skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. I want to know the answer, but not so much that I'm willing to spend the several hours necessary to familiarise myself with a large foreign code base. I was hoping someone here could give a quick top-level explanation.

From looking around, though, I think they're caching the user's votes and then just assembling the page on the fly from cache fragments. You could do that pretty quickly. Might be wrong.
Like, say, Facebook?
> So to sum it up the really significant difference between Seedcamp and Y Combinator is that Seedcamp throws lots of resources at a small number of potential businesses where Y Combinator throws a small number of resources at a large number of potential products.

not sure if this is right. Everyone I know who went thru seedcamp said the #1 benefit was the connections [which you'd get via YC] and #2 benefit was so far from #1 it wasn't worth mentioning.

I think seedcamp is more interested in later businesses - maybe about 3 months post launch. When they have traction and the proposition is more refined. My understanding of YC is that they love to get down and dirty in refining that proposition. Hence YC being more risky, hence the more deals.
True.

That's why I thought the comment I replied to was kind of pointless.
The uncanny valley of Cygwin still beats the valley o shadows that is vanilla Windows.

And Cygwin does X. You can get xterm or rxvt running, if you like that 90's feeling. It can do Gnome and KDE, but that is stretching it a bit too far.

I used Emacs under Cygwin/X for a long time, but after having some problems, I went with the Windows native. Life is bearable, if not good.
Updating the cache is far from easy. An example that show cases the non-triviallity is MySQL's query cache: it will purge the whole cache on a table update. If you get a lot of reads, this works great, but if you get a lot of updates, then MySQL query cache will be very inefficient as the cache will be purged on every update. MySQL query cache has a lot information available that could be used implement a smarter cache, unfortunately this problem is far from easy to solve even with a lot of information available.

The bottom line: good luck on expiring the cache on database updates ;)
Norman Borlaug, Saved Millions from Starvation - Dies Aged 95
Pretty sure BBC A+MI is a Rails shop (most of the rest of the BBC, including iPlayer, is Perl).
Benchmarking Tornado vs. Twisted Web vs. Tornado on Twisted vs. Unicorn
Much discussion already at:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926

Different item - from the BBC - covering the same ground.
Summary:

When describing what you do, or pitching, start from the listener's point of view, not yours.

Now go read the article where he takes too many words in too many colors and too many fonts to say "I'm important, listen to me! Listen to me! You're an idiot!"

Sometimes how you say something is just as important as what you say.

http://www.penzba.co.uk/SoothSayer.html

I wish he'd said it less psychotically.
I'm having such a great time telling all my friends about this :) (who are also coders)
Dirt cheap: Techdirt bets on 'free' business models
Oxford Don, with one-to-one learning, 16th-century tutorial gets new life online
There's a lot of software on a modern phone. For at least a decade, all the major mobile phone manufacturers have been large software companies.

I don't see what would have changed significantly at Motorola: if anything, they seem to be scaling back their software effort, letting Google take care of the platform.

(Previously Mot was involved with Symbian and had a custom mobile Linux variant -- http://developer.motorola.com/platforms/mobile-linux -- in addition to its proprietary "dumbphone" OS which is used on most of the handsets the company still manages to sell. All of these projects are likely much bigger efforts in terms of manpower than this new "social" shell on top of Android.)
Surely the creation of course materials is a one time event with a small maintenance element. And every child in the world follows roughly the same curriculum, only the rates change. So it would follow that these should be available free from the government right?

I use SRS (mnemosyne) with my kids for learning and it's awesome. It's faster than doing "homework" because it automatically adjusts to what they need to learn.
Betashop: 3 Keys To Being A Founder
Follow-up to Paul Buchheit's post on evaluating risk.
Otoh I have always assumed pretty much everyone is pale in Norway. :-)
In general, the less performant the better. I can explain: Whatever I make run fast on my noteboook, will be wicked fast in the production servers.
I wish them good luck with this, I think it's going to be very hard.

I know everybody is disgusted with Java GUI's, at least on OS X. They just don't fit in. SWT uses native widgets, but I don't think anyone would dare call SWT GUI's native on OS X.

However, a text editor might be something different. A large part of the GUI is the text view itself. If you can use SWT to power that, and use native font rendering with all it's pro's, then you should do it. Using system fonts, system font smoothing etc. is very important in a text editor. I wonder how it compares to Core Text?

I just hope people won't be turned off by the rest of the GUI. I've looked at a few examples of SWT applications on OS X, as I don't really use Java apps myself:

http://www.rssowl.org/images/overview/rssowl_mac.gif

http://zekr.org/quran/zekrimg/mac2.png

You'll have a hard time making the non-text-edit parts look acceptable.
Completely agree with you that #1 benefit of either Seedcamp or YC is the connections. I'm talking about the differences in approach here rather than the benefits.

Seems to me Seedcamp provides connections by surrounding teams with as many as possible. YC on the other hand seems to more carefully find the most useful connections for each individual startup so as not to create too many distractions for the teams. That said, being based in Silicon Valley has the effect of naturally surrounding teams with as many connections as possible.

I think Seedcamp's apparent interest in later stage business is not so much by design. It happens because of the way it is funded and the way funding decisions are made. They choose more mature looking startups because the funding committee collectively perceives them to be more likely to succeed.
"But when he really did ask if he and a couple of buddies could have a few beers at my house, I just said no. No follow-up, no prevarication, no buddying up for a sympathy injection."

While I see the purpose of a clear 'No', in some cases, it just seems like it's rather jerkish even if said in a nice tone. How hard is it to say instead, "No, and that is final; my reason is such and such, just so that you know"? I know that I would be accepting of the latter answer, but questioning of a pure "No", since it would seem as though he was just being instantly judgemental.
Why It Might Be Healthier to Sleep Alone
Yikes, you ARE out of touch.
Unfortunately, often it ends up being very annoying when the computer tries to be smart. Not to say it can't be done, but the PC's helping hand is not always welcome.
Baidu unfazed by Google's China inroads
Please say it ain't so. I love dumb software.

Every time I see dumb software (which is just about every day), my juices get going with all kinds of ways to do it better.

I became a programmer because I thought it would be fun and a nice living.

I remain a programmer because there is still so much to do. And thanks to dumb software, there probably always will be.
the impression of utility is more important than actual utility. what does the extremely high priced option (50k in the example) signal to the customer? that someone out there is deriving 50,000 + x value from that service.
Peace and Sport
Motorola Cliq May Make Handset Makers Uncomfortable
Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power
Lisp book - chapter preview (13-16)
My very first customer was the boss of a friend of mine. I asked my friend what his boss was willing to pay. "It doesn't matter," my friend replied, "Just charge him 50% more than what you really want and let him negotiate you down. As long as he thinks he's getting something from you, he'll be happy, and you'll get whatever you want." Great advice.
Only on trains.
It is stupefying that this article is written now, and there is not a single reference to semantic web, or artificial intelligence research.

This problem has been identified decades ago, years of research have gone into it, and some solutions have been identified. Granted, most solutions are not workable, precisely because they try to be too smart, which ends up not working either.

But just saying "why is my meeting scheduled at 2am?" or "why doesn't it recognize names?" or calling out "This is the end of dumb software!" is being dumb yourself. Seth could've at least done a little bit of research.
Yeah, when a program tries to be smart and repeatedly, helpfully "corrects" what you're doing, it often just gets in the way or corrupts your work.

Word is the first example that comes to mind (for myself, and many people). One such situation is they way that git just punts on hard merge decisions - coming up with accurate heuristics for complex merging is very difficult, but the programmer responsible for the merged content can usually make the decisions easily. This frees git up to focus instead on storing and propagating those decisions well.
The title get's it right. "No" is about power.

I prefer "yes", which is less about power and more about getting things done.

Interesting article. Will I ignore OP's advice and keep doing what I always have?

Yes.
Sometimes the assumptions that you make to make software smart will make users go postal.

I once had a coworker who was a smart guy. He helped design the guidance system for the HARM missiles. But one day he called me over to his office to ask for help. Ends up Microsoft Word was automatically injecting text while he was typing and he didn't know how to get it to stop.

The smart software's injects were correct given a specific type of paper for the general populace, but not for his edge case.
It would be interesting if Twisted people actually looked at the problem and tried to tune their framework to match the performance... Since someone from that team (afaik) already argued that Twisted can be just as fast, they should be inclined to prove it.
Sure ASUS is hitting the market with good products, and we like what they've achieved this is incredible and now a slim normal laptop comes for settling the scores, its got alot of range, so lets show you what we know about it.

Run on sentence.
Wow, that article was difficult to understand.
So what are we going to do to celebrate "Programmer Day"? Clearly, I'll have to celebrate by digging out some old coding projects and reminiscing. ;)
The first issue is not related to dumbness. It is handled usually with a pop up window that shows you the entire text when hovered.

Second issue can be handled as an option: "all my appointments are in business hours."

Maybe Seth Godin wants that infamous paper clip back: "I see you are drafting a letter. Let me help..."
You mean, founder of the modern overpopulation problem?

Let nature regulate itself. It seems to think several steps ahead of where human thinking stops.
Read to the end of the article, context matters.
Ask HN: How to communicate adaptability to employers?
In looking for software engineering work over the last few months, I've found many openings for which I would be qualified, if given 2-4 weeks of training. In this economic climate, though, employers can find someone who is already experienced in the exact ways that they want, and they tend to go with the "safe bet".

I suspect many HNers are similarly frustrated.

As an aspiring generalist, I've explored many avenues in computer science. If I get the chance to sit face-to-face with someone, I am 100% able to communicate my often deep knowledge about all sorts of technical subjects--especially machine learning and functional programming. But I have no "proof" of my expertise on these subjects, and therein lies my conundrum.

How can I communicate that, although I may not "look good on paper", I learn and adapt to new situations and technologies very quickly, and am worth interviewing?
"Dumb software" -- FTFY (title)
It takes a crane,
to build a crane

Yes, I am quoting a Jason Mraz song...
This has been solved. The solution is called DCI.
Data Context Interaction. A new paradigm where you design your software according to the end users mental model. Understand DCI and you should be able to craft software that makes more sense per usability. Trygve Reenskaug has explained why the traditional MVC is flawed.

ref. http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_visionP.html
Normal people don't use command lines as it's not discoverable, they can barely type, it's a pain, easy to forget, etc.

And compared to 1998 when the article you cite was written, normal people also have supercomputers sitting in their living rooms where time to launch for 1,000s of lines of code is instant, for all intents and purposes.

We have APIs, Flash, Silverlight, WPF, Java and many, many more to take away the pain of writing GUI code.

"time spent making a program beautiful is time not spent making it functional"

Try telling that to all the people who bought an IPhone. It's time to man up and accept the fact that a good UI and hence UX is essential to modern programming.

But feel free to go on living in 1998. I see the appeal, you get to point at your emacs screen and do the old 'all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead...' ;)
Perhaps I've just been unlucky ;-) This was Allied Telesyn kit IIRC.

But this is by the by! Rather than a damning indictment of STP, my real point was that having to configure all the layers of a network - physical cabling, VLANs, routing, firewalling - independently involves a load of effort that I'm not convinced is necessary. It'd be lovely to have routing functions occur in every switch, automatically routing between VLANs that are present together on the switch, and then doing MPLS-esque fast switching of frames across the network to destination switches if not - merging the switching and routing layers of the stack would just simplify things; why should we need the complex techniques we have to make networks resilient to failure?
Testing against unicorn makes no sense whatsoever. Test against eventmachine-httpserver, that's similar in scope and featureset.
No. I'll check it out, thanks.
On the getting things done. In the company where I did internship last year there was completely different attitude. People were urged to use "Yes, if..." instead of "No, because...". Not surprisingly this is the most successful EDA company.
Capital Factory Demo Day: Five Startups on Display
Nope, he really means 2.
Open source projects are a good way - in some circles, at least - of demonstrating that you know how to get stuff done.
What is geeky about this quiz? except the reference to fonts?

I would like to see FP and FN on cheeses and fonts. Stats are quite useless right now except for showing that almost everybody knows Helvetica is a font.
And added a 150,000-line dependency.
That's so 8-bit!
On the contrary, no to superfluous bullshit is a powerful tool for getting stuff done. Someone I know likes to just say I'm bored now and walk out of pointless meetings.
On the link economy
It's not really bootstrapping considering another crane is used to build the base of it...

Well, there's no reason it has to be that way, except money and time. One could, in theory, assemble the base and initial structure by carrying individual steel rods and buckets of concrete to the site and assembling them all.

But the astute (and, perhaps, perverse) observer would note that this only pushes the problem farther down the stack. Using humans to carry your parts to assemble the base isn't really bootstrapping, either, because where did the steel and concrete come from? For that matter, where did the humans come from?

Unfortunately, we don't yet know how to depict humans being bootstrapped from raw organic chemicals at this level of detail, and even if we did it would probably run a bit longer than 6:17.
He uses tons of chemical fertilizer not pesticides big difference.
Offer to come in for a day and work with the team. More and more agile teams are interviewing this way and it would be the best way to show that you can understand what they are doing and make helpful suggestions or even write some code on day one. (of course make sure that you think you can do this)
Command Line or GUI is a false dichotomy. For example, both of you cite Emacs as a command line tool, but I haven't used Emacs in a terminal for years. The Emacs I use today is a Cocoa application with pull down menus, drag and drop, etc. (I still wouldn't call it pretty, or a good example of user interface, but not because it is a CLI.)
I agree that it could have been left out as it's a different beast. But I wanted to compare Tornado and the others with one of the fastest (and increasingly popular) web server from the Ruby world.

PS: I'm about to update my post with the results from Thin and evma_httpserver.

PS2: My post has been updated.
I think you underestimate the effort it would take to write concise, accurate documentation for a project the size of twisted. I bet it took far less time to write the 5000 lines of code in Tornado than it would to rewrite the documentation for Twisted and its web modules, and get that accepted and integrated upstream. And it wouldn't fix the fact that Twisted has all sorts of functionality that Tornado developers don't need, aren't interested in documenting, and that web developers would have to either avoid or wade through.
Notice that the comment included a lot of adaptation for feedback from the question and answer period, too. And the various "flashcard" systems have the same feedback, but it's automated into the system; in a class you don't have that automation.
Garbage Collection 2.0 vs. Web 3.0
Secrets of the centenarians: Life begins at 100
Snow Leopard UI roundup
Be careful about reading to much into this - ApacheBench is a very limited (if convenient) benchmark that isn't very realistic of real world load.
Well, "I'm bored now" hasn't come up, but I sure have said "I don't think I'm contributing to this meeting anymore" and walked out. Fortunately, that gets light bonus points for me with my boss, which makes it easier.

Also, remember that phrasing; even without my particular boss that is likely to make a point with any sensibly-business-minded boss.
The subtler point of this article is that a simple no is a good test of your authority- service personnel, students, people he had power over; they had to except his "no." Girlfriend? Not so much.

The power in question isn't the added power of using the word- it's the way the word reveals the power dynamics at play. He didn't gain more authority by using the word; the word revealed to him his authority and its limits.
Doesn't Google own a stake in Baidu?
Medvedev's office:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2453/3714584029_6d37f5a64e_o....

Oval Office:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/01/21/us/21obama5-6...
I've found you're actually better off forcing MetalLookAndFeel on OSX than you are with Java/Apple's incredibly crappy Cocoa skin.
That's a great suggestion--thanks!
iPhone App Idea: Why not build a page-based "Audience Reaction Meter" for books?
See http://filmtvindustry.suite101.com/article.cfm/cnn_debate_audience_reaction_meter

You could allow readers to upvote/downvote any page in a book.

Moreover, you could allow people to identify themselves as belonging to one of various groups (e.g., evolutionist vs creationist) so you can see separate ratings for each group.
Pinax 0.7 released, ready-to-run social network on Django
That is for areas where a powerline is already available. If that is not the case the numbers are very different.
PHP runs some of the largest websites out there - hardly "simple web templating."

You can write administration scripts in PHP, deploy scripts, hell, you can even write Windows apps in PHP (though it's horrifying).

Just because you don't use it for anything more than simple templating, doesn't really mean much. PHP is everywhere.
I haven't yet looked at tornado, and it's been years since I seriously investigated twisted. That said, even though it's less code to use twisted, not counting twisted, it's going to be quite a lot more after counting twisted, most of which, as you note with "can do far more than tornado can", they didn't want in the first place.

When there's a bug in tornado as it is, they can just fix it. If there was a bug in tornado-on-twisted, and if the bug were in twisted, they'd either have to wait until the twisted maintainers fixed it, or fix it themselves. If themselves, then they end up maintaining the internals of twisted (at least for the time between fix and having the patch accepted), which means they have to keep track of and understand a lot of code that, as you note, they don't have any use for in the first place! In that situation, I might choose to write my own as well.
Acai Berry Detox - 3 Tips to Lose Weight Using Acai Berry Detox
Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid (surviving TC50)
Way back, my grandfather used to haggle in the local shops (back when they where still worked by their owners, haggling was possible). What he didn't get, was that the shopkeepers knew he was going to haggle and so adjusted the price upward.

So yeah, that trick definitely works.
doesn't work in opera.
What I did in Rails on a previous app was:

- Tie hooks into the logger so I can track exactly which ActiveRecord models are accessed in a given page view.

- Have 100% test coverage AND make sure coverage pattern (i.e. frequency distribution of line execution) at least looks something like production AND use subset of production data for testing.

When tests are run:

- Use the logger hooks to build the tree of partials included in each view, and models included in each view/partial (i.e. we got a User which had Friends and an Avatar which had a PicResource .. etc.), where the models are linked by foreign key relations, and pages/partials linked by inclusion. This is why you need 100% coverage & real data - you don't want to miss anything.

Then:

- Tie cache-busting code to ActiveRecord's after-save hook. When a table is updated, you go to every tree in which that model appears and go up until you hit the highest partial. You bust the partial and then you bust the top-level page.

- If you want to tune this further (for expensive pages), you can differentiate between CREATE and UPDATE. On CREATE you need to bust the whole cache for those partials/pages. On UPDATE you only need to bust existing cached renders of those pages. So you can just store the N most-viewed pages/partials with those models, and keep their IDs around.

Why we did this:

I realize this isn't typical for a web app. Our app had to render binaries for embedded devices, so we had to compile everything into a single file before it went out the door. This was a highly interactive app, so pages changed all the time. Using this system, we could:

a) maintain quick response times by almost never rendering on page view (rendering was compute-intensive and required about 500ms per page)

b) pre-render often-used and often-changed pages

c) save our precious database from wear and tear

d) do all this WITHOUT harassing the page/content developers, who could throw together new rails views/controllers using whatever AR models they please, without having to maintain onerous "cache-busting" lists or strict model-controller ties.

(I've omitted some details here, like dealing with cyclical dependencies .. no fun otherwise :)
Consider relocating for a time to a location where work is less scarce than wherever you currently live. That might not be easy at the moment however.
Google Groups Used To Control Botnets
3-4x the number of simultaneous connections (ignoring the actual performance gains) strikes me as pretty significant, even under a limited test.