skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
StackOverflow's traffic numbers:
* 16 million page views a month
* 3 million unique visitors a month
* 6 million visits a month

... which is very similar to what my sites are doing (we do more than 20m page views w/ about the same # of uniques. Our content is very image heavy, though maybe a little more amenable to caching.

StackOverflow is running on 2 quad-core 8GB boxes and one 8-core 48GB db box. We're keeping up with VPS "slices" at SliceHost that add up to less than two full 4-core 16GB standard SliceHost boxes; and I expect to reduce capacity when I finish moving our image assets off to S3+CDN.

We have one full time developer/sysadmin/etc.: me. Are other similarly trafficked sites really using a lot more iron? I thought we were typical for this scale.
I've definitely noticed that effect here on HN, and it doesn't seem so pronounced on many other sites. Here are the first sites I could think of, and they seem pretty flat. Sites like HN and TechCrunch have less content on weekends, so you'd expect a drop-off in traffic.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/msn.com
"Sentimental Nonsense" is one of the most fun aspects of humanity.

I fear a day (it will happen) when we walk around like the emotionless idiots found inhabiting the minds and stories of authors like Aldous Huxley.

So to answer your question of "Who Cares": I do, deeply.
Maybe. But it's still sad to see this site change into a big site with a wider audience. I definitely care less and less for the "discussion" that takes place here, which is frustrating to watch. Perhaps I'm just feeling pessimistic, but it seems like recently the tide of new visitors is too large to be assimilated without permanently changing HN's culture. Damn, maybe I am getting old...

EDIT: I also seem to recall that constant vigilance about the site's quality has always been a topic of discussion here. It's definitely healthy to raise a concern or two every now and again
Field Effect Technologies
Credit Suisse Gold
Pamp Suisse, platinum has many types of gold bars like Credit Suisse Gold Bars (1gram)0.0322 Oz, Credit Suisse Gold Bars (10 grams) 0.3215 Oz from coinsbullions.com for online sale.
Au contraire: http://github.com/philogb/v8-gl

Granted it's not in the browser, but it is JavaScript + OpenGL.
No problem. It's a good article, and prototypes are deep waters. There will always be more things you could have covered. :)
HN is good, but not perfect. It's disillusioning for a new user to go through a bad day or a bad few days on HN, and people react to disillusionment. That might be another factor.
Would you prefer that the news be a list of facts?

And now no-one at all can go to the moon.

If my memory serves me correctly, both India and China have active space programs that are interested in moon exploration.
BCPL, a predecessor of 'C'
One in eight Americans is now late on a payment or already in foreclosure
"Fixing" Groovy
Traffic to HN was around 30,000 uniques per day at the end of April (source: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html)
Why the GNU GPL Still Matters
On Forking a FOSS project
This isn't always (or even usually) true. Sure, the IDE will verify the compile time correctness of the code, but unit tests check for run time correctness. So if you refactor a method to add an additional parameter, unit tests will catch the null that Eclipse inserted into all method calls to make the code compile.
Two things struck me:

"Had he contact me before forking my project I would have gladly discussed with him about improvements that could be made and I would most likely had invited him to join the project."

and

"My project is currently stagnating because I don't have much spare times and I have to focus on other things for now, that said some help would have been more than welcome."

Sounds like a lose-lose situation for the forker.
But it's boring to use.

I've been trying to figure out what you meant by that. I noticed you had a tweet a couple of weeks ago:

I have decided that JRuby is officially boring. It "just works" in a terribly predicable manner, and the Java integration has no surprises.

It sounds like you use "boring" with some good as well as some bad connotations. Is there a blog post or something where you explain this?
Those restrictions are intended to preserve others' freedom while cutting individual freedom. That's a Social Contract: we agree to apply some restrictions on our individual freedom to ensure that, overall, freedom stands high.

If Alice lives in a society where murder is permitted, and Bob doesn't, Alice may feel she is "free" whereas Bob is not. From her point of view she can go live with Bob only if she accepts restrictions on what she can do. But Alice is missing the fact that by exercising her right to murder she is depriving others of their rights. And what if Alice herself gets murdered? How "free" would that leave her?

Defining concepts basing ourselves on "points of view" or "feelings" is pseudoscientific, leads to contradictions and is completely useless. So no, I don't think one should decide how free she is by merely substracting the number of things she is allowed to do from the number of things someone else is allowed to do. I'd try to grasp the big picture and figure out which set of rules will lead to a higher number of free and happy people.
How to say this without getting moderated into the ground...

Look, this site is what you make it. If you do not like the conversations, then start your own by submitting the kind of content that you'd like to see or at least participate.

You've been here almost 2 years, in that time you have not made a single submission and one of your 20 comments in that time is about how you don't like the direction the site is going in.

If you don't like it then take action, change the discussion to contain those elements that you care about and use your mod points to promote the content that you think contributes to the discussion most.

There is an awful lot of 'oh, I really don't like the direction HN is going in' here, as well as 'it used to be so nice'. I don't get that, it's pretty good right now, there is a TON of interesting stuff posted and discussed here.

I haven't been here nearly as long as you have, and I concur there are some 'growing pains' but on the whole it is pretty good. Help make it better!
I never asserted we have better performance because we have great programmers (although we do). I have stated that there is a performance benefit to using the Microsoft Stack relative to other common platforms like PHP, because C# just performs way better than PHP. And I've stated that the savings you get from the small number of servers we require relative to a typical PHP site more than pays the Microsoft licenses.
Sony Bravia LCDs run Linux
Why is this at -2, exactly? All mILK did was respond to a question. If people don't like the response, they should at least post a reply.
Several video screens, but none of them get cable/ota television signals. I don't watch much television online.
I really think that puts things in perspective a bit.
Right now we crawl again for each user, but as we scale up we're going to start doing some caching and providing data streams.
Apache CouchDB and Lotus
Unix Wizdumb: Document It
Apple breaks iTunes-Pre compatibility, to the surprise of nobody
Mobile malware has botnet features, analysts warn
If you transform the image homeomorphically, its analysis may still be meaningful because the topology is preserved. So, you pass the transformed image to me, I analyze it topologically without seeing the real image, pass the results to you, then you can recover the topology of the original image. It was just a thought...
And a wonderful thing it is, but they're both a decade out. No-one can go now, nor anytime soon.
A bad week for browsers
We offer a tarball for Linux that contains a command line installer. The problem is you just requested a dpkg. Others might want a .deb or a .ipackage or a .rpm or any other package flavor. There are fewer package management systems than there are Linux distros, but that doesn't mean there are still a lot.

Additionally, distros tend to want to manage the package building themselves. Some groups want to add in tweaks or configuration templates. Others want to include their own pages or optimizations. We can't logistically consider trying to manage all that centrally, nor would we want to take the control away from those distros.

So, I agree, you do get a slightly less comfortable distribution mechanism for the browser. You get additional control and choice depending on the distro you chose though.

What Mozilla does endeavor to do is make sure that the core code works well on all three platforms. That is where we feel it is most valuable to dedicate our resources.
This is might be sentimental, but nonsense is being harsh.

This is basically like getting a pulse on society. Yes, it's not scientifically rigorous, and yes, it might not even be grounded in reality. But it s a nice quick test to see if society have progressed past sexual divides at all.

And it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside!
About those unscripted Microsoft ads...
I agree that users should participate if they want to make the site better. And yes, there still are interesting posts. Still, I see people getting modded up for saying "go with the flow," and modded down for questioning the site's direction. First of all, these are OPINIONS, usually not worthy of up or down mods.

I guess what I should have said was discussion about this site's direction used to be an important part of HN, and I wanted to continue that tradition.
But it's crowdsourced sentimental nonsense, and that makes it Hacker News!
But that is not refactoring, that's adding a new feature!
The tone reminds me exactly of the bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Slartibartfast calls Arthur Dent "late" in an effete attempt to sound sinister and threatening...

... but that's probably just me, though.
Who'd want to? I mean, there's dust, and rocks, and big round holes in the dust.

How's about we go someplace actually interesting next?
didn't pg post a HN link, that just shows posts from only old users?
Interesting that you bring up Huxley. I thought he warned against people distracting themselves to the point of functional disempowerment with mass media trivialities, which is exactly what this kind of thing is.

"I do, deeply."

There must be a 50-year-old woman living somewhere within a few minutes' walk of your current location - go ask them, then.
Does this count governments?
Why Bing Is Fundamentally Different from Other Microsoft Products
Trac.
What an incredibly annoying website. Those fades were completely unnecessary.
I have a TV, but I don't have any cable TV or satellite service to go with it. It gets used a once a month or so when I stream netflix to it via my xbox360.
Exactly. Moreover, merely saying "I don't own a TV" seems to be considered preaching. I couldn't care less whether anyone else watches television and yet I'm made to feel like I just announced I was the second coming.
Microsoft retail stores coming this fall
Please include the URL or domain of the linked item somewhere in the content field of the RSS feed.
Nice big plasma for DVDs. No cable, and no antenna either, since I don't get any reception in my bottom-floor apartment.
I'm sure that I sound about as threatening as Slartibartfast.
Your point about typing is well put. However Ruby has strong typing, but has no compiler to check. So you're gonna have tests for that, but the existence of a compiler and strong typing enforced by said compiler is not an excuse to avoid testing. My tests check logic. If I decide that User.to_string() needs to return "User: Brian Hogan <brianhogan@example.com>" then I write a test for that first. Then I go make to_string() do what that test says. Seems trivial, but no compiler's going to catch if I implement that wrong.

That example seems trivial.. but here's a real example: I had a very complex health insurance system I helped write. A mistake in the formula could have cost someone thousands of dollars in premiums. We asked the end users to give us names of people and their health scores. "Jon, with this height, weight, bmi, and all this other criteria should get a score of x"

Writing the test cases first helped out a ton. Even with a compiled strong typed language, I still would have needed tests to make that work.

And it's been six months since then and I've heard of no issues with the calculation routine. From that, I'm reasonably happy with test-driven development and that's why, regardless of compilers or type systems, I still find it vital to my success as a developer.
I didn't downmod it, but I don't feel compelled to "correct" it back to 1. I grow tired of "the sky is falling" comments, and I guess some others do, too.
Why pay the Microsoft licenses when you could have Java or Scala serve the site?
Interesting that BCPL included both one-line and multi-line comments, but C did not.
This is an amazingly creative use of all the iPhone technologies, and New York is one of the densest places in the world so this would definitely be very helpful. It's not helpful for locals (who have the lines memorized), but for travelers who get confused and turned around in the maze of skyscrapers... this will be a great help.

I wonder if the technology is easily extensible to take new maps and locations. Post that openly and watch the world start creating further content... not just more subway maps, but more geographical locations (restaurants, hotels etc).

Exciting!
Latest news suggests mid-November: http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/090716.html
He3 Mining man! Well, hypothetically anyway.
In all fairness, Cyrus is a nightmare.

The opaque mail-store was a good idea when performance was an issue for mail servers - nowadays it just gets in the way constantly, especially when something breaks. The ACL system has been ridiculously broken for as long as I can remember. You can assign pretty much every letter of the alphabet to a mailbox/user but, for example, you cannot give a user delete permission on a folders content without giving him delete permission to the folder itself. Some ACL flags tend to interact funny with each other and nevermind trying to have users alter permissions (e.g. share folders) through their IMAP client...

This is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm honestly surprised someone was still using this dinosaur in production. ;-)

That said, moving to Exchange is truly a shame for a tech university.
I haven't looked at zimbra and the ilk for a while. Are they still so bad?
... And enough He3 to make the oil business look like spare change.
I've taken your advice, and not clicked that link. The tabloid covers I've seen while getting groceries reinforces that fact.

thanks for the disclaimer!
I used aquasocks as my footwear for a long bike ride (70 miles each day for several days), and they were great, breathable like flops, but not nearly so many collision issues with panniers. :)
This list is inaccurate.

At first I read it and the numbers looked iffy so I figured they just choose some of the top companies, but it more looks like they incorrectly reported numbers for China Telecom. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2009/perfor...
Hilarious Brad Pitt photographs for Wired Magazine
Coming out in August 2009 issue.
In case you refer to Huxley's most known work, Brave New World the people in that story where emotionless hedonistic creatures obsessing with sports, sex with many partners and hierarchy, being an a+ was all the rage.

Being emotional was a trait considered as crazy.
I don't know if this is why they have that, but that would make a pretty decent approach to restricting and slowing down XSS type attacks, if you can override and protect all the native built-in functions.

It should be easy using log analysis to then notice spikes in usage of something, and investigate.

I'm sure there are flaws in my idea, but I think it might work as part of a defense in depth approach.
Leaves out the National Health Service in the UK, which has at least 1.3 million employees (who all use Exchange email!)
NewtonScript was another great prototype-based OO language with a good persistent storage mechanism (soups). The UI was quite interesting.
Depends what you're trying to track I suppose but I use Pivotal Tracker for everything I work on (programming-wise) pretty much.
http://www.redmine.org/

Description taken from the website : Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.
How someone can call this story "sentimental nonsense" and eat up half the garbage people post from TechCrunch is wildly beyond me.
I dont know about running, but I do know about barefoot. I have always been a "no-shoes" kinda guy. The less I deal with them the happier I am. Seriously, if it is a cold spring my friends will avoid me till the weather warms up. Unfortunately I live in Illinois, and we have those times of year where frostbite is the natural result of barefoot. So every winter I put on shoes :(. This causes me to revert to heel walking (a natural result of shoes). Once the shoes come off it takes about 2 days to get back into midfoot walking. This seems to me to feel more natural, and my feet just sort of do it. I presume this will be similar for you, maybe not quite as fast, but I am certain your body will have walking instincts for barefoot styles.

HTH
Simply incredible, what devices inside the iphone allow it to extrapolate its position so accurately?
news.ycombinator.com/classic only counts votes from users more than a year old
I'd also reccomend wearing flops as much as possible for your walking around shoes. Midfoot strike is not just a running thing, it's also a walking thing. Flops help this. Barefoot is better, but glass is a bitch.
The best thing about this is how simple it probably is underneath, and how awesome it looks anyways.

Current user location and database of subway station locations. It's a small enough list that you just rip through all of them and sort by distance. Project badges onto a sphere/flat on a circle depending on the tilt of the phone. Orient on compass location. Overlay display on video feed. Done.

There's no fancy image processing going on, no actual pathfinding, just a nice combination of the new 3GS apis and publically-available data. Good show.
When I lived in New York I looked into mass producing a compass that was marked "Uptown/Downtown" (in place of North/South) and "Eastside/Westside" (in place of East/West) with the North/South line correctly aligned at 29.8 degrees from the actual.

You can hand these to visitors and they'd instantly be able to tell which direction to walk when stepping out of the subway.
It would be interesting to see a list of successful "took their time" startups. One year for Basecamp is actually pretty quick, although it doesn't take into account the many years they spent developing a following. I use MailChimp for sending newsletters and saw that they launched in 2001 but still did web development on the side until 2006.
Japan’s Porn-Obsessed Highlight The Need For New Content Delivery Models
Oddly, that is precisely wrong. SEO used to be about manipulating search engine rankings -- having the word "mortgages" in white text on a white background 5000 times on all your pages, or building a giant link farm to inflate pagerank.

Now it's about getting people to read content -- by creating content people like to read. I guess there's something to be said for appealing to smaller, less trendy groups (but that's part of SEO, too; the ROI on dominating obscure searches is often higher than for more mainstream searches, simply because a long search string is more likely to lead to a sale -- you Google [web design] (http://www.google.com/search?q=website+design) to learn about web design; you try [nyc website design firm] (http://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+website+design+firm) when you're ready to hire, e.g., the company I work for).

The problem a lot of people have with SEO is that when they notice it, it's done badly. But another way to restate the problem is that most people have no problem with SEO, because they only notice it when it's done badly.
How playtime is responsible for Post-It Notes, Lasik, and more
Null is a billion dollar mistake.

Scala, Java, and Javascript all have a difference between undefined and null. The author doesn't go into this detail. He also doesn't differentiate between a runtime error and a compile-time error.

If you do the same test with Haskell's undefined, then all the expressions throw a runtime exception.

Haskell and SML really have the approach that has a strong foundation. The inconsistencies across languages are due to them not sharing the same foundation.
well, inhabiting the mind of huxley wouldn't be very bad at all. also, i don't think this is what huxley was promoting to preserve with brave new world... i believe his promotion was that of a deeply rich and meaningful life. Things of this nature are more like the elements wrong within a brave new world; stupid mindless entertainment (after all, soma was described by him as "all the benefits of alcohol and christianity, with none of the defects").

"Dream in a pragmatic way." - Huxley

...after all, we need only look near the end of his life to see what conclusions he drew of all this as to what we ought to do: "In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means." (thoughts on the perennial philosophy, after he went mystic)

huxley perhaps is not the name to invoke to defend human interests in triviality, or rejections of reason.

invoking a reminder of huxley's ideas works well for rejection of trivial banter, rejection of living life as efficient strife for the accomplishment of the superficial (like finding this girl), and the rejection of making ourselves slaves to technological progress while making no progress in our deep understandings of life (like having successful startups and never taking the time to ponder the cosmic whole).
David Mindell gives more details of the AGC rope core memory in his book Digital Apollo. The software was stored in the wiring pattern, not in the cores themselves. The MIT programmers had to deliver final code three to four months before each mission. That turned out to be an advantage because "risky last minute changes of the program just before the flight were physically prevented," according to program director David Hoag.
I used the BBC micro version by Acornsoft in the gray past, it made the transition to C a lot easier when I finally got my hands on a C compiler (on a PDP 11 bought for scrap...).
I'd take a look at Plura- They're doing this now for webgames.
http://www.pluraprocessing.com/games/index.html

If I recall, they're using this to run their 80legs product, which is where they're hoping to make their real money.
Here is an interesting video showing the caustic guys do a demo. Interestingly the father of one of the guys on the team hangs out on HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573963