skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Glass bricks installation
Glass Blocks supply and installation services for residential and commercial buildings including allied steelworks and glass block frame. GBW Contracts ltd offers complete glass block wall package in house.
FYI: http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=6470

Webcast at 12:00 today.
Sinatra is great. I've been working with it for the last eight or nine months on various projects and I'm extremely glad about that choice. But I wouldn't call it "hyper fast" in any sense.

From a raw performance perspective, it's faster than Rails, but it has some issues with it's design that can cause extremely bloated memory footprints.

From a developer sense, it doesn't come with a lot (hardly any) of helpers, generators, or other fancy tools. So depending on your use case you could end up re-inventing some wheels.

It's biggest advantage is that it's small, lacks a lot of magic code, and doesn't force you into a specific structure. This makes it great for web services, small apps, or even small components of larger apps. But like anything else it's definitely not a silver-bullet.

By design it doesn't have a lot of helpers, generators, or other tools. Depending on your usage this could mean a lot of re-inventing the wheel.
This article is about JRuby's support for Android. I have nothing but respect for Charlie Nutter and the JRuby team but they are extremely short-staffed and spread quite thin with the ambitious agenda they have set. For that reason I would not count on a lot of support for any Android features they are able to roll out.
Just curious... why was I down voted on this? If its something that makes sense I'll try to avoid it next time.
(I built the server.)

You're right, in a sense-- a file server certainly would be better off energy-wise with fewer cores.

But building a fileserver wasn't my sole intent. In the long run, I expect to use all the cores, but with more RAM added. I just didn't want to buy RAM before I needed it-- I can add more RAM without losing the RAM already there. The same is not true for cores-- I can't add cores without throwing away the old processors. I thought about just buying one processor to start with, but I didn't want to worry about the availability of an identical second processor down the road.

(Actually, now that I think of it, there's actually 2 GB of RAM in the machine now. Post updated.)
okay, i give up.

explain to me how it's possible to run any significant WSGI app inside this container. wouldn't any long-running request monopolize the whole server?

i don't have a lot of exposure to other WSGI apps besides my own, but I always use synchronous, blocking development techniques when building them, including blocking database calls.
> Make failure immediately visible.

If you are aware of failure, then why fail?

The entire problem is that the computer is not aware that it failed. You need the human to constantly check that everything is OK.

But if the computer is always working fine, then human nature is such that eventually the human will stop paying such close attention.
Maybe khafra should have put "zombie" in the first post?
Mint.com Got An Offer It Couldn’t Refuse
Q. What do vegetarian zombies crave?

A. Graaaaiins
Add Value Rather than Price Cuts to Win Customers in a Recession
How do you tell someone they're writing bad code?
The reason we are even still discussing these issues thousands of years after they were first raised, is because there is no right answer.

No, It's closer to the reason people are still debating evolution. Every first year philosophy student tries to reconstruct ethics (and philosophy in general) from scratch rather than reading those who came before. Every major philosophy since Descartes does the same.

The real problem with any kind of philosophy is first principles. To go anywhere you have to accept some, and people keep picking their own. Stick with some long enough, and you'll get somewhere. You answers will be contingent, but definite.
I think that adding value, combined with a new/powerful message, will yield profound results during a recession...
I used Sinatra as my learning tool for getting into Ruby instead of Rails. Rails was frankly daunting. I had never done web programming, only some C in high school. I didn't like that typing 'script/generate' threw up 46 files, each with their own purpose and use. Even with books and tutorials I didn't quite know where to start, or how to do what I wanted to do instead of what the tutorial wanted me to do.

Sinatra was great however. Everything (by default, I realize you can move beyond this) was in a single file that I could glance at, find my errors and correct. The downside mainly was that when looking for help I kept finding Rails-specific stuff, which wasn't useful (trying looking up Ruby stuff without encountering Rails, or accidentally filtering every decent page out of search). The documentation for Sinatra could certainly be improved and I'd love to see a book on it.

One of the first Sinatra tutorials you used to run across on Google (was on http://www.xnot.org/ but is now removed) didn't work with current versions of Sinatra and produced very odd errors. Slightly frustrating to a noob when the documentation isn't marked with a date or the fact that it was only to the alpha versions.

Overall Sinatra is amazing for bashing out really quick and simple web interfaces in about 10 minutes. Rails is just too heavy oftentimes. I might just need to make a page that allows someone to see something that Ruby is pulling from a database- and that's it!
So...If this was from a workshop, is there an audio track?
While it doesn't have a lot of helpers or other tools that you're used to from Rails- you can always include ActiveSupport which brings many of those in and away you go!
I have a problem with these sorts of posts, but I struggle to articulate it, so I'm going to quote an insightful Reddit comment (http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9k3ss/mattel_sued_aqua_...):

They're a corporation, a large group of people pursuing profit on behalf of an even larger group of shareholders, with its members constantly being replaced. These associations don't possess philosophical consistency. They only appear to when the illusion aids in profitability.

I also suspect the Ballmer iPhone incident was him simply joking about rather than any actual harassment.
OKCupid seems to attract a hipper crowd more likely to not be religious, compared with eHarmony which has a pretty clear Christian vibe to it which would likely attract users who would reply more readily to 'god' than 'atheist'.
Instead of blocking the distracting sites permanently, using iptables might work little better by restricting access by time of day or duration.

[edit] I found the following: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192953
I think the hope is that the broader Android scripting and JRuby communities will step up to help. There is already a project[0] that allows bridged access to a lot of Android APIs via Python, and Lua. Getting JRuby to this level wouldn't be a huge effort, and would definitely give people a bit of motivation to move forward

That said, I think in the short term it's a pipe-dream. Getting the code going is the easier part, building the development infrastructure around it is a lot harder.

I'd love to write Android apps in Ruby, but I'm not holding my breath.

[0]http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
Did anyone watch the interview with PG last night at TC50?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/14/tc50-backstage-why-paul...

He said that in boom times you advertise your product as "twice as fast for the same money"; in a recession, "same speed, half the cost."
The main problem, I think, was opening with "hi ur pretty"
Yeah, I didn't even know until I installed ClickToFlash.

I don't know why they do though, maybe flash has better clipboard access than javascript..?
I already don't bother voting.
The Globalization of Censorship
Complete overkill, but my router enforces a daily limit for sites I visit too often. It's not that difficult to set up. Make a iptables chain, route all traffic that matches certain ips to that chain, add a --limit and --limit-burst counter to that chain, deny by default, allow when below said limit.

For bonus points, make all http connections redirect to your favorite todo list when you've exceeded your limit, and deny all ssh access (to the router) during working hours.

Setting it up was complete procrastination of course, but it works better than any manual block list. By slightly lowering my daily time waste allowance I can reduce the time I spend on sites like these.

EDIT:

Blocking with hosts is terrible, because you don't want to block sites permanently, and if you continually enable/disable the block list your muscle memory will unblock a site even before you realize you should be working. Cron job limits don't work when you don't have very strict working hours. Basically, you want to take a break for a few minutes every hour or so, and you need soft limits to enforce that.
The best way is to actually create jobs (i.e., provide earning opportunities for the consumer), via your product or service. This helps to develop additional sales in the long-term from those earnings, as well as the all important "brand loyalty", in a recession. Take a note from what sites like http://www.ideaoffer.com, and http://www.udorse.com are trying to do. But kick it up a notch.
As a commenter points out (http://tr.im/yLTH), the SourceForge TOS (http://tr.im/yLTS) is similar:

"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through SourceForge.net, you grant COMPANY a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual, fully sublicensable, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, create derivative works from, publish, perform, display, rent, resell and distribute such Content (in whole or part) on SourceForge.net and incorporate Content in other works, in any form, media, or technology developed by COMPANY, though COMPANY is not required to incorporate Feedback into any COMPANY products or services."
A brief glance at the code shows that the auth module is omitted because certain classes in the lib (OAuth, OpenID, etc) use the httpclient, specifically the class httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient.
Our product is built on Rails, but I do almost all my development in Sinatra now. The biggest win for me is that Sinatra strips away everything that would allow you to procrastinate in Rails (such as figuring out whether your actions are RESTful enough, or making sure you're serving all the content types, or making sure you've balanced code properly between controllers and models).

There is nothing to do in Sinatra except to get to work on your application, which is a good thing.

I highly recommend Datamapper over ActiveRecord, too; between Sinatra and Datamapper, you can literally pop open a single file and have a complete working application when you exit the editor, with no external setup steps.
Well that gives you some of the extensions, but it doesn't give you a lot of things on the 'view' end of the equation. You're handling your forms yourself, you're handling URL generation yourself, etc. Of course those are the things that attracted me to Sinatra, so I don't see them as problems so much as things to be aware of.
Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color
"The best strategy for dealing with Internet Explorer 6 is not to support it."

Amen.
Tool of the Day: Get Creative With Livebrush
There's a pretty large class of problems where the computer could be aware of failure, and not able to do anything about it. Just because you know that a sensor is failing doesn't mean that you can fix it in software; the best you can do force a human to acknowledge the failure before they continue. I think a bigger problem than humans relying on things that don't fail is humans getting used to ignoring failure because the failures typically don't matter.
The problem with the NextEngine is (from what I understand) that it's so vibration sensitive that you pretty much have to set it on a timer and leave the room...

There are a few companies working on getting some cheap scanners out there, it's pretty exciting.
Assigning blame (to NVIDIA, or anyone else) doesn't interest me, if it doesn't help me solve my immediate need: get shit done.

Why do I not run Linux on Apple hardware, you ask?

Actually I do run it on Apple hardware. I dumped it as my main OS, but I run it under VMware. As to why not wipe OS X and use only Linux, well, OS X gives me a lot of stuff I like, so I'm not about to wipe it. OS X is like a superset of Linux, in effect, at least according to my most important metric which as you may recall is getting shit done. It's like a new Swiss Army knife that has more blades, if you like analogies.
Generate CSS Sprites On The Fly
Why do all that, why not use freedom? http://macfreedom.com/
Using some test like this to rate applicants probably only points out a weakness in communication skills, but is better than just slamming through random resumes. A well-written cover letter should easily answer the first two (and listed as most important to twilio in the article as the folks building the team) points listed.

I think it is also entirely NOT scalable. What if you get 1000 submissions? In my area of the world (Research Triangle Park in NC) there is a company that famously gets hundreds to a thousand of resume and cover letter submissions per SW dev opening, especially when the job market is tight. One healthcare software startup I knew about was getting so many resumes for open positions that they developed a policy of trashing resumes received after 9AM on any given day. Just to keep the piles manageable. How can that be effective?

But maybe a bulk of the applicants to the positions mentioned in the article clearly just shot a resume at a job listing with no further effort demonstrated? Can we get some numbers on how many applicants just sent a resume versus attempting some of the "extra" work you asked for?

I've thought for some time that the best thing an applicant to a job could do would be to provide a portfolio of code (or website or demo) that clearly shows finished projects and results they have achieved previously. But that could be a pretty intense process on the employer side - how do you review even 50 of these portfolios in a meaningful way if each one is even small code samples (say 2K lines of code)? Then the employer and candidate could sit down and talk through the design choices and schedule trade-offs made on that code.

Plus, using previously written code completely punts on the idea that you might prefer a really smart hacker who is inexperienced in some technology instead of poor developer who has spent a career in that technology churning out mediocre work. My guess is that the hackers who would care enough to actually have a code portfolio out there for employers to see are probably a cut above the average software dev type anyway.

Maybe this is my startup - given many portfolios of hacker's work, how do we make it effectively searchable by employers who need to find good matches? There has to be a good web app out there for this - recruiters get big percentages on candidate placements, so there is clearly some potential market. I don't have any data to back up this supposition, but don't we think that recruiter candidate placements can be pretty closely approximated with some data mining given a portfolio of work and simple heuristics?

An additional problem is that many hires are made via personal networks - it's just easier to say, oh yeah, that person worked with our friends who were really happy with his/her work on that project, we should think about bringing him/her in.

The problem of hiring and finding great candidates has been bubbling in my head. But I haven't had any blinding flashes of inspiration for really great solutions - any thoughts out there?
Critical Points of Differentiation
Electronics 'missing link' united with rest of the family
I would still vote since HN saves the submissions I voted on for me to look up later.
One of my professors is the creative director of an ad firm. I asked him what CP+B's plan has been with Microsoft, since their route has really been baffling me.

He said that in his mind they're making a mistake by trying to address Apple, because Apple can play better on their terms than Microsoft can. So from that point of view, this new ad is more effective, because it's stopped legitimatizing Apple's Get A Mac campaign.

I still think that CP+B is over their heads in this campaign. They do great for Burger King, where they're competing with equal brands, but Apple has a better brand than Microsoft, and so "edgy" isn't cutting it for them. Chiat has a powerful set of ads, so it's not like they're playing against a void.
David Marr is amazing. I remember being completely awed by Vision. I think more than any other author, Marr showed that cognition could be made computationally tractable (focus on vision, but before him it was just a mess).

I don't know that there's much here to discuss though. His work has been supersceded in just the way any researcher would want.
New Incubation Concept, Dog Patch Labs, opens offices in Cambridge
But are there problems where the computer is aware of failure and requires the human to do something about it?

I think that's pretty rare. Usually if it fails, it can handle that on it's own. (For example stop the train.)

How often would you have a failure where the human must intervene, and the computer can do nothing?

That's what I meant by don't fail, have the computer handle the problem. If you handled it, it's not a failure (from a global perspective).

The real problem is where the computer does not know it failed.
Noticed this site was causing firefox to hang for about a minute and peg my CPU, so I profiled it:

The Addthis script you're using has an onReady method that gets called 94 times on pageload and takes an average 12 seconds to run each time. During this time Firefox gets the dreaded beachball/umbrella.

I'm having similar issues on a site we're using sharethis on, but not quite that bad on page load - it does increase the constant load on the cpu by about 15% though.

Be careful when using these widgets...

(macbook pro; 2.4ghz; 4gb ram; ff 3.0)
Yep, and to restate what others have said, the "existing large-scale projects" for the Codeplex Foundation will come from Microsoft.
well, I live in the 3rd richest county (used to be #1) in the united states. the people here are worse than you can possibly imagine (lots of inherited wealth).
The first google hit for "list of tetris variants" is Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tetris_variants

You scroll down that list and try as many variants as possible. Maybe even keep a checklist of ones you have seen and a journal recording your findings. Basic research, you might even become an expert on Tetris; it's very easy to become an expert on something that you love, btw ;-)
Only when you are scanning at very high 3D DPI.
Another problem is shinny surfaces on your model that introduce noise and holes on the 3D mesh (because the lasers reflect in odd directions from them). They provide some kind of powder to damp that, but still annoying.
Signals and the Ubiquity of New Carriers
You're assuming that ethics is the search for universal moral principles. That's not ethics, it's moral philosophy. Ethics is the search for 'right human action'. That is, the search for principles on how to live.

You're right that for moral principles to be meaningful they require some kind of universal law-giver (nature is one kind of law-giver, but not one we would expect.) If you assume a physicalist universe the best you can hope for in moral philosophy is a law of the stronger, or a more egalitarian notion that what is good for my neighbor is ultimately good for me (something that Plato believed for example,) but this has nothing to with the validity of ethics. If you read Aristotle's ethics, you'll find that he doesn't assume a universal moral code in the same way as our post-Christian culture is inclined.
Concentrate app for mac users breaks the procrastination cycle.
It's amazing that this eagle most likely descended from the Australian little eagle. Imagine if Steller's Sea Eagles had made it to NZ. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Stellers_...
Microsoft hasn't and will not change

So when given clear indications of change occurring (codeplex.com, codeplex.org ), your response is what? Just denial, or is there more to what you are saying?

FWIW, I disagree in general, Some things in Microsoft are clearly changing, particularly the processes of the developer tools division are much more open and community-involving than they were a few years ago. Hence. codeplex.

Other things that people think of as "Microsoft", like Office and Windows releases - not so much change I suppose.

As to if Microsoft actually has changed with regards open-sourcing some things that run on their IIS/.Net technology stack, I don't know enough yet. I do know that my views will be lead by what's happening, not by stale dogma that's counter to evidence.
um, no. please see the marginal revolution. price signals preferences. objective value would imply objective preferences.
I use it - even tried to buy it but my credit card was rejected.

Works great for me. The only added feature I would like is to be able to schedule activities, ie. 9-5 daily block distractions.
Oops- Accidentally wrote Clojure instead of Compojure.

Clojure is already pretty mature- Compojure is still the part that's excellent but still low level.
I'm better off if it appears that I'm not trying.

well that's a different signal, depending on your market (technical people in this case) it could be a superior signal.
Does Google's PageRank algorithm scale? (Presented at Microsoft Research) [pdf]
1. Upgrade.
Doesn't help you if what you are trying to do is read code, rather than write it.
"The lab will seek to foster super-early-stage entrepreneurship in areas where Boston currently has strong start-up track records -- such as software-as-a-service, cloud computing, biotech, and enertech. [Enertech is Metcalfe’s term for cleantech or energy-related ventures.] But additionally, the labs will also foster efforts in social media, e-commerce and the consumer Internet, where Polaris has been highly active in other markets."

-Interesting take on Boston area startup strengths.
Productive window management using keyboard shortcuts
496 year old repost?

``It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had the actual experience of it.''
- Niccolò Machiavelli

But seriously, it's not like this is a new or previously unknown phenomenon. This is just a fluff piece from a fluff site.
Good standards are discovered not imposed.
Clojure: the "write skew" anomaly
Ah, thanks for the info, both of you.

Here's hoping some useful Linux uses can come out of this - packet-based multithreading seems like a useful abstraction to me, though I am an admittedly inexperienced in multithreaded programming outside of class.
That's an apples and oranges comparison.

Following your logic we should have TFT-displays with bendable corners, so we can make "real" bookmarks...
I've been thinking about one of these.

http://www.tonido.com/

I don't know exactly what you are going to do but it might be better to serve email/files from something like this and use your bigger server only when needed. I guessing your eventual workload for bigger server will be intermittent and in the off time you will be wasting tons of energy by running a mostly idle computer.

Just my $.02
Voice chat coming to Facebook