skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ajax is easy to use, and the dom is easy to manipulate using jquery. When yo create a site with plain html, it fits in perfectly with how the user expects the web to work.

When you do this is flash, it is an application running in your browser. It is far from seemless, and is the equivalent of a java app. It is something that takes time to load, and when it finally does, it takes time for the user to get used to the new experience.

The simple question is, when you come to a page that uses flex do you notice that flash is running. If so then why? Why isn't it completely transparent to the user? Why does it seem like an isolated little object on the page that has little interaction with what is going on around it.

Perhaps I just don't like a company owning any type of represention on the web.

Perhaps you knew all these answers though, and this whole post is a light form of flame bait. In which case I fell right into it by explaining the obvious down sides of flex.

So the positives:
*Things move around and look pretty.
JPEGrescan: unique way to losslessly shrink any JPEG file
Unicorn: Rack HTTP server for Unix and fast clients
"Low-level"? More like scam. The "College Algebra" [1] covers what high-school curriculum covered in either sophomore or junior year (depending on whether they were in the "AP track").

So, funny story. My friend just started at the local community college yesterday. He isn't very good at math, so they placed him in a below-level math class.

They learned about number lines today. Oh and also the difference between "greater than" and "less than".

Wow.
Yeah. There are lots of good examples I come across all the time but because I can't remember them, try something silly like "web bosting". You'll notice words like "boosting" and "boating" are in bold in the 23 million results. With "web +bosting" you get just a few thousand results and "bosting" is in all of them.

(Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)
If you go through the USENET archives with Google Groups you can find some incredible stuff. One of my faves is digging up arguments about how much RAM or hard drive space would exist "by the year 2000." Some people back in the 80s and 90s were nuts spouting "scientific" reasons why 512MB of RAM would be a theoretical maximum and similar nonsense.
How many of you are binge coders?
Okay. Here's my workflow:

- block out at least three hours of time
- stock up on coffee and shutdown all distractions
- code until my brain breaks.

This has implications for office work, because it means I can't do anything other than randomly browsing the nets, meaning that I go to work all day for fun, come home and binge until I fall asleep. Kind of screws the work/life balance we hear so much about these days.

So. How many of you are truly disciplined about your work and how many just binge?
Or at least if they do it, they don't admit it in their comments.
Some Tips On How To Be Less Quiet In Conversations
Well no, it's not an apples to oranges comparison because no hardware vendors offer a solution which is comparable to the one Backblaze have devised.

That graph is simply comparing their solution to the closest commercial equivalents. It just so happens that these are all way off because all hardware manufacturers want to design their hardware to provide the highest throughput.

(That said, our experience with the Sun X4500s hasn't been great from an I/O point of view.)
I remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)
openBSD
Slogan: NO REMOTE ROOT EXPLOITS IN THE DEFAULT INSTALL IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS AS FAR AS WE KNOW
The problem with that idea is that it takes more than just people waving money to make something happen; it also has to be economical. There has to be a solution to the "money flow in > money flow out" problem. And due to the enormous fixed costs a college campus implies, if demand drops far enough, you may not be able to make the numbers work for much more than the very, very highest demand people. And that says niche market, which is going to be a big transition away from where we are now.

There's probably some convenient economic term to describe this.

Ultimately, you sort of missed the point of my message, which is that it isn't enough to merely establish that these are good or desirable qualities of a college. You have to establish that there's enough people who think it's the best choice to make it economical. Colleges have to beat every other option from the point of view of enough people that they can turn a profit because colleges are in a free market, and will very soon be facing stiff competition from a new competitor that will undercut their prices by orders of magnitude, while simultaneously providing services that will be in many ways superior, probably superior enough to make up for the ways in which they are inferior.

A few art colleges will survive and a few music colleges will survive, and I tend to agree the Ivy league will survive (but they will bleed), but at the end, nobody is going to look around at the landscape and say that "colleges have survived". It's going to be a bloodbath.

Try to cut out the emotional overtones and just imagine a market where someone comes out with a competitive product that is orders of magnitude cheaper, while being fairly substitutable for the original product. Technically, there are still people who make shoes for horses, and they come out to your house to do it. They aren't gone. But they aren't a significant industrial force, either. That's where colleges are heading; just enough left over that you might be able to come up to me in 2030 and say "Look, Harvard's still there! It's all OK.", but you wouldn't be fooling anyone.
Actually, you DO have Firebug and in a very powerful way:
http://labs.findsubstance.com/2008/02/26/firebugs-console-lo...
http://snook.ca/archives/quick_links/quick_link_debug_flash_...
At least a couple of pharma companies actively use Gluster. Haven't used it myself, but have heard some stories (not positive) about the stability
DRM purely in the sense that political goals supersedes usability.
I'm sure we'll see those on the Caltrain soon. People there regularly have some of the most sophisticated and expensive folding bikes I've ever seen.
Paul Krugman continues to write the best articles about the state of the economy for laymen. I'm continually impressed (despite his years of research, training, and a nobel prize to boot) with his ability to explain what is happening and why.

Sometimes I lament the fact that instead of running the show, he's left to opine about the policies of others.
Haskell in the Real World  - building real time finance systems for profit
While I found this an interesting read, I believe someone who works with *264 encoding with any regularity can easily justify using the relatively cheap hardware encoders available to consumers. I'm not sure if x264 is fully compatible with such a device, though. This is a lot more feasible than waiting for Intel and AMD to significantly change their architecture for what sounds like an edge case.
The 7000 series is an incredibly cool system, and it's definitely giving NetApp/EMC a run for their money.

That said, it's still really expensive if you're willing to go that extra mile and design your own system for your needs. And it's really not that hard.
I love at the end where he puts it in his bag and tries to act like he isn't carrying a lead weight on one arm.

The problem is, you still look pretty dorky/smug riding one, and it looks hella dangerous.

If you want something like this, just get an electric skateboard:
http://www.exkate.com/

It is probably safer, and you might look sorta cool.
Pyjamas: writing AJAX applications in Python
There is a clear inconsistency between general relativity and quantum mechanics; reconciling them is one of the things superstring theory has been attempting, so far with limited success.
I am a contract programmer and I get set my own hours so I usually code in 10 - 12 hour blocks every other day.
Does anyone know of an open-source alternative? I don't mean "lift up heavy shit until you get tired, don't eat bad food" either, I mean a tested, regimented, and focused system?

I participated in the 911 Fitness Challenge http://www.911fitness.com/ a few years ago and it was particularly helpful to have everything spelled out for you, but it was expensive to implement, given the gym membership and dietary requirements.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179639
Where do you live that not being into hunting marks you as an outcast? That sounds so alien and interesting to a SoCal resident like myself...
My college costs $-957/month.

I hate to be so smug, but Scandinavian-socialism really does rule.
I want to add an additional comment about the diet for you. The diet is BY FAR the most important part of this. Finding an hour in your day is not that hard. People who say otherwise are full of shit and just making excuses -- I work 60-70 hours a week, easily. If you have small children, that's a different story ;-) I don't, but I can see that their schedules and responsibilities are far more demanding than mine.

If your diet is not already clean, and you're not used to eating five or six smaller meals spread out over the day, it will be a lot to get used to. You can easily burn 6-700 calories in a workout. But you'll want to cut your calories and eat very smart and healthy. If you consider that you need to have a calorie deficit of about 3,500 compared to what your body needs in order to lose a pound, you can burn 500 calories and cut 500 calories in a day, and that will give you about a two pound loss for the week, which is a good goal. But you only have to worry about the workout for an hour a day. You have to worry about your diet ALL DAY.

The good part, as I mentioned above, is that there is no fad here. You have a tonne of flexibility as far as what you can eat, and as long as you cut out junk like soda, junk snacks, burgers, pizza, etc. you should the pounds drop off very quickly. I didn't even think I had 20 pounds to lose, yet I had lost 20 pounds in 60 days.

But the workouts make you want to eat better, the healthy diet makes you want to workout more, and when you start seeing real results (which you will very quickly if you follow the system religiously), that will motivate you even more.

Really, I cannot speak highly enough about this program if you're willing to commit to it.
I reckon Wired's name for it is the best "Cute Electric Penny-Farthing".
Hardware encoders are not feasible for ordinary consumers at all; if you want an encoder that produces reasonable compression, you have to go up to the $10k-$50k range (and even there, most of the ones on the market are really not very good!). Low-end hardware encoders are both often slow (usually outperformed by x264 on a cheap quad-core CPU) and extremely bad at compression.

Plus, a CPU can be used for things other than encoding video, while a hardware device is of course useless for anything else, so it's easier to justify spending money on a fast CPU than on a task-specific piece of hardware.

Also, it isn't really an edge case; it will occur in any application which has a working set that is unavoidably larger than the L1 cache. Video encoders are just one of many cases where this occurs.

(Note: added that last point to the blog post after I posted this.)
A couple days ago there was some complaints that technology hasn't actually changed anyone's lives, and I made the claim that while we may be paused now while we consolidate some things, the changes are coming. Here's one for you now: In twenty years (by the time my son would be graduating), the centuries-old idea of college will probably be gone.

I've been thinking about the implications of this article for the past couple of hours (since my previous posts), and I think it could very easily cut far deeper than people realize. Once we have ~$100/month college education, why wouldn't an advanced high schooler opt for that instead of standard high school classes as we see them now? And once the mental block of "schooling must take place in a school" is gotten past, what's going to prevent that from going ever-lower in age? Why wouldn't even a middle-schooler prefer to learn math at their own pace instead of locked to all of his or her classmates?

And... once "school" consists to some significant degree of distance learning, what is the purpose of clocking in at a school building? Now, there are answers to that question (two-working-parent households using it for child care, for instance), but it's going to radically rewrite the school social contract.

If this sort of thing even remotely succeeds it'll start rewriting more than just the college social contract, it's going to extend way down.

(Of course today it's just introductory courses, but that is very, very correctable over the timespan I'm looking at here. This is a game-changing price point even if they triple it.)
I wonder if this means you could get LaTeX documents to be readable on the Kindle. I have a few free math books that are in LaTeX, so this would be useful to me.
Also see: http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/09/is-pnp-ind-o...

From comment 2: If P!=NP is independent of Peano Arithmetic, then "almost" P=NP.
This is a terrible, unilateral, knee-jerk methodology to determine application eligibility. It seems that apple is constantly creating lose/lose situations in which the developers have zero recourse for their strongly legitimate complaints.
XSS Vulnerability in Ruby on Rails
Five Incredibly Entertaining Niche Social Networks
I think the CLR team was able to learn from some of the JVM's shortcomings; this limitation is one example. .NET IL has the TAIL. instruction prefix that allows tail calls. It can be prepended to any call instruction outside of an exception handling block.

There's also the JMP instruction, which is similar and allows the current method's arguments to be passed to another function, discarding the current stack frame and returning to the current method's caller.
There doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't get xpdf/evince/okular to run. He got X and QT running...

For this reason, and the internet connection, I would probably get one, if they were available where I live... And the internet connection worked here.
Check out http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thr... for people using client-side GWT with PHP, Python, .NET. There no absolute need for Java on the backend with GWT.
teej, I appreciate your response and dispelling any absolutes that I may have inadvertently spoken in. However, I don't think I spoke in strict absolutes by saying things like "As far as I know" and "Is the text always selectable & copy and paste-able?". I concede you're right, about #4 and your correction reminded me that as recent as about two years ago I used ActionScript 3 (or was it 2?) with a free compiler, as well as Flex (and I sure as hell didn't pay for any Flex compiler). Anyways, I'm not attacking Flex or Flash, I think both tools solve certain problems well. I was just trying to point out some broad issues with it that you, yourself concede exist. Apologies for that coming across as absolutes. You clearly have far more experience than I in the Flash and Flex world so thanks for your feedback.
He seems kinda clueless to me. A whole article on the economic theory of recessions with no mention of malinvestment? He goes on at length about the efficient market hypothesis and bubbles yet never acknowledges that nobody can identify a bubble that has happened without government manipulation of the market. He goes on at length about Keynesian stimulus with no mention of its dismal failures, most notably in Japan.

There are always these rather ridiculous omissions and oversimplifications with krugman.
Ask HN: How many of you have ereaders?
I've been seriously thinking about getting an ereader sometime soon. I do a lot of reading, and with the amount of material freely available on the web, I sometimes end up reading on my laptop. But I'm starting to get frustrated with that.

So I'm interested in hearing your experiences with ereaders. How usuable are they for technical books (like nonfiction) and nonfiction books. And do you find any of the extra features useful (such as keyboard/ wireless internet)?
Given how little we know about reality it's not practical to answer the question right now. Let's just say there's a lot we don't know and leave it at that. No use to speculate as to what science cannot solve.

What I am though is a rationalist - i.e. I believe we use our minds a lot less efficiently then we could. We're starting this century to learn a lot about how the brain really works, and how reality really works - not at the basic levels but as very complex systems. And with this we slowly get pieces of how to be better humans. Ironically enough some of what we found is that religion/spirituality is a pretty good thing.
Samsung's new generation of drives is currently only available in "EcoGreen" versions: 5400rpm. Doesn't particularly affect bandwidth when you're at 500gb/platter, though you lose on latency.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152...
This might get answered once the DVDs arrive, but in your opinion can I pretty much just do the program in the morning before work and then drink a protein smoothie afterwards for breakfast?
Every time an article shows up on the (fascinating) topic someone pops up and starts swinging. "Personal growth. Face to face interaction with brilliant professors. Discuss with like minded talented youths. Completely misses the point of college... and on"

The reality is that no one would even consider paying private universtity equivalent fees to achieve those things in any other case. They are peripheral. Like air conditioning in a car they are inseparable from a good university.

You can't ignore the fact that "They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is
driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilising lows."

In any case, assume andreyf is correct and the peripherals make all the difference. That is still a big deal. Universities may need to compete explicitly on that advantage, without the pretence of a better education. That world would look very different. Perhaps as this article and discussion on HN suggest, online is more suitable for basic courses while advanced courses still need a building. Maybe this is on to a decent idea: $99 per month online study of all basic courses, 1-2 year. 1-2 years in a building for advanced courses.
Thanks for the follow-up. After re-reading the post, I see that this is not /just/ an x264 problem.

Thank you also for informing me that hardware encoders aren't very good. I had actually considered purchasing one of the ~$100 ones, but now I'll steer clear.

I must be doing something wrong, though, because I can't seem to get much better than 2x real-time on my Q6600 w/ 4GB memory when using x264.
yeah but it doesn't look like this will work with a rabbitmq broker since it implements amqp 0.10, rabbit is currently 0.8 mqp compliant so you would have to use qpid as the amqp server afact. Still pretty cool though.
Yeah I totally agree it's expensive - though compared to the other enterprise storage solutions it's cheap. That said people should be making cheaper solutions when you don't that enterprise level system - especially if you can handle the failures in your software stack.
When you're running for your dinner, you get several tries.

When you're running for your life, you win or die.
BTW: V. classy operation at SmallTalkApp... wish I could have entered a suggestion via your "Feedback" button... without going through Bloomplex's "question handling". Makes it feel way less like I'm actually connected with developers of STA... taken away to "getsatisfaction.com ...

As for the original topic, I feel your pain over losing a chunk of life "to fix cross browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript issues". But I appreciate your raising the flex issue; the ensuing discussion has convinced this noob that he neeeds to study up on and experiment with it.
Fcsh is indeed a lot faster than mxmlc. I've written a small shell script that stands in for fcsh and provides an interface like the standard mxml compiler (mxmlc) so that you can just call it (like you would call mxmlc) and have it return an exit status instead of dropping you into an interactive shell like fcsh does. It's called fcshctl:

http://hasseg.org/blog/?p=194
Ok. Since I couldn't access the site, I didn't even know what it was supposed to be doing... other than 'an old and well-known trick' and something to do with browser history.
I know it's not practical at the moment due to lack of deployment, but how does flex compare and contrast with silverlight/moonlight?
The meaning of 2x real-time, of course, depends entirely on the resolution.

x264 now has encoding presets you can use to trade off speed for compression: they go from "ultrafast" to "placebo" (full list in the help). Grab the latest from x264.nl; we've also had a lot of speed improvements lately ;).

Do note that at high speeds, it's easy to get bottlenecked: the most common case is the decoding of the input, which is often only single-threaded. If your input is uncompressed, then you can get bottlenecked by reading it off the disk. And if you're running filters on the input (e.g. resizing it), that can also serve as a bottleneck.
He forgot C! It's not in the language spec, but gcc will optimize tail calls, with -O2 or above.
XSS Twitter in minutes; Why you shouldn't store important data with 37signals
Dear jetBlue...
You seem to have posted this twice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=803883
The link caused my anti-virus (McAfee) to pop a warning. A quick Google search says:

"McAfee Avert Labs has found a false detection with JS/Exploit-Packed.c.gen and will be releasing the 5729 DAT Files to correct this issue. The false detection is being seen on websites containing certain types of javascript obfuscation"

How do you tell if it's a false positive? I wonder why javascript obfuscation is needed? Any smart people out there know the answer (and interested enough to share it?)
The question is though,
If I were to take one of these degrees on this website and pass it, how would it compare in a perspective employers mind to a 4 year cs major degree?
The real problem isn't that MRI gobbles up memory when loading libraries, but that it is constitutionally incapable of sharing that memory between processes.

If it didn't have such a ridiculous mark-and-sweep GC that insists on periodically writing to every damn page, libraries loaded before calling fork() would be optimally shared by the descendants.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Google abstract)
My dissertation was partly about prefetching to L1.
http://akkartik.name/akkartik-phd07.pdf

It required changes to processor microarchitecture, though.
kamaloka as in, "world of love" ? +1 for name. No idea what AMQP is though.
So I'm assuming that you're calling it a scam because they offer very little value in terms of the information provided, and that this high-school math is put off as a college course?

But universities do that now. They offer remedial math and reading, and "Strategies for Student Success," which allows people to retake high school material in a college setting. Because undergrad tuition hours are all charged the same.