skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It reinvents the wheel. As a developer, you have to have really good reasons not to use it. Especially since Boost license is practically AS-IS, they could have taken the original source.

It is possible they are better at this problem than others, but that is very unlikely, from experience. As a developer it isn't wise to do a reliability test on a new library by yourself.

Making a portable async framework is quite error-prone because of the heterogenous situations it could face. You can witness this reading libevent's evolution over the years. And those developers are as good unix coders as you can possibly get with vast experience on the subject (since mid 90s.) I bet the Boost/Asio guys are very good C++ coders too, Boost is as close as you can get to STL.

At a glance, http://rubyeventmachine.com/ doesn't state why a new C++ async library. They only mention the Reactor Pattern, and Boost/Asio supports it:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_40_0/doc/html/boost_asio/ove...
DriverScanner - Driver update tool
depends on what you are selling, as a previous poster said, and who you are selling it to. My experience selling to computer nerds has been that we are a very rational and price-sensitive bunch. we shop around, and we want objective measures.

Actual utility, much like truth during a court battle, is a big advantage. Sure, it's not overwhelming, but it helps a lot. If you are providing actual utility, your customers will do your marketing for you.

Personally, I think the choice depends a lot on what you are good at. If you are good at marketing and have little technical and/or engineering skill, sure, you will get more out of marketing. But the opposite can work too.

Personally, I'm always very amused by people telling me I should raise my prices. I started out selling FreeBSD jails (with an actual utility close to my current $8 product) for $40 each. I rented two. Switching to xen, then dramatically dropping my prices (well, and a few years of actually, you know, learning what I was doing) helped me a lot.

Marketing is easy when you have obvious and objective advantages over competing products. You can yammer all day about this or that or the other, but if you can point at your price sheet and say 'hey, look- I'm kinda like that other guy, only 1/4th the price' well, for price sensitive customers, that's a difficult to refute reason to give you a shot, especially if the advantages your competitors cite for the price premium are not immediately testable.

Differentiation is only in your interest if you are better at marketing (and/or have higher costs) than the competition. In my case, the competition is much better at marketing, and my costs are such that I can dramatically undercut them while making a profit, so it makes sense for me to just focus on providing a decent product while occasionally saying "Hey, look at me. I'm kindof like the competition, only 1/4th the price!"
Yes, a 1u to .1u increase is 10x, but it's still trivial. In most cases, everything else that you're doing is much slower than the match. Yes, in a degenerate case, the PCRE performs abysmally, but seriously, are you ever going to use "a?a?a?aaa"? I'd like to see some numbers on the average, not the absolute worst case.
Most people in the world don't have central heating, almost one billion is starving (a global food crisis was there before the financial crisis and still goes on), only a few nations guarantee health care, capitalist nations like the US don't. Globally the literacy is very poor and education rudimentary. There are more slaves now in the world than in any other periods of history.

Capitalist countries like the US, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa are the most crime ridden in the world. In the US alone more than a million people is in prison. People live in gated communities to protect themselves. Due to the digital divide only a small part of the world population has Internet access.
Self-interest is not greed. Greed is wanting more than you actually need.
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=greed
Sorry about that. I really should check my facts before being snarky. For some reason I thought twitter was only a year or so old. Maybe that's when it really took off or something.
I remember reading about the importance of sub-millisecond shutters in underwater photography. Apparently, if you time the flash and shutter just right, you can get the light bouncing back from the target into the camera, but block all the light from in front of and behind the target, as well as ambient water particles . This apparently increases your visible distance underwater by twofold.
It's a joke, but I'm afraid it's author doesn't seem to think so.
My post deserves negative four points (actually, it deserves worse) for two reasons: it's both false and rude.
It seems everyone has read the post in a different sense than I'd intended. I'm not suggesting that people pass copycat games off as originals. It just might be a good workout.

For example, a lot of the fun in DOOM has been (in my opinion) lost in later generations of FPS. An honest attempt at copying might have helped game designers capture the little details that made the game fun - not just the general idea of "whoo I'm a first-person shooter".
I agree with you but you make one mistake. The Cuban system is capitalism as well, state capitalism where all capital is accumulated and managed by the state.
They might call it communism or socialism to fool the people there but in both systems the means of production belong the people but in Cuba they don't.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

The GDR was also called democratic but it never was, so don't get fooled by propaganda labels.
I recommend treating it as a spectrum instead of boolean. Eval is considered harmful for a similar reason as to why GOTO is: it makes code harder to prove and to manipulate. Markup and data on one end of the spectrum can be endlessly manipulated, analyzed, and worked with. As we move up the power spectrum, we get to regular languages, stack languages, and finally Turing-completeness. Within Turing-completeness, though, there are still varying levels of how hard something is to work with. Yes, the halting problem means that you can't for any behavior determine whether an arbitrary program exhibits that behavior, but there are still subsets about which you can reason.
This is what I was thinking during the Twisted vs. Tornado stuff. Sometimes it's not Not-Invented-Here, but rather Want-to-get-involved-in-a-growing-market (and markets exist in open source, even if money doesn't change hands). Increased competition changes the constraints in different ways, you no longer need to be just good enough, but rather need to be innovative and come up with interesting, differentiating features.
"Capitalism works because the best businesses succeed while the worst fail."

So Microsoft, Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Exxon are the best?
> the result is implicit cooperation.

Right. The implicit cooperation. The implicit cooperation by the wealthy few that ultimately best serves the moguls' already grotesquely large fortune.
Hi-tech video camera used to capture dolphin slaughter
They're the best at capitalism.
Ask HN: Looking for a shared overview / task app for teams, native and live.
I've used countless project, task, and ticket tracking systems and continue to love what I'm using right now (Lighthouse). I've also attempted to integrate Yammer into my teams day to day with mixed success. What I'd really like is something that does the following (while complimenting the ticket tracking system we're using):

Allows everyone on the team to see what everyone else is working on at a glance. No scrolling through a feed (any discussion about what they are working on would happen after a click away from the default view). I would also be able to set what they are working on as the product manager which might simply be a reference to a ticket number in Lighthouse.

Since this would be a real-time application it would be nice if the team could have instant chats as well, at any time.

Why would any of this matter if our ticket tracking system is working fine? Well, not everyone on the team is a developer and they tend to stay away from Lighthouse unless they really have to log in. Designers, marketing folks, and the higher ups still want to know what's going on and in some cases it's my job to assign them tasks. I can't expect them to use a tool that's geared towards developers, especially because all they want is a very fast view of what's happening now.

I really hope I'm describing a tool that already exists. My hope is there is a native Mac/Windows application that supports this, but browser based would work I suppose.
There's definitely a lot of all-or-nothing thinking going on here, on both sides of the issue. I agree with Borlaug about nitrogen fertilizer; we can't replace it efficiently. But I also have qualms about the over-use of pesticides and fertilizer; air and water pollution; decreasing genetic diversity of industrially farmed food (probably the primary reason why organic produce tastes better, in practice); and dependence upon a global supply chain that requires massive amounts of energy, and that leads to perverse nutritional incentives. Don't get me started on non-vegetable farming....

I think a lot of claims coming from organic fetishists are off the deep end, but they're not entirely wrong. I think a lot of the claims coming from industrial farming fetishists are off the deep end, but they're not entirely wrong. As usual, the world consists of many shades of gray.
Too bad EU is on 220v. I'd ship you guys incandescents from the US.
Left standing ? I am not sure.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/09/ny-times-lehman-post-...
Very cool idea. I wish I had time to make a toy Compojure example tonight.
Stop Complaining And Start Educating Potential Clients (Marketing)
With so many complaining about crowdsourcing, outsourcing, and their neighbors amateur nephews, I thought I'd spark a bit of discussion the other way.
Exactly. I don't care too much about organic vs non organic vegetables per se. What I do care a lot about is that I get the tastiest vegetables I can get. It just so happens that this means buying organic most of the time.

There really are two very different problems. One is how to we feed lots and lots of people in poor parts of the world and the other is how can rich spoiled people like myself get the best tasting vegetables. The solution to these two problems probably isn't the same.
Another good article which I don't think is getting as much press as the New Yorker article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
Ask Jeeves is on a mission to be indispensable
Borlaug had no problem with people buying organic (e.g., "Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It's a free society."). His issue was that first-world people shouldn't completely abandon the advancement of genetically-modified food as it doesn't agree with their views of how food should be grown.

Most of us can buy organic food I would imagine, and it usually does taste better. But we shouldn't force our ideals of what others should and should not eat when organic is not a viable option, and any food is better than tastier food. That was Borlaug's message.
Is anybody arguing that you can? Is anybody championing organic farming because they think it will feed the world?
That’s only happening in Quicktime’s Plugin for browsers, not in Quicktime Player. It’s a pretty smooth effect, it hopefully trickles up to the Player soon :)
I can second that. I took up buying my vegetables from a few hippies around town last year. They deliver to my door for the same price the (non-organic) vegetables would have cost at the grocery store. Though, I think a lot of this improved taste could be freshness as well; most of the goods are local and were picked much more recently. Another detractor is the fact that the food at the store has (typically) travelled much longer distances.

I agree with the thesis of the article, though. With the coming (actually, possibly already-existing) overpopulation crisis, high-tech food is going to be important. Unfortunately, the hardcore food-hippies will have to get over that fact.
Note that here the laser is used to generate an _acoustic_ pulse, so the light is not used as a carrier, sound is.

Research in using lasers underwater for 40 years with the same result: little use other than for very short distances. Water absorbs the energy too much for lasers to be of use at long distances. And high power emissions only make you look like a searchlight, hardly something you want to do if you're in a submarine.

I cannot see that this "changes everything".
I do to from time too, but I asked because personally, I rarely see people get questions answered on Facebook the way they regularly do on Twitter. But then again, the people that Twitter and get questions answered quickly are probably your blogger, big personality types too.

And then yet back on the other hand, as you say, there is no friend requirement so those big personality types could really only amplify their voice in that way over Twitter.
> Most people in the world don't have central heating, almost one billion is starving (a global food crisis was there before the financial crisis and still goes on), only a few nations guarantee health care, capitalist nations like the US don't.

Surely, a greater portion of the population has access to food and medicine than at almost any other point in history. Communism has scored some massive failures when it comes to feeding people (5 year plans, etc. etc...)

> Globally the literacy is very poor and education rudimentary.

Surely, the world literacy rate is higher than at almost any point in history.

> There are more slaves now in the world than in any other periods of history.

As a percentage?

> Capitalist countries like the US, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa are the most crime ridden in the world.

I believe this point to be accurate and relevant, although the high US crime rate is probably also related to our common law system.

> Due to the digital divide only a small part of the world population has Internet access.

But still far more than at almost any point in history! The internet is a great sticking point in debates about government investment. I don't think it would exist without capitalism, but I gather that it was greatly accelerated by government R&D money.
At what the market values I'd say Yes.

Microsoft made good enough software that ran on the cheapest hardware available. So people could do everything on a PC that they could do on say...a Mac for a fraction of the cost (sure it was probably harder to do but people obviously valued the money they saved more)

Wal-Mart sells products the cheaper than anyone else. 'nuff said.

McDonalds may not be the best food but they spend millions per year making sure it's consistent. You can go to a McDonalds in Los Angeles and a McDonalds in London and it's going to essentially be the same food. People value that. Plus it's again cheap and good enough.

Exxon has actually made several innovations in customer experience that help push it up over it's rivals. Here in Southern California for example we have SpeedPass which is an RFID device on your key chain that allows you to purchase gas quicker and without pulling out your wallet.

So the point is all those companies delivered what the market wanted.
He was talking about the serviceguy trying to get him to buy more expensive service. I think if you just say "no" in a conversational tone, there's nothing impolite about it. You don't have to be an asshole to say "no".
"The twisted port involved removing almost 1,400 lines of code and didn't change the tornado API."

Or, looking at it another way, you removed Tornado's simple 1400-line core, and replaced it with a 150,000-line dependency.

(Yes, I know that Tornado On Twisted doesn't depend on the entire Twisted framework. But the port does involve a lot more code in total than the original.)
destruction on a planetary level

Surely you can't believe the planet itself is going to explode or something, can you? I mean, what you're really saying is that more growth will make the planet into a state that you find offensive and hard to live with -- dirty skies, polluted water, etc.

If that's the case then I'm with you. Glad to talk about how clean we want to make things and what kind of rules we want to put on ourselves so the world meets our ascetic approval. (offline, of course)

I don't think you believe the planet itself is going to be destroyed. Life will continue, right? It'll just get ugly and uninhabitable for poor people -- which is not an acceptable option, by the way, but it's not destruction.

Or are you somewhere in the middle, thinking that somehow the planet will manage to kill just us and the rest of the ecosystem (or what's left of it) will continue?

When you use words like that, you really still need to explain yourself some more. I'm just grasping at straws here.
2009 MTV Video Music Awards Live Online ~ Kiss Corner
If the practices can be sustained, then we've increased the carrying capacity. To revert to traditional practices could decrease it again. The bigger the difference between our population size and carrying capacity, the worse that ride down will be. Of course, how these practices can be made/kept sustainable is an issue.
Code reviews for fun & profit
Just because I sell you an apple for a dollar doesn't make me an evil mogul and you an oppressed worker.

As an aside, we should really teach Marx better in modern schools. We teach the brilliance of his insights without then following it up with the many ways he was mistaken. I think sometimes Marx is being taught by the Humanities department and not Economics professors.
You know what is the problem "efficient market" capitalism?
It is logical enough to make people with IQ 100-110 attracted and interested and even fascinated by it, but it is completely devoid of theoretic basis - the only basic premise is Adam Smith's invisible hand; and that is disturbing for smarter people. Like Stiglits often says - hand is invisible because it is not.
Hardly. One form of economic growth is increased efficiency.
Raze that place to the ground, and throw those "medical" staff in jail for life.
>> To do this, the sub releases a similar buoy through its garbage chute.

This is technically incorrect. The garbage shoot is for weighted trash that gets flushed vertically downward. If the sub were going to launch a buoy it would send it upward via one of its 3" signal launchers (used for flares, other buoys, etc.)
The problem with "No, because..." is that it leaves the question open, especially when the person saying "no" is trying to be especially polite. Suppose the father said, "No, I wouldn't be comfortable with that." Well, when he's not there, he can't be uncomfortable, so it's ok. Suppose he said, "No, it's illegal." Well, smoking is legal at a younger age, so that must be ok. Speeding is illegal so when the son sees the father speeding, he'll have to conclude that his father is being unfair since he breaks the law but expects his son to follow it.

"No" with a condition leaves the expectation that when the conditioned is changed, the answer will also change. "No" by itself is straightforward and can't lead to false expectations.
I might be inclined to think that someone who can't give a straight answer is going to have trouble expressing himself.
well, the roadways were preceded by cart/horse paths, but I don't think rail was ever the cheapest option. A dirt road is pretty cheap.
I believe the fault here, at least in most third world countries, lies with society and associated expectations. My grandmother never approved of my decision not to become an engineer, but go into the hard sciences instead. The quality of education I got there was never a problem (and in fact was really good) and the institutions had a lot to do with that quality.

I know of any number of people who kept trying to become an engineer or a doctor (at least in those days), or chose science in high school cause that's what they were "supposed to do"
I don't think Apple will let this segment pass it by. There were mp3 players before the iPod, and smartphones before the iPhone, and they managed to introduce a new spin on an existing idea and make it sexier and more expensive. That's what Apple does best.

I wouldn't be surprised if apple releases something in the near future that is part iPhone, part netbook, part Kindle, part tablet PC, and all Apple. I'm picturing a 7-9" hi-res touchscreen with 3G/4G/WiFi connectivity, a true Mac OS (that still runs iPhone apps), built-in webcam/digital camera, GPS, the works. And because it's Apple, expect to pay a premium for it.
It works on my G1 but only does about a frame a second. Anyone with a Pre care to chime in?
For command-line workability, I suppose there have been many levels of problems in the nix and the PC world.

Going way back to when I was learning to program, I couldn't get Unix working at all. The folks at the college who understood it loved to make that understanding a mark of their superior condition rather than helping in any way.

This was well before Linux. Unix terminal configuration is pretty much the most screwed-up, evil thing in the world. At the college where I was learning to program, most of the terminals were irrevocably mis-configured at the server level (or at least some level we had no control over) but the admins pretended it was the student's fault.

And the present screwed-up configuration of the various flavors of desktop Linux can be traced to their support of the various archaic terminal flavors as a default.

And it really shouldn't be assumed that Unix was step forward from UI's that existed in the really old systems. I learned my hatred of vi from a truly old school programmer who went back to far before Unix existed and could verify that there was no excuse for it's pathological absurdity - it wasn't a "step forward" from the editors that existed before - rather, it's popularity has to do with accidents of markets and college sysadmin culture.

Here DOS (not Windows) was great. I just got a simple compiler and did a did of command-line stuff. The Borland c++ ide was great back in that day...
Although this message is comforting in my IMO the comparison is not that relevant. There is difference between digital and physical goods when it comes to marginal cost, complexity, and other limits in serving each additional customer.. Also if it is online only marketing with no "human factors" (as in the case of db/OS vendors) involved in the sales process then again the make or break avenues are limited.. Good things are with digital goods you can iterate quickly both in terms of product features and getting the message out.. so if you let nature take its course then a strong and smart competitor will kill you..If you have to win then you have to outsmart at least in a niche..
"That's ridiculous. This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people."

Quotes like this make me sad. This is so ignorant coming from a brilliant man. Organic or conventional farming isn't the issue. The way most Americans consume meat 3 times a day is the issue. It would be like having a debate on oil consumption in this country and two people were arguing about heating homes with oil and nobody ever brought up transportation. Eating meat 3 times a day isn't sustainable. Organic farming is. The way this debate is framed is just beyond stupid for how intelligent the people having it are. Everyone just assumes that meat 3 times a day is ok and it's the organic farming that isn't sustainable. This is laughable.

This isn't an all or nothing thing here. Eating meat in moderation is fine. This country (American) has a taste for federally subsidized, extremely cheap and unhealthy meat. That is the issue. Not farming.