue to shift more and more heavily towards SaaS, but where the balance point will land remains to be seen.
Fair - the town hall question referred to IE in general; it may very well be IE7 that they have at Foggy Bottom.
Visitor patterns add new functionality to existing object structure [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern].

Python decorator does not do that?
Well, with a contrived example, you can prove anything. I wouldn't say Apple's App Store interferes with your right to free speech.
Don't be naive. A majority of people are sufficiently flag-simple that they'll do whatever they're told to do, including rounding the dissenters if necessary. Do they give tests and/or classes in constitutional law and the limits circumscribing the behavior of superior officers in the military? I think not. But we do train all children of school age to pledge their allegiance to a flag every morning, a level of indoctrination which I find both bizarre and troubling.

I don't mean this post to be anti-military or anti-American, but your faith in symbols seems naive to me. Christianity and Islam both lay claim to being peaceable religions subservient to a merciful deity, and yet the history of both is drenched in blood. Besides which, there's a history in the US (as in many other countries, to an even greater degree) of just suspending bits of the constitution as and when 'necessity' demands it.
Speaking of which, do you know where I can find IE 6 so I can install it in a VM and test our site?

MultipleIE doesn't work on Windows 7, which is what I'm using.
Locale, from two forty four a.m. http://www.twofortyfouram.com/
> bandwidth plus royalties

I think I've read that Netflix has an agreement with the studios where they pay per shipment rather than per DVD. So, having 1000 of a new DVD on hand costs little more than having only a few. The studios like it because it aligns Netflix's cost structure with their own (basically fixed), so agency costs are minimized.

I'm sure that Netflix pays less for bandwidth than Amazon sells theirs for. So, we can presume streaming a two gig movie (probably much less in reality) would cost much less than 30 cents -- postage one way for a DVD. Add in a few more cents for data center, etc. and they're still better off relative to postage.
And please don't correct someone for using a word that is a real word, nonetheless an unpopular one:

http://www.answers.com/humbleness

This reminds me of when I was told the word "priorly" was made up.
No, not really. What I'd really like is to input the URL and get a search result listing that includes number of posts and date of last post at least.
Hmm, you're right. Somehow that didn't make it into the final release. What a shame.

Either way, our perspective is still that the more people that complain about IE 6, the more pressure IT departments will have to upgrade their systems.

Starting with Firefox for a modern browsing experience wouldn't be a bad idea :)
That statement comes from personal experience where some functions did not exists in the eye of text editor because they were defined inside a string.

Not that big of a deal, but enough to annoy me.
Oooh, look out! A bunch of companies with no established user bases are going to boycott you!

This will get the grannies to upgrade their computer machines for sure.
While I can understand your values (and agree with them) your definition would make YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and dozens more "not start-ups". Or businesses.
Dunno about Win7 compatibility, but this is the official VPC image: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...

Personally, I'd probably just use a VMWare image of XP or Win98 and download IE6 from here http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1E1...
Were you actually expecting to hear from an IE6 IT shop on HN? The people living in that world don't often post here.

Next you'll say that nobody ever calls their computer case the CPU because you haven't seen anybody do it here.
I see that Sandy Koufax is the only pitcher listed who worked before night baseball. It would also be interesting to see where the still skinny Barry Bonds of the 1980s and early 1990s ranked; I suspect still high, but not quite as high.
Am I reading this right? It seems to say that every day, every disc that’s currently is in stock is processed so that any that need to sent to customers can be pulled out for delivery. And my intuition tells me that would be crazy.

"Then discs are scanned a second time -- if a title is requested, and around 95 percent of titles get rented at least once every 90 days, the machine separates it and sorts it out by ZIP code. (The entire inventory of the building is run through this daily, a process that alerts other warehouses of the location of every one of the 89 million discs owned by Netflix.)"
FTA:

The DMCA says, “no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”

Not to be a pedant here, but obviously the protection wasn't every effective.

What is to stop me saying something like:

"THIS POST IS ENCRYPTED WITH ROT26 ENCRYPTION"

then suing the pants off of all of you for circumventing my protection? Yeah, that is a stupid example, but things have gotten WAY out of control here.
and wouldn't it be nice if they briefed their colleagues, so that law enforcement officers the world over will stop "asking" photographers to delete pictures they've just taken.
I usually just use the standard GCC implementation. I remember implementing a pretty quick red-black tree version for my systems class. It got me an A, but I don't think I'd use it unless I find myself having serious problems with GCC.
General AI is not applicable in real life yet. Probabilistic reasoning can be subsumed into a logic system. For example, a human(David Lowe) has originated SIFT. A reasoning system should in principle be able to derive SIFT. We are not there yet but that should be the goal.

The problem with singe domain systems is none are even capable of robust inductive transfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_transfer). Some reasoning problems are mathematically hard problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_undecidable_problems). There is no algorithm which even in principle can solve them. Among other things, you need infinite processing speed to do so. No amount of science can help here as it is in the logical domain.
Couldn't they install Firefox, then, and use IE6 for legacy apps?
Thanks for the comment. Indeed, I use gmail for all my web domains, but have you seen the Service Agreement? Firstly, they own our data, so basically, our emails belong to them. We are just users.

Well, "twitter style" :) with the @ signifies an address. Without the @ it could be used as a universal login for other applications.

I am thinking that the domains have less and less importance, and that our data should be more integrated across the web. I am aiming at unifying the web data of a user just as it is available at local storage, and applying the desktop usage habits to the web.

It's just some thoughts passing, and I'd appreciate opinions.
Sorry, I mean Shoes is developed in pure Ruby
That is really an amazing article, I couldn't agree more.
I'm sad to say that some european hackers are reluctant to go to defcon because of the risk of being "registered" or even arrested.
The adwords conversion optimizer has been around for at least a year, maybe 2 or 3. So I'm not quite sure what's changed now. I tried it with really good results on a website where I wanted to only pay a specific price for each new user.
I know employees at Cost Plus World Market headquarters are stuck using IE6.
"What this effort will do, if it is successful, is defang ... all populations, overthrowing the protective effect individual firearms ownership, destroying the intent and effectiveness of the Second Amendment, and unbalancing the Constitution permanently through evolving technology which end-runs around the original intent of the Framers."

Hasn't this already happened? Iraq very clearly demonstrates that a massive force will overrun you no matter how many arms your citizens possess. Citizens usually don't possess missiles, anti-tank weaponry, large-caliber arms, etc.

You don't need significantly advanced technology; you just need slightly better weapons, and slightly more of them.

The flipside, though, is that we could reinterpret software and hardware as arms; if robots are standing on the street corners, the ability to fight back electronically becomes the only option.
As does Britain's Ministry of Defence as well as many other departments in the British government. Moreover, they don't even have upgrade plans in place either.
How about Virtual Box to run IE6?
Telephone Terrorist
or linux for that matter?

I purchased several original xbox's and modded them to run linux for a clustering project.
It's not a boycott, just a dismissible nag message. Did you read the article?

Also, the number of people from these startups is approximately (data from quantcast):

4.1 million (jtv us) + 1.3 million (weebly us) + 1.7 million (reddit us) + 1.3 million (posterous) + 0.5 million (disqus us) = 8.9 million US people. Global reach is probably 2-3x that much, but quantcast doesn't offer global numbers for all of them (JTV has 26 million globally).

I'd say that counts as an established user base.
This was the reasoning that led to Java's ascendancy in the enterprise and the 1996-2000 tech boom. Companies were stuck with Y2K-incompliant COBOL software that they no longer had the expertise (or sometimes even the source code) for, and they had a hard constraint of Jan 1, 2000 that they had to hit. So many of them threw away their existing software entirely and rewrote it all in Java. The resulting IT spending fueled the tech boom of the late 1990s, led to the rise of the Indian outsourcing industry, and resulted in widespread adoption of Java EE.

We're in a recession now. There're a bunch of unemployed web developers. Let's simply ban the use of IE6 and kill two birds with one stone! Break some windows and burn those diskpacks, baby!
There are a lot of CPA Networks out there already and I'm not sure Google brings anything new into the table with the offering.

It obv works for advertisers wanting CPA and only willing to advertise with Google, but for the rest, it's just a me-too effort from Mountain View.
Study: We learn more from success than failure
What I did see were more cuts than in an average Bruckheimer flick. I'm skeptical.
That's true. It may be that they grew up poor, or it may be that they're just "poor" psychologically. I dunno. I have a lot of these tendencies, but I got lucky (I now feel).
Ask HN: small fish v. big fish - exclusivity contract?
Executive summary: small bootstrapped startup, approaching potential B2B clients about the product we want to build. One established company wants to help us build it, in return for an exclusivity deal. What are the gotchas? How do we avoid getting screwed?

Long version:

My partner and I want to bring a new technology (mobile devices) to an existing industry which currently isn't using it, but we believe definitely will be using it in a few years' time. We've spent the last month knocking on doors, trying to gauge interest, and to define what shape a solution might take - basically, doing Customer Discovery. There is definitely interest, the industry feels that the times are changing, but isn't exactly sure how that change will happen, and enthusiasm has varied wildly between different companies.

My partner and I are both tech people, and we have very limited domain knowledge - we're learning and making contacts as we go, but we started from zero a couple months ago. We're also trying to bootstrap as far as possible.

I had a meeting today with the first company that was truly enthusiastic about what we're proposing. They "got it" right away, and proposed a partnership to build the solution we have in mind. They are willing to bring their expertise and domain knowledge to the table (they've been around for 15 years), but in return, they want some form of (time-limited) exclusivity. They are basically seeing the same opportunity we are seeing, and want to use it to grow and position themselves as a leader - and are happy to work with us as partners, but (naturally) not as competitors.

Depending on the terms of the agreement (we'd want a good lawyer on our side, of course), there could be significant upsides. They would effectively become our first (large) client. We could use their expertise to build a product that makes sense, and their reputation and sales channels to push it into the market - these are certainly not our strengths. Our interests would be aligned in the sense that they would want to push as many sales as possible - thus growing both our businesses.

The part I'm nervous about is: we're a two-person startup with no funding, they're an established midsize company. How do we make sure we don't get screwed?

What are the downsides and hidden gotchas to something like this?
Somewhat ironic that a website about satellite internet has giant PNG files on it.
Reddit: Hard Science
So...does this mean Google is infringing your patent?
Oy, such a short timeline for a task like this! Submissions are due by August 14th or September 3.
Depends what you mean by 'standards'. 7 & 8 support more of CSS 2.1 than the other browsers.

I believe support for CSS3 is lacking because they didn't want to write to a draft, and then have to support no-longer-standard extensions when the draft changed.
At various times I've profiled some CPU bound code and thought malloc is taking too much time. This has led me to read up on, and try and develop various usage-optimised allocators. The one lesson I've learnt is that in most cases the standard libc allocator is actually extremely good.

Where I have had big advantages over libc malloc is where the memory allocations have been specific to a thread context. For example, consider a multi-threaded server, where by you could guarantee that only one thread was active in a connection at anyone time. It's quite easy for a single connection to spend 5-10% of it's time in malloc and there are often big globalish locks around general purpose allocators, so it's easy to get get mutex contention which is far worse than the overhead of a sub-efficient allocator.

In such cases you often need to have small bits of memory within the context of a connection. Here I found big benefits my mallocing memory in bug chunks and then simply splitting that up into small sections within a connection specific allocator to avoid any malloc mutex locking.

What I've found is that in order to beat normal malloc, I think you really have to have a specific usage case that restricts something to do better.
Python In-Memory Data Structures
I asked a guy who spoke 7 languages the same question, and he stressed reading above any other exercise. Sure at first you won't understand very much and you'll have to use a dictionary a lot, but its like a puzzle that gets easier.
There's are other factors besides schools between American students and European students. For many Americans, the reality of ever needing to speak any language but English seems totally theoretical, whether for travel, business, or profession. For many Europeans, needing to speak a non-native language appears much more realistic. Further complicating this is that if one's native language is English, then it DOES work almost all the time, reinforcing the notion that foreign languages are merely decorative. By contrast, if you were a Dutch computer scientist like Dijkstra, you would understand very early that you could never hope to write professional papers in Dutch. (Brits have the advantage of seeing that other languages really are used, but share the disadvantage of already being fluent in what is nearly a world language.)
Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think.
"Its biggest secret remains the warehouses themselves -- for two reasons. No. 1, each holds several million DVDs, not to mention expensive mail-sorting gizmos and dry-board posted statistics on how many discs were recently returned damaged, placed in the wrong sleeve or scratched. And No. 2, Netflix has grown leery of what happens when customers learn the location of a warehouse -- they drop off DVDs at the door."

This seems in-genuine for multiple reasons:

1. Other articles I've read on the Netflix Inventory Control system indicate that there are almost _no_ DVDs in the warehouses, the vast majority are either at customers, or in shipment. So the "Several Million DVDs" is an unlikely claim.

2. Expensive mail sorting gizmos? So? Are they afraid of theft? "Mail Sorting Gizmos" neither lends themselves to easy snatch and grabs, transport, nor resale.

3. Dry-Boarded Stats on scratches, damaged, wrong sleeve. Doesn't sound like competitively useful information to me, particularly after data like # of Sleeves per hour (650-900) per employee, and interval of exercise (every 65 minutes) has been made public.

4. Drop Off DVDs at the door - This is a bad thing, why?

Nope, My guess is that NetFlix is trying to delay the inevitable, which is unionization of their workforce by trying to keep the location of their shops confidential and avoid organized labor leaders paying their sorters/packers a visit...
Being as my desktop at home still runs Windows 2000, I used to assume this was the case as well. But the OS/browser stats on w3schools, at least, show only 1% usage of W2K as compared to 14% IE6 usage, which, if my math is right, seems to mean that a large number of IE6 users are on XP.
I think you answered your own question: "Minority browser, for sure ..."
An explanation from the author: This isn't a startup, it's just an idea I thought would be cool. I'm announcing it on HN first, hoping to get technical and aesthetic feedback before I throw the URL around.

The two browsers in the submission title are the only ones I have on this machine. Right now it doesn't run as smoothly as I'd want in FF3. There are a couple big optimizations ideas I have, but I was comfortable enough to post this without them. Was that a mistake? If you can try it out in some other browsers I'd appreciate that. I have no idea what IE will do.

That's all. Hope you have fun.
I know folks who have a chipped XBox, primarily to run XBMC (XBox Media Center). This isn't pirated software at all, it's open source. But it's a great way to get media off a home server and play it on your entertainment center. The hacking of the box is only because of MS's locking out 3rd parties.
Oh nostrademons... You always know exactly how to fuel the fire.

Maybe we should organize "ie6aholics annonymous"?
This is inspiring and awesome.

I think Yahoo found the bizarro world version of this.
Let them be responsible for themselves.

If they were responsible for themselves, they would be working or starving right now. However, they are on unemployment. As a taxpayer, I'm partly subsidizing their donut and lotto habits. That gives me ample reason to criticize their behavior: if someone is spending your money, you're perfectly entitled to at least complain about how they spend it.
We're just using a single c1.medium instance for the database right now. Trendingtopics.org is a relatively low traffic, read-only site and most of the reads are for a handful of urls on the front page which can be cached.

Also, after processing the raw log data with Hadoop, we only need to store/lookup 3M records in the MySQL presentation layer, which is well within the capabilities of a tuned RDBMS. Many Rails sites are backed by MySQL, so I thought linking Hadoop/Hive to a common data workflow would make for a good example.

I've been hearing that recent improvements to HBase 0.20 could make it a contender: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1022150/is-hbase-stable-a... and some high volume sites like Mahalo are already using it. That said, there are other alternative data stores (Cassandra, Voldemort, Tokyo Tyrant) that might be worth exploring if a database isn't cutting it for you.
Asimo has a 15 minutes battery life, and batteries are improving at sub-linear rates. Tethering solves this, or some kind of ICE, but neither are useful everywhere. People require a pizza day, which is amazing.

You're right about the price of technology, but the timeframe is what I'm talking about. I think the "robot revolution" is inevitable. But I still like to poke holes in theories that it is around the corner, but it isn't.

Cheap restaurants and other cheap labor intensive activities are the _last_ things that will be automated. Your manager job will go first, along with your highly paid pilots, etc.
The word "startup" wasn't used by the author of the post.
And talloc was derived from halloc (http://swapped.cc/halloc), which is a hierarchical allocator. Or rather a wrapper for an existing allocation api.