skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this when it was first published in 2006. It's a bit strange to say, but it actually had a significant impact on my life and how I interact with people.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
whoops, forgot about spotlight. i stopped working on my newsreader before it became viable.

i've examined the spotlight apis from time to time, and it does look like it solves a lot of the same problems. having never really used it, i can't say if it does as good of a job as bfs indexes do or not.

i can say that the beos file system is much more amenable to database-like usage than the mac file system. bfs has indexes implemented as a first-class feature, just as important as filenames or metadata. indexes are managed by the file system itself. spotlight was kind of bolted on top of hfs+. its indexes are in user-level files.
Two major differences.

One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and querying is a feature built into the filesystem.

Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only indexes the attributes you attach to files.

Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this feature.

[1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku (http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/), though development has been stalled since my PC went kaput.

EDIT: Read articles 24 and 25 for a sneak peek into BFS's more powerful features: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/
Remember that Haiku is built for i586 systems. Are P2 and P3 i586?
FTC forces Sears, Kmart out of the spyware business
I'm with you on the multiple language runtimes into one process, I find it hard to envision a situation where that would be a benefit, the only situations I can think of have nothing to do with scaling issues (multiple smaller websites for some reason bound to legacy versions of an interpreter).

The other issue (a small number of processes accepting work) is a good idea though I think, to get the number of processes doing actual work closer to the number of cores.

After all, even if it is a 'small multiple' it is a divider when it comes to how much hardware you need and less hardware=better.

The DB may be a bottleneck, it may not be, that very much depends on the workload of the server.
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It's funny that "The National Association of Staredown Professionals" mentioned at the bottom of the article is a real organization. I wonder what their meetings are like?
Is it my imagination, or are there very short samples from Commander Keen playing in the second video? (E.g., about 5 seconds in.)
Another reason he uses PMF is probably because Danny Tarlow (post author) is a student at UToronto. Russ Salakhutdinov and Andrei Mnih, the authors of the PMF method, are also students at UToronto.
Sure, but why limit our oil sources to just oil wells?
Anderson, IN has city wide Wi-Fi. Interestingly, the city government put this in place as a "network" for the city services. It was opened up for public use later.
I don't like that they don't state their payment terms up front...I have lots of stuff that'd qualify quality wise but I'm bit put off by their offering pay but not actually putting any details of that in the FAQ.
We should all make as big a differnce in our lives as Norman Borlaug, he is a large source of inspiration to me.
Proper Branding Is Indispensable To 
Most companies spend a lot of time in identifying the best promotional products. Interestingly, they do not put in equal effort and time discussing the branding issues. The only purpose why companies and businesses distribute promotional gifts and promotional products is to reach out to their target market and to have their brand names registered in people’s mind. You will not be able to achieve this result unless the promotional products that you are distributing are properly branded
" That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to."

If that is as far as someone gets in trying to get an understanding of Rails, then they aren't even trying.

What's disappointing is not that Mr. Lerdorf doesn't like Rails (though his reasoning could be better), but that he doesn't even seem interested in it or why people get so excited about it.
Given that John Carmack is a massive Republican jerk, part of me wants to say "socialism (and Jet A subsidization) rules!" The rest of me wants to steal the rocket and fire myself into lower earth orbit.
I'm writing this from within the live-CD session, and I have to agree, it works great (The frequent reads from the CD slow everything down, of course, but it's not nearly as bad as a live Ubuntu session)
How many mistaken cries of wolf would it take for you to think the wolf cryers are mistaken though? 5? 10? 20?
You'd have to stage those. I don't think there are enough units, and there are probably significant difficulties in making many additional copies. It would be evolution in action.
Wasn't this the entire plot to Pi?
I definitely find it hard to doubt the veracity of the project, being that the team and Xprize foundation are both well known. However, I had to watch the videos a couple time and there's just something about them that seems... fake. Its really hard to put my finger on, but very subtle details like the shine off the metal and the structure of the flame seem like high-grade CGI. Another thing that bothers me is the shaking of the camera itself as the vehicle is in the air. I've done some work in the past few months with After Effects and one of the nice features is called "wiggle()". You can attach wiggle to cameras, null objects, and even lights and simulate a very realistic camera shake. The movement of the camera in both videos seems like it was done like this.

I'm probably dead wrong, but I feel its important to at least state such thoughts publicly. I guess that we're finally getting to a meeting point between high-grade camera systems and cgi effects that they're starting to blur enough to fool the eye, or last confuse it. Guess its similar to the uncanny valley effect.
If your marketing strategy is, "keep this away from the general population, and minimize the number of inbound leads I get to something that I can possibly handle", then, provided you plan on relaunching this under a different name a year from now, OK.

Otherwise, I've read your code and watched you work on this for awhile now and you're just doing yourself a disservice.
What exactly was the challenge? The X-Prize page that should do so (http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge) gives no idea of what the competition is or what the 2 levels of competitions are.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820995
Yes. (It was 8086, 80186, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium=586.)
I want to agree with you, but what I am interested in knowing is why the boston doctor was insisting on a mobility test prior to surgery and why the small town folks were insisting on surgery first.

The same thing happens in small town India as well where doctors are more interested in keeping you admitted above and beyond the needed duration and doctors in large cities are just better because they have a greater patient load to be well versed with complex surgeries if needed.
You can always -- provided you are sane, sober, and alert -- decline treatment or even just check yourself out of the hospital "against medical advice." Generally this involves signing some forms releasing the hospital from all responsibility for you. And then you can just walk out.

Hospital personnel will try to strongly discourage you from doing this -- not because they're evil, but because in most situations it's a really, really bad idea. But if you just keep saying "no, I don't want treatment, I want to leave, give me the forms to sign out AMA," and you're not clearly nuts or high on morphine or otherwise impaired, you can pretty much just leave.

However, unless you have a very specific reason for believing that the treatment protocol at work isn't correct or best for you, it's generally a bad idea.
My point is that there is a person who created the software who deserves the blame. You can't talk about a computer being smart at all. Either the programmer was smart or they weren't.
That's an idiotic job, as you described it -- and really only makes my point for me.
But he's arguing against the idea of having a small number of processes -- he seems to want a single monolithic process per machine, with a native threadpool and multiple interpreters to get around GILs.

The idea of rolling multiple interpreters into a single process is especially bad for python, as it has a real garbage collector and os.fork()-ed processes will share a lot of memory. It makes some sense for Ruby, since its assy mark-and-sweep will invalidate every single page on the next collection after a fork().
You'd have to go to statistics to make any sort of real determination, of course (anecdotes, data, etc...), but it's definitely not something where I'm trying to make the facts fit a conclusion - it happened that way and it made me suspicious of at least one dentist.
DjangoCon 2009 Presentations
I got too say, I would be surprised if an insurance would not cover something like this. This is equivalent to a sports injury. Frankly no one can tell me that jumping off a cliff mountain biking is less dangerous than a bridge jump. I've bridge jumped before (not fifty feet I believe but high) and I wasn't the only one around, I didn't think it was that dangerous at the time but I understand how a bad landing could cause such an injury. Hell Olympic divers have really bad landings doing 33 feet dive and don't die.
It's like that Paul B article: what's the worst that could happen, and what's the best possible outcome. IMO, the best possible outcome from jumping off a bridge is not really worth the worst possible outcome.
There is quite a body of knowledge about eye contact when applied to hacking women. Viz. the original experiments by David Shade: http://www.fastseduction.com/youarenew/eyecontact.shtml - Jeans Joe's manual on eye contact mastery: http://www.jeansjoe.net/blog/?p=14 - Joseph W. South podcasts with Jeans Joe about eye contact: http://www.jeansjoe.net/download/jws.and.jj.-.eye.contact.po...
If I recall correctly, and am seeing what I think I see in video #2, the purpose of the challenge was to lift off from one pad, move a certain distance and land safely on a different pad.
Or the FreeBSD thing backfires on you, and makes tarsnap seem like an OSS OS satellite project, like OpenSSH and rsync. So maybe don't go that direction.
The intuitive and colloquial uses of those terms tend to stray significantly from the "correct" denotative uses, too. That might be worth keeping in mind while you champion those uses of the term.

My sympathies definitely lie with the prescriptive use of terms. I just think that, if strictly identified as existing within a limited framework for purposes of a particular discussion, jargon denotations are perfectly acceptable prescriptions for use.
Intel Is Said to Plot an Executive Overhaul
It is mostly a matter of scale when it comes to the actual farm operations. Larger operations have the available capital to invest in pricy equipment that decreases their operational expenses (favorable tax advantages make this a win for most businesses, bug operations just have the cash/credit to actually act upon the available options.) For a farm a lot of that expense is fuel, fertilizer, and herbicide/pesticide; larger, more efficient equipment is usually the quickest route to being fuel efficient on the farm and there are a variety of options ranging from GMO crops to smarter tilling and cover crops to try to reduce the usage of fertilizer and other chemicals. A lot of these techniques were pioneered or "re-discovered" by modern organic farming but the make sense for any farm.

As for the efficiencies in transportation, a recent book to take on that subject was "Just Food: Where Locovores Got It Wrong". The basic idea, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, is that modern logistics systems have spent a lot of time and research on getting very good at what they do. Companies in this business track every penny involved in getting goods from point A to a lot of different point Bs. One big truck going from the farm to a regional distribution center and then twenty smaller trucks going shorter distances from that center to customers ends up being a lot more efficient than a small army of trucks going from the farms to those twenty customer sites.

There are some externalities that do not show up on the bottom line, but I can't see it being more than a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of the entire effort.
"I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement.

Ouch! Thanks for the honesty, though. :-)

I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart

I'll meet you half-way -- a 2em gap looks too big to my eye, but I like 1.5em more than the original 1em.

putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges

Oops! I didn't realize that this wasn't uniform.

changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content)

That looks a bit too weak to my eye, but I agree on the principle -- I've dropped them to #555 and #aaa.

The hover highlighting [...]

I spent an obscene amount of time trying to decide what I wanted to do there -- changing the background was the first idea I had, but I couldn't get it to look a way I liked. I think I'll have to come back to this once I've gotten away from looking at that menu for a while.

...sans-serif faces...

Sigh. I hate the idea of specifying fonts in web pages... why can't web browsers just pick a reasonable default? But you're right, it does look much better with sans-serif -- consider it changed.

... reducing the contrast just a bit...

Lowered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text (maybe this is just a personal thing -- but I'd like to be able to look at my website without wincing), so I've done this using an off-white background instead.

On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links.

I considered that, but there's nothing sensible to make them link to -- I have pages about portsnap and FreeBSD Update on my personal site, but they are several years out of date.

I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement.

My law student friends tell me that this isn't a problem; and it doesn't matter anyway since I really don't care if the explanations are somehow interpreted as part of the terms.

Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page.

Good point, I didn't realize how many parenthetical remarks I was making when I wrote that text.

On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30).

Oops!

On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something.

Is it not true? I can't think of any non-random access memory which is addressed in the same way as RAM is.

On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links.

Good idea.

It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page.

Those links should be opening up in a new window -- aren't they? That's what happens in my web browser, but it's entirely possible that I did something non-portable.

Thanks for all the excellent suggestions -- this is exactly the sort of comment I was hoping to get here. I'm not necessarily going to follow all of your suggestions, but even those I'm not following have provided very useful food for thought.
Hacking whom, now?
That view seems rather inconsistent with history. People in markets that are more free (there really isn't any market we can define as being "free" as yet though countries like HK and the US are closest) find that their people get wealthier at all segments than those that don't. Yes there may be greater inequality but you have to ask yourself if we should make sure that we avoid "the feeling of inferiority" by banning leather seats, 12v 2litre engines or the latest iPhone or by making it unaffordable for everyone.

To varying degrees, societies make a value choice (whether implicitly or explicitly): that people to live unequal but wealthier or equally poorer. There really isn't much of a middle ground - or at least not that yet exists. I find it curious that those of a certain ideological persuasion focus more on the inequality rather than income mobility which is, what at least I believe to be more important and why many of us here seek to create and build our own businesses.
Copying my comment from my comment page.

Well like I mentioned I believe that is an implementation detail. For example, if you have the subprocess you have two fundamental designs. The first being where the master process still manages the client socket (so data is transfered from the worker back to the master). The second being where you pass the client socket (over a UNIX message with send_msg) and allow the worker to flush the buffers and close the socket. The problem with the first is that you increase the amount of wake-ups your event loop needs to do by 2x (since it needs to handle data in and out for the worker) which could increase your handling latency. This is a no-go in some applications. The problem with the second model is you lose the ability to have connections live longer their request (otherwise they are restricted to that workers affinity which will not be evenly balanced).

ODBC is an option (or SQL Relay) but it adds an increased latency without providing the ability to yield on the resource being ready. For example, even with the models I described above to reduce over subscription of resources, your container may not be correct in its assumption that the connection has little contention. So you effectively add latency and reduce correctness in your ability to run efficiently.
The external plot was people accosting Max for the number in his head. The internal plot, I interpreted, was that when Max stared into the sun as a little boy, it merged his left and right brain functionality. When he took a drill to that growth on the side of his head, he was breaking that connection.

I think that's the ultimate goal when dealing with yourself: creating peace between both halves of your brain. Max found enlightenment by staring into the sun, and wasn't ready for the power it wields, and went crazy.
http://www.xprize.org/blogs/wpomerantz/ng-llc-rules-explaine...
People really open up to you when you call them by name...

I never realized it, but almost every conversation I have on the phone goes like this:

ring
ring
"Thenks for calling hacker news, this is PG, how can I help you?"
"Hey, PG, whats up?"

This totally throws the customer service rep off. Most people just ignore the name and start screaming off their question. It makes you different and "fun" to them. Think about answering the phone all day. Suddenly somebody showing an interest in you goes a long way.

I never realized that I did this until a good friend of mine pointed it out to me. I now feel kindof bad about being manipulative :( (although unintentionally).

The same thing also works for most other service people. Be nice to them. Treat them like people and suddenly things happen for you :)

(there is a restaurant in Tempe, AZ that does not serve fried pickles. However, if you're nice enough to the server, they'll generally pull some strings for you and BAM! friend pickles. I emphasize that they don't serve them because, if you get a server who is in a particularly bad mood and you ask for them, they will get sortof angry at you. I think they're a pain in the ass for the cooks.)
I'm getting mixed signals here from your comments in this thread versus how the site looks versus your original question: I can't tell if you're trying to run this as a business, or if it's just a hobby.

If it's just a hobby, then no, you don't need fancy graphics or much in the way of an interface or anything else. It's your project, and you're sharing it with people. That's great, and you get to let your personal style preferences rule the project.

But if it's a business, then you have to run it like one. Even if your target market isn't a bunch of point-and-click Windows users, the site needs to be professionally designed, which includes adding some graphics, paying attention to typography, getting rid of the horrible black borders around everything, etc. You're a damn good programmer, from what little I know of you, but that doesn't mean you have any skill at graphic or interface design. If you want this thing to pay the bills, or even do better than that, then you have to sell it, and at the moment ... I don't think the new design is cutting it, even though it's a hundred times better than the current "design".

Yet another way to look at it is that your time would be much better spent working on tarsnap's infrastructure and code, which you're very good at, rather than developing a new layout for the website ... which you're mostly only OK at.
Jack the Ripper was a pioneer in the field, don't'cha know.
Using nanotubes to break through solar efficiency barrier
We're approaching the point where the amount of time between one person knowing something and everyone knowing it is approaching zero. What do you think it'd be like to exist as part of a collective consciousness like that? When do I get my bio-port ??
"According to Ithaca Fire Department statistics, Lowe was the fifteenth person to die in Ithaca's gorges since 2000—and the fourth to drown in that particular pool since 1986. When most people think of gorge deaths, they think of the jumpers who have given Cornell an unwanted (and unwarranted) reputation as a suicide hot spot. But Ithaca Police Officer Doug Hoyt estimates that about half of those fifteen deaths were accidents caused by turbulent water, slippery rocks, fallen trees, and a host of other natural features. The local community has mourned each death. But Lowe's passing—coming in the wake of the drowning the previous year of Jeevan Mykoo, a thirty-year-old tourist from Ottawa, and the 2006 death of Navin Parthasarathy, a visiting graduate student from the University of California, Santa Barbara—has spurred a widespread debate about how to deal with the dangers and appeals of one of Cornell's great natural attractions."

http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_conten...
I don't think Unix was a step forward in terms of a UI, but as a programming environment it's a lot easier to go from zero to something than Windows (IMO). That's all I'm saying.

Now I use a Mac and have the best of both worlds!
I'm surprised there has been no discussion around NT's IO Completion Ports on this topic. IOCPs have this magic where the scheduler makes sure the number of threads running from a worker pool are the optimum for the number of cores on the system. It lends itself well to writing hi-perf networking apps where you're waiting on a bunch of objects using MsgWaitForMultiple or some equivalent.
Any clue on when the DjangoCon 2009 videos will be available online?