skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I tried to argue that was an implementation detail with sacrifices no matter which direction you go. One could also argue that its problematic to deal with run-away runtimes with memory issues. The GC does provide an interesting problem I didn't consider. Especially those that over-utilize OS signals. Perhaps the choice of Python was poor for this.

You can still separate it into two fundamental shifts. The first being making a fully asynchronous/event driven module/handler API. This should be done regardless of the runtime module.

The massively-scaled websites I've seen would tip with 4-8 times the sql connections. SQL Server is especially bad at this. It also makes it hard to simply throw additional hardware at the problem.

I guess you could yield on resources from a master process if you have the logic to know their status.
That and IIS7's integrated pipeline.
The guy who filmed them is working on them now - I know nothing from an official standpoint, but I ran into the guy doing them Saturday morning and he mentioned he was working on them already.
But why do the otherwise-independent app server processes need to be sharing 'the' socket at all? If you're already going to be running the same app on more than one machine, there's no reasons left to stick to port 80.

It seems like you're stuck on the idioms of Apache and 'real web-servers' (as you put it).
I think you're close, but not quite there yet. "We" (or 'you' and 'I') exist as thoughts in our own head. Not only do we have analog bodies that are trapped in the digital world, we are voices trapped in the outdated hardware of our bodies. When can I get a full body transplant?
Same, but it happened on my iphone. I won't tell you how strange it was to see a "virus scan" in a Windows XP window on my iphone.
IPhone Application Incubator MEDL Mobile
Another interesting thing this peak oil/anti-peak oil debate shows to me is the difficulty of factoring secular and cyclical processes together.

Yes, oil production will peak at some point is the too terribly distant future, but no, the pattern of decreased oil consumption won't be the same as the patter of increased oil consumption because the factors generating the decline won't be the same as the factors that generated rise.
You're doing it wrong. Look at what's hard to simulate, not at what's easy to simulate.

Metal shading is easy to simulate, so look elsewhere. Look for the engineering details that a non-rocket-engineer animator would get wrong or not know about. I guess, though that you don't know about these.

Instead, you could look at the density of information and secondary effects in the shot. Typical CGI shots, as engineered intentional artifacts, lack the level of detail and chaos / serendipity of reality.

E.g. the spalling of the concrete, the smoke/steam dissipation, the fully volumetric flame with mach-diamonds.

CGI smoke is rarely done right. If you've seen enough particle systems, you'll start to recognize their signature. CGI flame (your comments aside) doesn't usually correctly capture the features of a rocket exhaust plume. Note the colour changes and mach diamonds, as well as the subtle thrust gimballing.

Also, look for non-rendering details. E.g. the rock in one video that's just canted on its side, being supported by the back-blast of the plume. If this were CGI, then someone would have had to decide to do that. But, who would think of that?

Every CGI shot has a budget, and usually only enough work is done to "sell" the shot, within budget. If you look frame-by-frame at most CGI animations, you'll see that it's just a veneer of reality. Usually when you compare to photo or video reference, you notice all kinds of missing effects.

What may be confusing you re: the metal is that the oxidizer is LOX, which is super-cold, and causes frost to form, altering the metal's reflectivity.
I really don't care about wifi as long as I have 3G. It works everywhere, and it's a very simple opt-in solution where those who want it can pay for the service.

But then again, I don't live in the US. Telcos actually works around here.
Stuff like this makes adblock an unfortunate necessity these days. You can't trust ad networks, not even on high-profile websites.

I used to make a point of not running adblock or flashblock since I figured that if I was visiting someone's site, they at least deserved to get the ad impressions from it, even if I wasn't clicking on their ads. After repeatedly seeing PDF/SWF exploits pop up on "reputable" sites like Deviantart, though, I pretty much had no choice but to block everything to avoid getting hit by an unpatched exploit.
Micropolis (based on SimCity), released under the GPL
The World’s Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment
tradenton.com seems to have a US based registrant.

'adx' in the dom descriptor suggests that these are 'exchange' ads (that's a fairly common label), but there is also an advertising network called AdxDirect, maybe that has something to do with it ?
Of these, I'd recommend (in the order that I think is best):

Nowell Strite & Shawn Rider from PBS supposedly gave an amazing talk
(I missed it, but those guys are awesome)
Ted Leung's keynote
Andrew Godwin's talk on South
Adam Fast's intro to GeoDjango
Chris Wanstrath's talk on Git, but only if you're not already using it
Simon Willison's cowboy talk is mostly detail free, but interesting

I liked Avi Bryant's keynote, but I think that you'll have to wait for the video for that, since he didn't use a deck.
... or you could use Erlang and it takes care of a lot of that crap for you.

That said, I think the big pain point is really the data store in any case. Yeah, it's nice to handle more with less, but in the end, adding django/rails/php/whatever machines is easy and a known quantity. It's tougher to scale up the data store.
The Bonsai Primer
Like patio11, I'm just going to give you my thoughts unfiltered.

There are multiple levels on which this site is problematic.

1. Marketing

Who are your customers? Who is landing on this webpage? What information do they have? What information do they need to make a decision about whether or not to use/purchase/whatever your product?

What is your product, anyhow? Why are your prices in crazy units? Picodollars? Just talk like a normal person: "$0.30 per gigabyte per month."

It's totally self-defeating from a marketing perspective. I have no idea what you're selling or who you're supposed to be selling it to.

The goal of a landing page is to either convince me I need something or, if I know I need something, convince me you can meet that need better than anyone else.

2. Design

Nothing on this page catches my eye. I don't know where to look or click. There's too much text; don't make me think.

If you don't know how to design (I don't), pay someone to do it. You need to figure out what the first, second, third, etc. most important things are for your customers and then design the site in a way that directs them down that hierarchy.

Also: BIG. ASS. BUTTONS. See http://getdropbox.com for a nice example.

3. Brand

It looks like the homepage for yet-another-open-source project (I know it isn't). Very academic.

If I were really concerned about the security of my online backups I don't think I'd trust this product.

If "backups for paranoids" is what customers really care about (did you go talk to customers about that, or did you just pick the tagline because you liked it?), I'd like to see evidence that people just as paranoid me are using it, too.

Tarsnap is an awesome product. I think this site doesn't do it justice.
Point taken. How about giving everyone an appendicectomy, just in case?
It comes across as hostile ("I thought of it as a kind of dominance, holding them in the kind of invisible grip you might have once seen employed by a villain in a DC comic...", etc). Am I interpreting this incorrectly? Can you elaborate on the impact it's had on your interactions?
Perhaps in the context of what services EY are providing it isn't controversial, since they clearly just provide Ruby hosting. In general though I feel like lately everyone is so dead set on the langs/tools they are using that we tend to focus on the languages rather than the general CS topics behind all of them. This was just a good time to bring up my annoyance I guess.
Ideally one could "realize that large chunks of the human experience can't be conveyed through language", etc without getting scammed and joining a cult, which is why it's good to you both parts of the brain :)
What? Evolution happens epoch over epoch, not in action. My only hope in being launched into space in a shitty little rocket is to blow up in a massive regulation-inducing ball of guilt.

Also, I find it hilarious that I got downvoted a lot. Let me get downvoted more for saying the following: John Gault should be launched into space, with a railroad spike up his rear.

Heh heh heh.

I hate HN's Republican/Libertard contingent. Peace out, Randians.
> Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions. One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university. Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects. They answered more questions correctly.

Sheer tripe. Out of two groups, one is going to do better. If the first group had just happened to do better, we'd be reading an article about how thinking something is "close" makes it more "concrete" and raises your creativity, because it's easier to think of things that are tangible -- or whatever other Just-So story they'd invent. The second group didn't have its creativity "raised"; it just happened to be the group that won the coin flip.
Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and Variational Inference (Tutorial)
Take your false dichotomy and shove it -- whether any system is analog vs. digital is entirely dependent on your point of view -- it's not grounded in anything concrete.

Your analog vinyl record is composed of discrete molecules and thus has a hard (and very low) limit on quantization range and dynamics (it's fundamentally digital).

Your digital CD has the data stored with error-correcting parity so that the foil can degrade significantly without losing anything at all -- insta-lossiness is not a fundamental characteristic of degrading digitally encoded media.

The signals in your digital computer are electrical, and thus analog. You can't just say on:off::1:0 -- how would you handle disconnected circuits? So represent signals as 'high' and 'low' -- but then you have to deal with the gray area between high and low -- you don't want to have weird bugs because of a cutoff point. So you end up with a minimum of 4 'binary' states!

Then the analog electricity in the wires is composed of discrete electrons slowly progressing around the circuit -- digital strikes again! It's turtles all the way down, I tell you.

It's like Cocoa vs. Carbon in terms of bullshit dichotomies that get brought up constantly by otherwise intelligent people. You can cross the streams guys, and guess what? They already are in almost any case you care to look at closely.
I know this doesn't directly address your question. But large liquid ethane pools have been discovered on Titan. Dinosaurs certainly didn't live there; where do you suppose the carbon came from (it comes from the fusion of dying stars).
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You are extremely intelligent and an excellent engineer. But a designer or marketer you are not: focus on what you're good at, and convince people who are good at the other things to work with you (or teach you how to do it well).
Watching her in the hospital and knowing that she swam to shore and stood up would have made a mobility test irrelevant. Being 40+ with a shattered T12, she made the riskier decision by opting out of the surgery. If you remove the hyperbolic language from her story, it reads like the hospital was being relatively conservative and trying to take the approach with the least risk of paralysis or other spinal cord injury. That said, It's awesome that she's able to recover without surgery. Even "successful" back surgeries usually have many complications. Surgery or not, back injuries suck and require tons of PT, exercise and lifestyle changes to get back to normal.
Exactly. Stuffing everything into one process is a whole lot of complication for very little benefit.
IEEE Ratifies 802.11n
"Under the settlement (PDF) with the FTC, Sears has now agreed to destroy all data gained from the experiment and stop collecting data from any software still running in the wild. In addition, if it wants to do any tracking in the future, the company has committed to "clearly and prominently disclose the types of data the software will monitor, record, or transmit. This disclosure must be made prior to installation and separate from any user license agreement. Sears must also disclose whether any of the data will be used by a third party."

The thing that bothers me about this whole thing is that any company can do whatever they want and in the end the worst that can happen is that they have to destroy and not repeat it.
Who’s Killing the Electric Plane?
Investors Warm to Web Calling - What's Next for Voice?
> My theory is that both halves of our brain are useful

I have the opposite theory.
I don't believe there ever was a 80186
Eye contact alone is golden. With no words offered from me, the car salesman negotiated the price of our new car down and double the trade in of our old car.
take notes, on everything, review often.
They all blankly stare at each other...
Programming and Minimalism
Thanks for debunking me. Everything you pointed out is absolutely correct. Also, I didn't know about the oxidizer, which is very cool to learn.
Separation and Its Discontents: An Evolutionary Theory [full PDF]
You probably already think I'm an asshole, but even though it's fun to tweak a design until it's "just right," none of these changes will have a big impact on your bottom line.

1em versus 1.5 vs 2em? That's premature optimization.

And statements like "[l]owered contrast helps readability, but I hate the look of grey text" tell me you're designing for yourself, not for your customer.

That's fine, if that's what you're doing, but I've been assuming the opposite, viz., that your goal is to increase the number of people who pay for tarsnap.
Great question. I think the front page will definitely benefit from having one column. To be clear, I don't mind multiple boxes. Just that they should be in one column for easier reading. What you have would serve a magazine better(because it adds a pinch of fun). But in your case, you've a product and people just wanna get the info.
I haven't lived in Sherbrooke for a year or so, but the system was fairly well done. I lived on campus in one of the boroughs, so I can't speak to how coverage was in the city proper.

It's also worth noting that Fredericton has an excellent downtown wifi network.
The Power of the First Name - Using it Right
I suggest turning off the full justification in the text boxes.

Maybe I've spent too long reading text typeset by TeX, but I find non-justified text to be very distracting.

Try to make the text boxes have the same margins on all four sides. With large top-bottom and small left-right margins, they look unbalanced.

Oops. Those were supposed to be the same.

...menus...

Yeah, I spent a long time trying to decide between side and top menus -- in the end I decided on the side menu in part because I have not only submenus but also subsubmenus. Things like man pages deserve to be on the website... but they don't really deserve a prominent space in the menu structure.

Finally, what is the proper capitalization?

That's a very good question. Can I dodge it by answering "sentence case", or is that likely to be too confusing to people?

I'd like to stick to referring to the client code as "tarsnap" (lower case) since the software is installed with a lower-case name and UNIX filesystems are often case-sensitive; is it possible to talk about the "Tarsnap backup service" (capitalized) but the "tarsnap software" (non-capitalized) without horribly confusing the matter?
you're designing for yourself, not for your customer

Not quite. In the absence of hard evidence either way (yes, I know, A/B testing -- but there isn't enough traffic on the tarsnap website right now to get any statistical significance for minor changes) website design is purely a matter of taste... and if it's going to be a matter of taste, why not go with mine?
What Makes The New York Web Startup Sector Special?
Even with all that data, they still suck at marketing.
I keep a very simple vimrc file with minimal customization. Note however that I'm a beginner with Vim, so my customizations end with what "just works" with minimum pain for me.

set nobackup
set clipboard=unnamed
set number
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
colorscheme oceandeep
Ask HN: C or Haskell, which to learn next?
I've been programming for about 5 years now. I started with Perl, then moved to Ruby, then Javascript, then learning some PHP. Ruby and Javascript are my main languages. I didn't go to college, so I didn't go through a formal CS curriculum, and I'd like to learn some stuff I feel I missed out on. I've narrowed down my choices to C and Haskell at the moment.

Haskell seems to be the most practical of the functional languages from what I hear, but there aren't really any web dev applications for it that are in serious use so far as I can see. That said, functional programming would be a great way for me to learn about alternate programming paradigms.

C on the other hand I can think of projects I can do in it, but it doesn't seem as much of a leap as Haskell does, which makes me wonder if it'll be as good a learning experience. What does the HN community think would be a good next step?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186
Microsoft admits critical Windows 7 bug
I wish I could have attended. Hopefully next year.
They are different enough that you could just do both simultaneously.
I need a reason to recommend this, Colin.

Ok, I don't know why you, of all people, don't consider security to be a valid reason for using tarsnap; but if you don't like that, how about

* Tarsnap's snapshotting model of backups is very efficient (equal to or better than incremental backups) while providing the flexibility of having archives behave as if they're completely independent of each other.

* Tarsnap is priced based on actual usage, so if you don't have much data to store, it can be incredibly cheap.

* Tarsnap is written by someone with the expertise required, and who is willing to take the time necessary, to get things right.

That last, of course, is relevant to security; but it's also relevant to simple robustness, too.
Anyone know why it doesn't tip over? Gyroscopes? Model rockets have fins to keep them going straightish, but this lander doesn't and it's not going fast enough for them to matter anyway.
Google made a lot of hoopla about blanketing Mountain View with Wi-Fi, but it seems to be a failure. I rarely get a signal anywhere I go, and the one place I go where I do get a signal seems to have a bad backhaul link (it shows up and gives me an IP address, but doesn't move packets). If I sit on the sidewalk under a lamppost with one of the boxes it works. I think they underestimated the difficulty.
The really weird thing is that a normal, useful technology, which produces no bad externalities (no extra pollution, etc.) is being banned outright, rather than being taxed - instead of this why didn't they just slowly raise taxes on incandescent bulbs, to force people to notice? And instead of that, it'd be even better just to raise taxes on energy itself - that way people could choose where to cut energy costs, and not be forced to cut it specifically from the light bulb portion of their total energy cost.

Also, the fact that people haven't stopped using incandescent bulbs naturally just shows that electricity is still ridiculously cheap.
Applying the words 'scientifically false' to any unproven proposition is ridiculous. Under that criteria most statements made by people would be 'scientifically false'.
What point would there be in saying that?

When a statement is made in isolation it could mean many things

'I think that X' ||
'I've heard that X' ||
'Most people think X' ||
'It seems likely that X' ||
'It is scientifically proven that X'

You've obviously chosen the last one but there is no clear reason why. Even then it would strictly speaking be 'factually incorrect' not 'scientifically incorrect'.

The interpretation most people (i.e. the correct interpretation) of 'scientifically false' is 'scientifically disproven'. When you make a statement like this you muddy the waters for those you aren't alert.

Look at it logically. Let's say further studies do turn out show that organic food does actually have more micro-nutrients (as you seem to accept there is some possibility of). So the original statement magically transforms from being 'scientifically false' to scientifically true'?
Intuit To Acquire Mint For $170 Million
personally I'm disappointed with this, I just don't see Intuit as the right company to run Mint
I don't understand the point of your Jet A comment, considering that this thing is burning methane and liquid oxygen.
All the stories were submitted by the same guy, a 3 day old account who's also submitted fastcompany, popularmechanics, and similar sites.
couldn't have benefited better people, congrats to Aaron and the whole team
Micropolis isn't so much "based" on SimCity, as it is the official Tcl/Tk X11 port of the original (2D) SimCity. It's been out for a while (the 'latest news' page is dated April 2007), but I'm sure Don would appreciate a helping hand from anyone with C++ knowledge and some free time for polishing up this venerable codebase.
Shoot, sorry, I'm not sure where he said it then and google's giving me no love.
Learn C. So far you've done lots of high level languages, but no low level languages at all. Understanding what things look like at the machine level will make you a much better developer regardless of what language you end up using -- and there's a reason why people refer to C as "portably assembly language".

I often say that nobody ever understands when they should and shouldn't use hash tables until they've written a hash table in assembly language; you don't necessarily need to go to that extreme, but working in C at all will give you a much better understanding of fundamental algorithms and data structures than if you only ever use high level languages which hide such details away from you.
This has "buy'em to squash'em" written all over it.
The categories of animals reminds me of the small world/seven degrees of separation thesis, that you'll know a lot of people who are in a tightly connected group, but you'll also know a handful of people who are distantly connected. These distant connections allow you to (theoretically) reach anyone in the world in seven steps. The people are the animals, the tightly connected groups are the categories of animals, and the distantly connected people are associations to another category.

He missed the entire class of categories that are based on the name of the animal (e.g. starting with the same letter). I think his multiple-personality technique is a neat treat for bringing different kinds of associations to the fore. That's assuming that you have the (now-meta) connection to the appropriate person in the first place. For example, he didn't think of imagining he's a lexicographer.

BTW: I wish he'd leave some white-space to separate hints that he doesn't want you to read.