skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have some valid points, but there is another side to the equation. ERP is not only necessary in big organizations, but also in smaller ones. One could start serving the middle market. There are thousands of smaller companies that would kill to have ERP systems installed, but cannot afford them.

There is tremendous scope for start-ups here and the market can be penetrated. One needs to think out of the box and study the problem. Most organizations see the need for ERP, when their business expands or when it is running through problems. By that time, their processes are not well defined and that 'confusion' in turn is passed in a sort of convoluted way into the software. At this stage most of them are in need of a good Business Consultant rather than software!

Most Businesses are still run in a 'fuzzy' way. ERP systems impose rigidity and inflexibility. The new generation software would free business from these constraints.

- They would be mostly web based. They will be made of 'websites'that can talk to each other. No need for EDI systems. RSS feeds for materials anyone?

- They would be evolutionary in nature as their proliferation will attract further development and cross-fertilization of good features.

- They would cost 1/100th of what existing systems sell for.

I think there is a great business opportunity here.
Disclaimer, I'm currently in AlphaLab. I'd be happy to answer any questions about the experience.
Apache/mod_wsgi creates multiple processes (or can). The issue is that Facebook didn't tell us what configuration settings they used. Did they limit the number of processes? Did they not have it start up enough at the start?

It's clear that Facebook wasn't using a single Apache/mod_wsgi process because that wouldn't get close to 2,000 requests per second. I'm sure they gave it the number of processes that were appropriate for the amount of RAM on the box - the issue is that every Apache process (of which I'm sure they dozens if not hundreds) uses up memory.

It's hard to set that up properly and that's what makes benchmarking so hard. Still, it's not hard to believe that with the weight of Apache in the process, there's going to be at least 5MB of overhead for every request. If you were saving that 5MB of RAM per client times the 2,223 requests per second, that's 11GB worth of freed RAM per second. Let's say Django uses 10MB of RAM for a request: that's an extra 50% increase in capacity right there just by eliminating the 5MB Apache process overhead. And Apache tends to be on the heavier side (5MB is somewhat low as an estimate) and if you can do it asynchronously, you're not tying up RAM as you wait for clients, so you do well.

Now, put Apache/mod_wsgi behind nginx (as a proxy) and you'll also see an increase in requests per second because you won't be tying up all that RAM as a client is downloading and only use the RAM while actually doing work in Python freeing that memory to be used elsewhere. However, I'm guessing that they ran this benchmark locally and so the network tying up Apache instances wasn't a factor.

Clearly, benchmarks are benchmarks, but it isn't as if Facebook and FriendFeed don't have lots of smart engineers and they wouldn't be using their own server if Apache was significantly better. They have a site of massive scale and know how to benchmark things since you need objective data to make decisions based on rather than the religious arguments some get into.

I'd guess that, if one could get Django running under Tornado, it would run similarly and that it's more of Apache being the bottleneck/RAM hog.
WOW. That's just astonishing - thanks for the link! I think it's definitely worth studying how two very similar societies can have such radically different obesity indicators.
I've noticed it's fairly common to have two, or even three top stories talking about the exact same thing or event. At least you get more than one page of comments, from possibly different people on here coming to different conclusions. Sometimes the first comment for a story can shape all those that follow.
I guess they will continue being Twitter, where following involves one click and (in 95% of the cases) not to worry about privacy.
As a Canadian living in the USA I have to say, we don't eat that differently in Canada, the big difference is we eat less.

Canada is just as full of greasy, nutrtionless, processed-to-hell food as America is, but we simply do not consume as much of it, from my observations.

When I moved to the USA I immediately (over 4 months) gained a buttload of weight (both figuratively and literally...). This is due to my bad habit of finishing everything on my plate. I've since fixed this and my weight is rapidly decreasing. Yay. Serving sizes in the USA are simply ludicrous and completely out of step with reality.

Before talking about high-fiber, low-fat diets, Americans need to do one simple (but difficult) thing: eat less. Eat way less.

A friend and I (both Canadian) paid a visit to the Cheesecake Factory this last weekend - when our plates landed on our table our eyes bugged out. There was enough food to feed 4 people in a standard Canadian restaurant. I'm not even exaggerating :S The table next to ours polished their food single-handedly and then ordered dessert. We were shocked. How any single person can consume that much food in one sitting is unimaginable, and somewhat disgusting.
The little lie about Real-time Data
Functional Alcoholics and Github combined SF meetup tonight
>Carrell estimates that the human eye can directly resolve around 7 million pixels, almost twice the resolution of a 30" display. But that's just what it's directly focusing on, all of the peripherial vision brings the total up to around 100 million pixels. The Eyefinity demo I showed earlier was running at 24.5 million pixels on a single GPU; you can estimate that at this generation we'll be able to do about 50 million pixels with two GPUs and one more generation from now we'll get to that 100 million pixel marker. That's two years for a single GPU. Then give it a few more years to be able to render that many pixels but with enough complexity to actually look real.

Rendering something at the max resolution that the human eye can resolve isn't enough however; you have to feel immersed in the graphics. That's where Eyefinity comes in, at least what it starts to come in.

Carrell believes that in seven years we can have the first generation Holodeck up and running. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Trek reference, Carrell believes it'll take seven years to be able to deliver a 180 degree hemispherical display (you're not completely surrounded by displays but at least your forward and peripheral vision is) with positionally accurate and phase accurate sound (both calculated by the GPU in real time). The GPU will also be used to recognize speech, track gestures and track eye movement/position.
If you read the article, you would see that the roadmap that begins with this GPU is to build one by 2016. That GPU will supposedly perform the holodeck like speech, gesture, and eye tracking.
I've long wondered why twitter doesn't do an auto complete for @mentions. Usernames are often hard to remember which makes the updates tedious to create. Nice work on FaceBook's part.
Facebook kills Twitter, and now RSS can rest in peace, knowing that its murder has been avenged.

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/

</sarcasm>
For the record. They tested web.py not web2py. It is not the same thing and they are completely unrelated.
Slide 14 looks sub-optimal.
Agree. Tweetdeck does this.
This is why blu-ray players include writable storage.
Materialism doesn't imply that organisms are machines.
I think one of the big reasons for creating a new interface was that the XO's screen is really small -- it's about as wide as 1.5 times the largest dimension of an iPhone. While its resolution is roughly the same as a standard desktop, its pixels-per-inch is 2-3 times as high.

This places screen real-estate at a premium... Essentially all applications will be running maximized, so title bars and other window decorations are a waste of space, as is having a menu/launching bar at the top or bottom of the screen.

And due to the XO's high pixels-per-inch, all text needs to be roughly 2-3 times larger in pixels than on a traditional display. Many applications on existing systems do not cope well with this requirement; most of the X11 applications that have been minimally ported to Sugar have text that is illegibly small.

The device's display is closer to a hand-held device than a typical laptop, so OLPC decided it needs a different UI than a typical laptop. And OLPC is not the only organization to make this choice: There are a number of manufacturers who are releasing Android-powered netbooks in the near future, as opposed to using more traditional UIs.

Unfortunately, Android was not an option at the time the XO was being developed. I imagine Maemo or Qtopia were not chosen for either licensing or maturity concerns. Any of these options would probably have been an OK alternative to Sugar, but none of them is a traditional overlapping-windows interface.
But Twitter is for public verbal diarrhea , FB is for shouting amongst your friends / acquaintances.
Thomas Freidman suggested this in "The World is Flat." I liked some things about this suggestion. It doesn't specifically target engineering or science, so it wouldn't distort the market, and a Ph.D (I think Friedman included all doctoral degrees) from an accredited institution is sufficiently rigorous that I don't think it would be as easy to "game" the system.

But still, there are a lot of things I really don't like about this proposal as well.

My experience as a grad student in engineering at Berkeley has left me convinced that these programs are utterly abusive of their students. If there's a shortage of Americans willing to sign up for PhD's in STEM fields, these institutions deserve it. Plus, starting salaries for PhD's in science/engineering lag badly behind MBA/JD/MD programs. This would only exacerbate the situation. And if a Ph.D granting institution is able to award citizenship along with a PhD, there's pretty much no limit to the abusiveness they'll get away with. Hey professors - Want to keep your highly trained poorly paid lab tech around for another year? No problem - you control his dream of citizenship, so trust me, he'll keep working 80 hour weeks for you for $22K a year.

When this sets the standard for treatment of grad students, Americans will all but abandon the field. Expect the already high percentage of foreign students in PhD programs to jump even higher if this becomes policy.
Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case -- those portions are ridiculous even by American standards. But as an Australian living in the US I agree with you -- I find it hard just to get a normally-sized meal for breakfast or lunch.

In Australia, if you order a ham and cheese sandwich, you get ham and cheese. In America if you order a ham and cheese sandwich you get a huge stack of ham, a bit of cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles (!?), maybe some sprouts, mayo and a bright yellow mustard-like substance. If I tell them I just want ham and cheese they look at me like I'm crazy (and I am, cuz I'll be paying about six bucks for this sandwich anyway).

On the other hand, last I heard Australian rates of obesity have overtaken US rates. On the other other hand, Australia probably has more of the slightly-fat people (ordinary folks with big beer guts) and fewer of the ridiculously-fat people (acres of waddling flesh or too-fat-to-walk electric wheelchair folks).
Google's new look.
Here's what I actually said in response to all this on the original blog, which showed up as a huge spike in our traffic!

There was a sudden spike in traffic, and it turns out it comes from Y Combinator Hacker News, where there's a discussion of this post with seven comments as of today.

The criticisms were sound -- it's too technical (i.e. jargon filled) for someone to understand who doesn't already get it. Ironically, I've been telling Andrew Gelman that about his Bayesian Data Analysis book for years.

Unix man pages are the usual exemplar of doc that only works if you mostly know the answer. They're great once you already understand something, but terrible for learning.

I think Andrew's BDA is that way -- it's clear, concise and it actually does explain everything from first principles. And there are lots of examples. So why is this so hard to understand?

I usually write with my earlier self in mind as an audience. Sorry for not targeting a far-enough back version of myself this time! The jargon should be familiar to anyone who's taken math stats. I don't think it'd have helped if I'd have defined the sum for the prior defined as a marginal.
Putting my frustrations to one side, it seems clear to me that there are problems with the program, there are abuses of the program, and there are people like me caught in the middle of it all. However, some of the worst abuses, such as by Indian consulting companies that bring people over and then don't pay them while they are "on the bench" should be solved simply by enforcing the existing rules. Anytime you hear some consultant mention "the bench" there are these types of abuse going on.

Both the Australian and Canadian processes look far more sane to me. The Canadian one also runs roughly along the lines you mention.

I don't know whether Americans have been deterred from entering the field or not. However, I do know that in my particular subfield there is a distinct shortage of qualified people of any nationality.
When did people ever get excited about a press release from a major recording studio that wasn't related to a specific artist? How does "Artists and Apple can generate marketing buzz" mean that the record industry is dead? When did the record industry ever generate marketing buzz?
I believe it - I mean, after all: they did a massive study of 31 people. Myth confirmed then.
That's why they recommend the 5x1 setup for first person games.
%10 of 250k company would simply create a visa for money path.

Getting VCs to sit in a government committee and review thousands of visa applications seems rather unlikely, and their success prediction ratio is questionable.

The various legibility profiles I've seen (like those in Canada etc) all seem to filter out Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison..

Perhaps a solution is to allow investors like YC sponsor something like H1B granted to their companies' founders rather than their own employees.

But, is there really a need for all this? Why does anyone have to be in the US in order to start a company? If anything, shouldn't the web make geography less of an issue?
Mac OS X 10.6.1 is out already.
Beautiful glass sculptures of deadly viruses and bacteria
Good information.

It's worth noting that the sort of optics common on a 35mm pro cinema camera are a bit large for a hobbyist still photographer to be toting around.
I've also found that Americans like to lather sauce over everything, which begs the question of if they'd realize if we replaced all their meat with soy protein. This may be part of the diet problem.

In Canada we have ranch sauce, we have mayo, but it wasn't until I got to the US that I started seeing these things going on everything under the sun, in gigantic quantities.

Why have the ham sandwich if all you'll be tasting is the mayo?
Network Budget in Lockdown?  Prison System Reduces Opex- Network World
I think this is a great basis for eligibility. It isn't all that different from the "points" test in Australia (or Canada, from what I've heard).

My only difference is that I can't get behind granting residency to "everyone" with these attributes ... lots of people, sure, but I think that for practical reasons, the US can't offer citizenship or residency to everyone who would like it, even good folks who meet your criteria.

But considering that we take about 1.2 million a year into the US, I'd much rather a good system based on the criteria you've proposed than the dysfunctional nightmare we have right now.
(Most of) my teachers weren't really trying to teach us. They were just there to get a paycheck.

To whit: almost half of my graduating class was reported as valedictorian to the colleges they applied to. Why? Everyone with over a 4.0 was valedictorian. How'd we get over a 4.0? Becuase they added the bonus for honors courses on after doing the division, not before. Get an A and a B in two honors courses? That's ((4 + 3) / 2) + (.25 * 2) = 4.0!

This is why I have such a low opinion of education in general.
Eliezer Yadkowsky's page is a nice intro to Bayes's theorem, the understanding of which is critical for understanding why the posterior is proportional to the prior times the sampling distribution.

But Bayesian stats isn't just about applying Bayes's theorem. Its key feature is using probabilities for model parameters and incorporating posterior uncertainty of their values into inference.
I actually had one. I switched to blu-ray because of netflix.

A netflix subscription and a blu-ray player is both cheaper and more interesting than subscribing to all the premium movie channels.
Hah, this is so old!

I remember finding this article back when I was researching music blogs before starting the Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) in 2005.

Awesome!
Most larger companies have an "SSL Accelerator" which is usually part of a router/switch/load-balancer. This device does SSL in hardware, so it can do the offloading much faster and let the web servers and app servers worry about serving-up the app and doing that work. Most SSL Accelerators can do millions of connections without working too hard, so it's possible at large scale for larger websites without really worrying about CPU on the server-side. I'll bet that they just don't worry about SSL except for when it's absolutely necessary (personal info - login, purchase, ...).
Color me unsurprised.

15 years ago a circadian rhythms expert told me that early risers are people whose natural rhythm is shorter than a day. Night owls are people whose natural rhythm is longer than a day. Since the average human cycle is 25 hours, more people tend to be night owls than early birds.

This sounds like extra detail on that.
Yup, TN-1 for Canadians.

Doesn't help if you want to start a business in the US, though.
Where can I buy one of these CAVEs for my house? Will it cost more than my house?

Having GPUs like this could also be useful for research facilities and other people that need to visualize a lot of data at once.
A book I had about US immigration said that the situation you outline actually occurred with the E-2 visa for quite some time. That's why the criteria for the E-2 are so strict now - if the criteria weren't so strict, it'd be the ideal "founders visa" already. Basically the post is proposing creating a lax E-2 (of sorts), which already failed once. (Even though people are throwing around numbers of $500k, etc, for the E-2 - that was certainly not the case even a few years ago.)

Perhaps the most interesting comment over there is on relaxing the criteria for the O-1 visa instead. Perhaps instead of being "incredibly famous" you could just be "well known in your field" instead.. I better keep in the top 100 on Hacker News then ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size

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

Please educate yourself, and return if and when you have something useful to say.
Gordon Brown apologises to Alan Turing
The satellite clocks run at a slightly lower frequency than the desired frequency on Earth: 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Relativity
Political gimmick, but I remember the petition for this was posted here & I guess this apology was prompted by that campaign.
Same for me. 2am - 9am is fine for me. But when I go to bed at 10pm I don't want to get up until 8am. If I force myself to get up at 6am then I'll be pretty much spent by 8pm as far as any serious mental work goes.
Trevor's younger than us, but I believe his father was an early programmer too.
You can already buy a green card. The price is $500,000 to $1,000,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
Really? You left a {TODO} in your article?
I am not sure what esi type tags are. Mind sending me a link?

Suffices to say, no, we do not support that :)
I work in healthcare and this is my understanding from the responses of patients that I encounter - fast food is cheap. One of the families I work with, both parents are diabetic and the children are all overweight. I asked them about their eating habit and the answer was : McDonalds for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why? Because it's cheap to eat at McDonalds for a family of 4 than it is to buy vegetables at the market....for 3 bucks, you get a whole meal for one person. $3 at Safeway, you only get..a cabbage and some tomatoes?

They didn't understand that their eating habit is going to cost them much more in health expenses
"In other words, swearing casually removes the power of swearing."

Yes. Which is why we need stronger swear words than ever now. I propose "kruftonic." Nice and consonant-y for your stronger swearing needs.
What exactly does 'non-blocking' mean in the context of a webserver?
Guy Steele's talk from ICFP references this talk. I was at PPoPP and attended it.

In some ways, I thought his talk was a trojan horse: using parallelism to get a community with a large number of high performance systems people to embrace functional programming. But, I think that's a fair argument to make.
and the way they handle request in non-blocking way still have many benefits over Django in real web application especially if you have to make many calls to "other" http server to fetch data which happens a lot in today's world.
Non-Design Blogs
Yes, and there may be some other issues to look at here.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Maybe he is gregarious but also highly selective.
Just 5 minutes ago I was working with a developer who, after pulling up Google in her browser, immediately started checking her text size settings thinking somehow they became mis-configured.
That was my first reaction, as well.
Edge Side Includes. Proxies like Squid and Varnish support it for inclusion of dynamic data in otherwise cache-able pages.

http://www.w3.org/TR/esi-lang

It seems like this would not be mandatory in Tornado, since it is an app server; from my reading I'm assuming all pages are dynamic.
I read this and thought.. wow! I gotta give this a try!

Then I noticed I left the second to last comment on that post. 5. Years. Ago.. :)
My wife and I pretty much always split an entree in restaurants in the US, with maybe a side dish to go with it. Every time we get two, it ends up being way too much food.
"Well, the Cheesecake Factory is a bit of an outlying case ..."

I'm not sure about that. Cheesecake Factory, Claim Jumper, you name it.

Even the fast casual restaurants like Chipotle. They tout the "freshness" of their ingredients–despite the fact their burritos weight as much as my laptop.

Of course, every restaurant now is on the "hamburger slider" craze ... even though the slider is probably the size a normal hamburger should be.

Don't even get me started on the Midwest. When I first started visiting Oklahoma regularly, I was a little shocked. You'd almost think there was a state law that every restaurant had to be a buffet.
Good idea. In a nice, friendly note to the consumer, spell out the outrageous fees and mandatory crippling, and say 'we can't afford this and frankly, we think you deserve better.' If you succeed commercially, it puts pressure on the big boys to change their nasty ways.
I thought "they" was incorrect because it's plural. "He or she" is the way I was taught.
The Secret To Real Success
Yes, the difference is software. The filesystem performance is better. The hardware has the same performance.
31 data points?

I know that when we run A/B tests on our website, and calculate confidence intervals, we often need thousands of conversions before we see results that we are convinced are statistically significant.