skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was an exception for Google in my cookie whitelist that I didn't put there, but after checking some other chrome installs it isn't on all of them.
I think the "just good enough for business" attitude contributed to the demise of the American car and the rise of the Japanese ones. The American tradition was to use engineering tolerances that would maximize throughput under the constraint that it produced a pretty functional car. The Japanese tradition on the other hand was to use tighter tolerances, well because there was room for tightening the tolerance. At the surface level, or the MBA level it seems that the Japanese way is just dumb. It does not make monetary sense when measured in sales per year. But it turns out that the benefits express themselves at a different timescale: better brand and a culture of devotion to improvement, rather than to being "just good enough to work so that I can move to the next thing".

Part of this applies to the craft of software too. One can be sloppy and churn out functional websites by the dozens. At the superficial level, the goal to extract the most from a 500MHX Pentium-III might seem brain dead, with little or no pay off. But it pays back by instilling an attitude of deeply learning your craft, that learning does pay back although that specific well tuned web server might not. You dont have to build all your servers that way, but if it doesnt hurt you a little when you know exactly what you could have done to extract some more juice out of it, you will not reach that level of understanding. If you are impatient or sloppy, you will build impatience into your product, and it will show.

Besides it is always easy to over value ones time, it sometimes correlates with conceit.

@sitkack what makes you think I was talking about the 50s. Going by the downvote I seem to have touched a nerve. You are right Japanese products around that time were synonymous with bad quality, not just in US. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then.
pfft, as if SWAT teams would accidentally brutalize an innocent person..
> when languages like Python and Ruby can be over 100x slower than other high level languages

You said a wrong thing. Java is a far cry from a high-level language.

Javascript is arguably a high-level language however, and meaningless benchmarks (aka "damn lies") attest V8 is in spitting distance of Java. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php

Scala is much higher level than Java, compiles to the same run-time, and is at rough parity. http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/scala.php
The 10k problem is still not solved. A run of the mill VPS typically manages around 1k simultaneous connections and 10k requests/s. That is, over plain http. Over TLS this goes down to about 100 connections and 600 requests/s. A cheap amazon instance will usually be around 1/5th of all that.

With a bit of tweaking you can get the plain http case a bit higher, but the TLS route will not get much better, because TLS isn't written with speed in mind (the handshake is slow and expensive) and the prevalent implementation (OpenSSL) is not written for high performance servers (it basically dictates that you run blocking sockets in a thread per connection).

Unfortunately spdy and various http2 proposals rely on TLS (in order to punch trough proxies), which means going back in server performance about 10 years.

So it is of little surprise that companies have started offering "cloud" solutions, because the typical VPS can't handle todays high traffic internet over TLS (worse than plain http by a factor of 10) and the typical cloud server is worse than a VPS by a factor 5, creating a 50x performance degradation, artificially. Obviously when faced with the question of running 10 servers, or 100, most small companies turn to the even worse "cloud" solution, requiring even more servers (500).

The whole affair is a sodding mess, and we're wasting massive amounts of energy and capital on insisting on doing things inefficiently. This is because by rights our VPS servers should easily be able to break trough the 10k limit in every way, but it can't because the OS wastes a lot of time running an inefficient network stack as well as that TLS and OpenSSL can't be bothered to get their act together.

And that is how, in the year of our lord 2014, more than 15 years after somebody writing the 10k problem article, and after webservers becoming at least 128x faster then back in the 90ties, most websites out there can still not stand up to serious traffic, take ages to load, and are hosted by an infrastructure (routers and whatnot) that easily buckle under even light DDOSing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5928424

http://www.cato.org/raidmap

Now you know of some deaths
Self censorship is much worse than state imposed one IMO. The later can be formed, the former creates meek and obedient societies.
We instrumented Chrome and measured the download times: approximately ~1.1% of font loads are longer than 3s. New timeout will help address that 1.1% by using a system fallback.

http://www.igvita.com/2014/01/31/optimizing-web-font-renderi...
The news from the earth these days is rarely cheery.. PRISM and Ukraine and ....
http://www.cato.org/raidmap
Also, video tags only play in full-screen on iPhones, which is pretty unacceptable for the type of use people have in blogs.
"There is no way for the primary service (such as a web server) to get priority on the system, leaving everything else (like the SSH console) as a secondary priority" - Can't we use the nice command (nice +n command) when these process are started to change its priority? I am sorry if it is so naive question
I understand your point.

I just think there are points where some ideas need to be called out for what they are.

The idea that we mostly male programmers will help make women equal by denying them options on how to fill out forms that they might otherwise want to choose strikes me as deeply at odds with itself.
It seems we've already passed this problem: "We also show that with Mio, McNettle (an SDN controller written in Haskell) can scale effectively to 40+ cores, reach a throughput of over 20 million new requests per second on a single machine, and hence become the fastest of all existing SDN controllers."[1] (reddit discussion at [2])

This new IO manager was added to GHC 7.8 which is due for final release very soon (currently in RC stage). That said, I'm not sure if it can be said if all (or even most) of the criteria have been met. But hey, at least they're already doing 20M connections per second.

[1] http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/hask03...
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1k6fsl/mio_a_highpe...
http://www.cato.org/raidmap

some prank alright.....
There is an intro chapter and lots of content in the links referenced in the article, not to mention the slide (posted here and elsewhere).

You will be able to buy it once it arrives in April (you can add your email to the list for updates).

http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/growth-hacking-101-your-f...

http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com/intro_chapter.html
Photos of morning Moscow
The book does not mention anything as foolish IMHO.
my armoury

* Facebook disconnect.
* Google disconnect.
* Ghostery
* Privoxy
* Self Destructing Cookies
* No-Script

I wouldn't be so concerned about the ads themselves if they didn't flash, jump about, get in the way of text, harvest my likes, cross harvest my interests, get hijacked and infect my machine, steal my battery life by being animated etc. etc.
Copyright 101: The Things to Know About Using Imagery
The article forgot to mention that in the Star Trek timeline things didn't go so smoothly: a third World War eventually occurred and only the invention of warp drive and the first contact with the Vulcans turned things around.
But I think the point is another: for as much as I love Star Trek and advocate a smooth transition to a post-scarcity economy, I don't think Roddenberry and the writers that succeeded him are experts in currency, economics or even in the techologies that made that fictionary society a perfect post-scarcity economy.
There are, however, some interesting thoughts that could serve as a basis for a more deep look into the post-scarcity economics. Organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement tend to advocate it under the "resource-based economy" name and I find their views interesting, relatively to this topic.
Here is the report from New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/world/asia/indian-publishe...
You seem to be intentionally obtuse, implying that "the system is working". The existence of the possibility of a remedy does not justify obstructionist behavior. E.g. just because you can take me to court to get me to pay a bill doesn't give me permission to refuse to pay my bills, saying "so sue me" to everyone I owe money to.

So on general principle, the NYPD says "no" to everything, and forces you to appeal, and then forces you to take them to court.

This is not okay. In fact, it's not even close to okay. Governmental apparatus exists at the whim of the people, and when it places it's interests in opposition to ours, forcing us to jump through expensive, time-consuming hoops to extract even the smallest amount of compliance with the law, there is something deeply wrong with the organization at the highest levels. Evidence? The police chief should be yelling at someone about this, and making a public apology for what is clearly absurd and unsupportable stone-walling. The fact that he remains silent implies his complicity. (But then again, what do you expect from someone who condones and expands the appalling stop-and-frisk policy?)
>What seems scholarly to you looks extremely offensive to most Hindus

Um... I am Hindu. I don't practice folk Hinduism too much but Hinduism and it's history are one of my areas of interest. I really want to discuss with some others who have read this book and find out what exactly put them off. Have you?
Boots on the ground. Before the product was finished being built we had interviewed dozens of potential customers, etc. Don't be afraid to walk up to strangers and at the end of an interview, ask someone who they think would be helpful person to contact. The latter trick starts to point you toward more influential / bigger players. We had a check before the alpha version was done.
any hip hop recommendations?
thanks for the response, I'll look into it through my uni research portal
Safari Reader mode to the rescue...
Gangs of Wasseypur was released in two parts as two separate movies and IMDB has added the runtime of both the movies. However both movies were equally good :)
Not most, ALL. Even "natural monopolies" like power delivery are not natural, and only actually come about through government intervention.
same here, macos, chrome and safari both show empty code blocks...
It's a sad day when my country sacrifices freedom of speech, yet again, in response to a mediocre* book from a largely ignored author which would have faded into oblivion on its own.

* or worse - Read the Amazon reviews, specifically the ones by the author's fellow academics http://www.amazon.com/The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History/dp/1...
Forking firefox would be a huge undertaking.
> Is MIT being hypocritical here, or did they learn something from the Aaron Swartz tragedy?

Simple, MIT has zero desire to allow out-of-state prosecutors any leeway to possibly sue them. So, they will fight this because the precedent might cost MIT big bucks later if they lose.
Isn't this more-or-less how mainframes work?
Yes, the caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks. It was because there was such a heated rift between the north and the south that representative Brooks thought it would be more fitting to discipline his opponent with a cane used to beat an unruly dog than to challenge him to a duel, as was the norm at that time. He beat Sumner repeatedly with the cane, then calmly walked away like a total gangsta - definitely one of the most memorable stories from my high school history class.

It's worth noting that not too long after that incident, there was a civil war...
Yep. I was a backer too and received some early, crappy units. The latest revision is really good :)
Is this kind of efficiency effectively obsolete for general-purpose programming?

I think it is obsolete in that area, and has been for years (decades? Unoptimized SQL is almost always slower than key-value stores). General purpose programming is really about meeting user & business requirements. Speed and ffficiency is a second level concern, which only becomes an issue when you don't have enough of it.

BUT efficiency is even more important now for systems-level program ("system" in the sense of building libraries for use by other systems, as opposed to user-facing).

A good example is SnappyLabs[1] who developed a faster JPEG encoder and ended up being a subject of a Google/Apple bidding war.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/04/snappylabs/
http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all helps?
Early screenshots of Twitter ('06), Facebook ('05), and Tumblr ('07)
If it is foolish to you, then so be it. To categorically ignore the power play implied by defining a section without any input from it (and ignore rest of the comment, I suppose, along with the book and its criticism) seems intelligent to you then so be it. I am deeply aware of my inability to explain what has already been explained by others, so I resign.

"Cause I doubt they would agree." That should tell the complexity of defining Hinduism and the amateurish level western 'Indologists' have achieved which they spread around, calling any criticism to their approach 'foolish'.
Interesting point. it's not necessary that these behaviors are specifically programmed into the ad engine, rather it might have learned them on its own from the enormous amount of data it has.
Much slower. The flash chips in a microSD card can only do a few tens of MB/s.

The are now full size sd cards that claim 250MB/s, but not micro ones.
Just what are these resources that we are using more efficiently? CPU? RAM?

Are they that important? Should we not be trying to use electricity more efficiently since that is a real world consumable resource. How many connections can you handle per kilowatt hour?
Ask HN: What do you think would be the next cool API just waiting to be built.
Who's gonna be the next Twilio, mailgun, etc.
"When a product is close to launch, I become a perfectionist. Each misaligned element or awkward interaction is like a thorn in my side. "

When a product is close to launch, I become paranoid. I do not want to do any changes, unless critical. There will not be time for another round of testing/regression testing. We have even whole process for that.

He is talking about team moving on other projects, which means he talks about time very close to launch.

It is great when the designer is perfectionist. There is also a time for that and that is NOT close to launch. You absolutely should come up with these changes while the project is far from launch so we can time for fixing them.

You should absolutely NOT suddenly come up with tons of tiny little changes close to release. One of those tiny little changes may break something important and we will have no time to find out.
I'm reminded of a recent article that crossed the front page of HN, about a group writing some sort of fluid layout engine for their mobile app. They were able to optimize it from tens of layouts to thousands of layout per second, which enabled their strategy of trying a bunch of different layouts and picking the best one. This wouldn't have been possible if they stuck with the naive solution. Making it fast enabled a new feature that simply couldn't exist with the slow solution.
I wish they open sourced it and let others look at the code and experiment with it. For a lot of developers if it isn't open = it doesn't exist. Now it is their code and they do whatever they want but that is my view of the project.
"languages like Python and Ruby can be over 100x slower than other high level languages"

Notice the "can be"? It's important.

And I don't think arguing if Java is a high level language or not is very useful in this context. Notice that C++ was also included as a "high level" language. Clearly if C++ is high level then Java is too.

Anyway, the point of that comment wasn't which languages are high level - it's that efficiency is important, because some languages have areas where performance suffers.

Clearly that is true (at least to some extent) as the use of Numpy in Python shows.

I'd argue that writing Numpy (and other high-performance libraries for use in high level languages) isn't "general purpose programming" (which is what the OP) was talking about, but that is also a different discussion.
Initially, it doesn't matter how your product looks if people want it. It would be cool to see early screenshots of other popular services like LinkedIn and Dropbox. Proper credit goes to reddit user, cmdrNacho, as the link was found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1y1f3n/if_you_coul...
When it goes to transactions and stateful sessions, C10K, or even C1K is far from solved yet.
I'd argue there's one more criterion for horizontal scalability: an increase in hardware capacity (number of nodes N) must yield a proportional increase in system throughput.

In other words, horizontal scalability means being _able_ to throw hardware at the problem :-)

Anyway, I agree with fiatmoney's sentiment that if you're in a corporate environment where your goal is growth, it's often best to focus on ensuring that your systems can grow along with demand, in a confident, easy, operations-free way -- as opposed to ensuring you've eked every bit of performance out of the hardware you have. In many business projects, the cost of human engineering time exceeds the cost of hardware.

Even when considering large-scale systems, it makes sense to scrutinize optimizations. If you had time to implement only one of these two equal-effort projects, which would you choose? (a) An optimization project expected to reduce a recurring yearly cost by $1 million (b) A new feature development project expected to earn an additional $2 million yearly recurring revenue?

I've found it effective to look at all engineering decisions as business decisions. From a business perspective, the mistake at the center of fallacies like premature optimization is the failure to consider opportunity cost.

(On the other hand sometimes pushing a technical project as far as you can is its own reward. Not everything in life has to be about business. Whether or not the results are widely relevant to typical businesses, I look forward to seeing the research into the C10K and C10M problems!)
Sketchboard introduction video can be seen from http://youtu.be/ztQ2QkEmFqg
50+ of the top 1,000 eTailers pay us for our software – Engineers needed
I happened to be at the airport when it happened (still am). We got to hear that the airport closed due to "Operational problems". Plenty vague, but the internets prevails.
I think you have a larger problem though.

A theory is (as Heisenberg explained in his book "Physics and Philosophy") an interpretation of data based upon unscientific, non-falsifiable, a priori assumptions on the part of the theorist. You can't really disprove something as nebulous as "hidden variables." That's not a falsifiable statement. What you can do is disprove some theory based on hidden variables. Such evidence does not apply to the possibility of other theories of hidden variables that are yet unformulated.
There is. I, as a free speech supporter in India, think that it is ridiculous that you are not allowed free speech in a place where you spend majority of your waking hours.

Violations of free speech by private institutions should be a crime, just like labour violations are. It should only take an amendment, there is no fundamental irony.

Notice that the state infringes on private parties anyway - the most obvious example is when the state decides to take away children from families if there's harassment of the child at home. I am not debating whether this is right or wrong, but I am just pointing out that the state is not so hands-off as it is generally made out to be.
It definitely splits a longest road but does it obstruct you in building further?
Craft Computer Club: a crafty way to inspire little coders
The API that returns predictions for the next cool API just waiting to be built.
Snabb Switch looks awesome.

Is there a list of "things" (not sure of the terminology?) people have built with it?

I guess the downside is that you can't virtualize it (I realize that is kind of the point, but it does reduce the accessibility of it).
2^64 IPs. :)
SEEKING WORK 
Tehran, Iran. Remote OK. Will work for bitcoins. C, C++, Oracle, Mongodb, Redis, Linux, Git and etc.

Email: ardeshir[dot]baharian[at]gmail.com
In the articles I read, it sounds like Oculus has very carefully worded how exactly motion sickness was "fixed" ... saying it "eliminates it in certain virtual environments." [1]

The only cause of unbearable motion sickness for me was strafing in games like HL2, Portal, etc. I'm somewhat skeptical that adding head tracking will make these strafing-heavy games sickness-free.

Currently, the sickness is such an off-putter that I need to force myself to keep using the device. I'm somewhat concerned that if this cannot be eliminated for all content, then some proportion of users will still get sick as the envelope is pushed. I know that for many/most consumers, even slight sickness will cause them not to want to use it at all.

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425987,00.asp
IMHO, It is Penguin's fault. There are religious extremists in every country. If you are going to release a book that does not agree to their view of the religion, they will complain. This matter should have settled in court. It is wrong to blame the country for Penguin taking of its book just because an organization asked it to.
I have read the book and its criticism. TL;DR: The book suffers from cherry-picking for telling a story. It ought not to be taken seriously as an endeavour in study of Hinduism. I mean, its in the title - An ALTERNATE History. Otherwise it is a fun read. (Imagine a book called - 'Nazism - An alternate history' based on Inglourious Basterds.)

The criticism comes from people who are taking the book seriously. :)
But that's a bit absurd isn't it? A recent core i7 reaches 124850 MIPS. That means that if it takes 1/1000th of a second to handle a connection, the CPU could execute 124 million instructions during that time. At 10/10000th it could still execute 12 million instructions. A minimal asynchronous connection handling certainly doesn't require more than say 10'000 instructions, so our servers are under-delivering on their performance at least by a factor of 1200x, perhaps even by a factor of 12000x.

Our servers should be able to surpass C1k easily, even C10k shouldn't tax them. They should, by rights, only be taxed by the C10m problem.
On the more prosaic end of the scale:

Bingo Card Creator, circa early 2007: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/old-site/index.htm

It doesn't exactly scream "This will certainly sell a quarter million of software, allow you to quit your day job, and fund your software business."

You'd find similar things floating around if you were to look at the early history of most companies which are widely idolized in our space. Nobody ships perfection on day 1. Luckily, customers are happy to pay for imperfect things.
Blah blah blah black, blah blah blah white. Same story every time. Apparently Asians don't exist.
Please add "Crickets" pleeeeeeease. And make sure it's the subtle crickets and not the really harsh sounding ones. Find crickets that sound like these: http://naturesoundspa.com/nature-sounds-for-sleep/relaxing-c... and NOT these: http://naturesoundspa.com/nature-sounds-for-sleep/undisturbe...