skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This really depends on the language. Ruby's code is (or at least was) quite nice. It is pretty much OO written in plain C.

By contrast Perl makes very heavy use of macros for portability, to an extent that may induce brain lock in many people, and makes your debugger very hard to follow. This is not to say that its use of macros is a bad thing in the end, but it is a definite shock.
That is a good point, and needs to be considered. From what I have read about their technology however, there are ways to substantially mitigate that risk.
Nice work. I take the El myself, but passed this along to everyone at my company.
"Big" or "small" software is relative to the problem at hand. The essentially author posits that "big == tightly coupled", which doesn't have to be true whether the team uses agile or not.

I think the real thing that the author denounces is blanket statements like "this project will be big so we must use Java" without really thinking about the project's potential structure or the best language.
You really don't need anything that complicated to beat low-stakes no-limit poker short stacking. I used to know a few people who made decent hourly rates just mechanically following a very small spreadsheet. I did it myself for awhile and it seemed like an easy win, though not as profitable as simply being good at the limit games I was playing and nowhere near as challenging/fun. My personal sample size was small, but I still suspect a small set of if/then statements would have been a winner.

The real challenge is finding enough tables to play. The bad thing about short stack is that sometimes someone calls you and you win, and now you've got at least a medium stack. Most sites don't let you come back to a no-limit table with less money than you left with until some period of time (for instance 2 hours) has passed. Party Poker did not have this feature (maybe still doesn't) so it would have been easy back then, but for an American now I don't know of any site of substantial volume where you wouldn't quickly burn through all available tables and find yourself waiting.

Even for a bot, there might not be much profit in it.
Right. I kinda clubbed that with no store, but no store really means no single-point of distribution.
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P2P becoming smaller fraction of Internet traffic
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I find the sources of ExtJS nice to read. They have an OOP approach.
The source cited, Benhockers book (http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Eco...), was a great introduction to "complexity economics". However, if you are more interested in the actual work, head to amazon and buy Growing Artificial Societies (http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Artificial-Societies-Science-A...) or head to Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=8sXENe8QrmYC&dq=growing...).
That was....weird. I understand the intent, but in my experience it isn't quite that thick of a fog.

As startups go, the successful ones worry about how they sound to the layman and explain things clearly, using everyday analogies and can relate to experiences "normal" people have.

Although obviously "normal" is a relative term :-P
It all comes down how well you can slice the process. There is no cheep over the counter solution to these problems but a little custom code can go a long way.

5k node updates per second might sound like a problem, but one core of one machine can easily keep up with that so you can have several copies and several views of the whole network graph. Public vs. private messages can be handled separately and then joined before presentation to the user. You can separate finding which message to display from the message data. You even get to display dirty reads as long as the data is <2 seconds old it's plenty good enough.

Ok, describing the solution based on the above insights takes some time and pictures but does it still sound horrible?

PS: Twitter was forced to morph an architecture built to solve a different problem into a working solution. That takes time and can be fairly difficult. But, starting from scratch it's not that bad.
Code snippet for startup success
> a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!)

> You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser.

Deceiving the search engine to tamper with its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught.

> users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search

They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users.

> Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals.

And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in another tragedy of the commons.
Having never tried it, I can't really say. I'm willing to at least seriously consider that the right dynamic language might be an excellent choice for certain big projects.

For instance, I've been doing a good bit of playing around with Perl 6 this year. I think by this time next year Rakudo will be stable enough to make it an excellent choice for developing large projects where execution speed is not of the essence. But that's just a hypothesis, I certainly haven't done enough Perl 6 programming to feel confident in that yet.
Computer Vision Networks
I bet that bank just let out a 'touché'
Man this is annoying:

1. The MyISAM/InnoDB debate is so stale it stinks. If you're using MySQL, you should be using InnoDB unless you know exactly why you should use MyISAM. None of these issues are relevant until you have alot of concurrency and uptime/transactions/integrity are radically more important than potentially faster SELECT statements on MyISAM.

2. Did HN really just put this flaccid article to the top of the list? Aren't we more technical than this?
Autonomica == Netnod, which runs most of Sweden's Internet infrastructure as well as i.root-servers.net (one of the 13 root DNS servers).
Anyone else have any experience with business/life coaches? I can't really see how I'd get anything out of something like that.
These people don't care if you say you don't like Memphis, but they do care if their flacks do; Memphis is part of their identity. You're also allowed not to like their logo, but you can't say that if you want to rep them.
http://www.crazyblinddate.com/
The story there makes you wonder how many investments they actually did.
Another player, founded by a former classmate of mine that got acquired by AutoDesk: http://www.3dgeo.de/
Memphis is part of FedEx's identity. Moreso than, say, International Paper's identity. This person works in communications. The fact that Ketchum had staffed FedEx with what appears to be a moron is relevant to FedEx. I don't think this is an overreaction.
I think you under-estimate the complexity and performance costs of having a massively distributed data structure. Having N nodes perform computations on a graph many times the size of N is easy. Maintaining some form of coherency throughout all N nodes is hard.

The communication costs are significant, and probably similar to N-body simulations.
sorry about that, i just checked all of the lines and everything should be fixed now. please let me know if anything else looks odd.
Isn't that a lot of what Y Combinator is about? It just means access to someone whose opinion you really respect, that also knows you well enough to give you wise customized advice.
i will certainly be adding delay information soon. i just need to write something to poll metrarail.com periodically.
I guess you could call it HTML 1.0...
Google Wave: The eternal conference call
The problem that they want to solve is:
"How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it's accurate, that it stays current and that it's useful to everyone who might want to use it?"

I think "stays current" is an important part of the question. Over a period of many years, buildings in an area are taken down and new ones are built.

Maybe Google will have an enthusiastic mass of people contributing to this project, and end up with good models of most of the buildings out there right now... but in ten years, are people still going to be doing this for them? I think mooneater's suggestion makes sense if you look at growing this into something big and robust in the long term.
So what. Some random facts: The CIA did very bad things in Guatemala, Shell did very bad things in Nigeria, Nestle did very bad things in Venezuela. Those are just 3 small examples. Many people know. But nothing happens.

Twitter is not going to change the world. You have to take action.
You should develop a large system by building many small parts that are bound together (probably by scripts). The "big monolithic program" approach is insane: it invariably leads to reinventing wheels (e.g. there is no good reason for an office suite to have its own scripting language).

Small parts can be written in whatever language makes sense for the task. Their partitioning leads to clean interfaces: command line options, file formats, or protocols, without which the parts could not be usefully combined. This has the great side effect of making each piece easier to test in isolation, as regression test data can be created for each part without regard for how the data reached that point. It also makes everything inherently more flexible, for unforeseen improvements.

When you have small parts that are easily tested, you can easily replace them. This is the basis for innovation or other maintenance: if you really have to, you can confidently throw out one piece and put in something better that is compatible.

It also helps immensely to open-source each part; at least, within your organization. It should not be surprising that people are more willing to contribute when there is something small they can wrap their heads around.
I remember reading an essay comparing engineer-speak and manager-speak to an "impedance mismatch"? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Wish I could find it ...
You can talk to friends and family without making it public. You can also live your life without twitter (though some might find that hard to believe)

The point I'm making is that there is a risk involved. You can't just say "if they get offended it's on them" because they might e-mail the VP of your company and the VP of your company might see firing you as less trouble than facing controversy.

And if there's one lesson I've learned in life its that no amount of proof reading will keep you from offending some people. So that point's moot.
These are Google suggestions about being Indian and being American
When you grow from zero to 100million users you get to watch as each piece breaks under growing load. Keeping a system running as it just keeps growing is hard.

However, Facebook rolled out a messaging system with little problem. I think the problem is guessing and simulating the load before people start messing with it. While not wasting millions building for load that never shows up.
I'd agree but as the article points out people in memphis are very sensitive about their town. If a decent sized boycott starts I'd bet this guy's job is toast (especially in this economy)

The issue is whether the irrational people can make enough noise to cause him trouble and whether that one tweet was worth the consequences it will bring to him.

(see tptacek's response above where he completely agrees with the guy who made this a big deal)
The NT kernel is the most beautiful piece of code I've seen

Modulo Plan9 kernel. It's also lot smaller a read (ca. 50 KLoC and that's it).

NT kernel itself doesn't have source out but for folks who are students

And folks who are hackers should be able to look in certain places to find the leaked version ;>
Check out this recent analysis of parts of the source: http://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/
Because those who ignore the pub-sub research IBM did in the 80s are doomed to re-implement it badly.
That graph is somewhat misleading. P2P clients use randomised port numbers now.

By contrast, P2P downloads arrive in random chunks, making it hard to know when a download will finish — which is when it’s actually possible to start watching anything downloaded.

When software appears like that chinese football streaming software with "click and watch p2p", then there will be some serious headaches in the movie/tv industry. Hopefully, hulu and the likes will have taken up that space by then.
Pretty graphics says ~0.5% for P2P. Tiny paragraph in the middle says 18%. The author deceives.

The graphic may accurately show that three of the ports popular with P2P programs are getting less use. These are a meaninglessly tiny portion of the total P2P level.

The result is a graph showing a factor of 5 drop for what is probably a factor of 2 drop in P2P's share of internet traffic.
Links or paper titles?
Peace and quiet is worth the price to a lot of people. Besides, all inventions are expensive at first, it'll become cheaper in time.

I'd actually like to see a ceiling version of this. :)
Awesome, thanks for the tip. Will look into that. And thanks for sharing the link. We're building the smartest, sharpest conversation about Chicago on the web over on the WC. Discussions like that are happening more and more.
What I meant is that I would comment further when not on my mobile device, but instead a keyboard. See my forthcoming comments above.
This is in fact an unsolved problem. Current database systems cannot handle this level of connectivity. Facebook can't do a "push" because of all the features they support. It gets extremely complicated if they push complex data into user's mailbox. And twitter cannot do "pull" so they can avoid putting a cap on the number friends/followers but then that's why they cannot really add any feature.
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+1. If you wanted to geek out or maybe demo something you're working on, Sully's Pub near North and Halsted might work. Chicago's Python and Android groups have met there a few times. They have a room upstairs with wifi and a projector, although I'm not sure if you can use that room unless you have a ChiPy-size group to buy enough food and drink.
Wow, thanks for all the feedback, I'll certainly take it under consideration. I wish I could give you another upvote :)
Ah, I finally got a reply link to your post.

"Deceiving the search engine to affect its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught."

Indeed. Yet that obviously does not automatically imply deceiving the users, as you erroneously stated earlier. Doing so would be stupid, as in serving up porn for bridge search results, for example.

"They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users."

Incorrect. You misunderstood what he stated. By saying "vote with their mice" he is referring to whether or not users purchase products or otherwise "convert". Granted, this interview does not cover his stance on DECEIVING the users. The following one does:

http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html

"Deceptive cloaking (again: solely viewed from the surfer's perspective) is self-defeating"

"And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in the tragedy of the commons."

Interesting that you would drag morality into an exclusively technological issue. I won't address this, as it has no place in this discussion.
Excellent article, misleading post title. It's a satire on book marketing trends from a writer's point of view. It attacks the Web 2.0 trend. The article is not about "techie" speak, at all.

It has some pearls on the situation of a decaying industry.
Title here bears no relation to title of article.
Ask HN: 50/50 CoFounder Split
Does anyone strongly suggest against it?
Good question. My experience was with Minix 2: I needed a floppy driver to weld on to eCos, and Minix's was by far the easiest to deal with. I haven't looked at Minix 3.
They also have been using 1-800-GOOG-411 to train their voice recognition engines (like Voice Search in Android)
Why Charles Stross hates Star Trek
I think that it depends on what phase of the project you are in when you start working together.

If you start working on a protytype / v1 together then 50/50 makes sense but if you have already started / are close to being done w/ a prototype when you start working together then 50/50 would not make much sense to me.
This is a ten month old article and comments that robustly argued both sides of the situation. How is this news, let alone hacker news?
I've never hired one per se, but networking is like having a team of them, and you can call any given one depending on your question. It's like having a super knowledgeable coach all the time, no matter what.
If Twitter generates 10N units of hype for every N units of substance, it's a huge advantage. If everyone's paying the same cost for their substance, Twitter's getting the highest possible return. It may never live up to the hype, but it'll be more than it would have been without the hype.

More on this:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/twitter-is-overhypedwhich-is...
Unfortunately it is US only, so it fails to be a game changer, but I guess congratulations are in order.
In the case of Twitter, CICS has been around since the 60s!
Yes - "Business" is too generic. Would you start a tech business in Pittsburgh?
10/GUI is the most dramatic reimaginations of the desktop user interface
It actually is pretty fascinating. I sat down to test it and ended up modeling four buildings in my downtown area. ;)

It works quite well and it is actually rather nice to see the building go up. It will be even nicer if I get to see them included in Google Earth. We'll see.....

At any rate what I am saying is that I don't mind working for them for free.
Maintaining some form of coherency throughout all N nodes is hard.

Hence the "eventually consistent" model.
Note that there are blades hidden in the base- This, again, makes the concept a bit disingenuous.

...It's still kind of cool though how the air generated by the fan hidden in the base is multiplied through the airfoil.
I'd say YC is more like a business partner. They know everything there is to know about your business and offer advice -- but that's because they've been there before and have an invested interest in making sure you succeed. So it's important they're honest with you and guide you as best they can.

But a coach is in a different position. How do you get someone with enough knowledge in your area to provide insightful advice? How do you make sure they're not blowing smoke up your ass to keep you as a client?

My guess is you just make sure you get the best or have an old friend in the business who won't pull punches. In that sense it's nice that something like YC is around for the upstarts that can't yet afford the best or don't have a prebuilt network.

But not every small startup can get into YC, obviously, which I guess is where sites like Hacker News and a good network of like-minded friends can fill in the gap.
Thanks a lot!! That really helped getting me some direction...I will be start learning HTML, CSS and then the JS!!
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Coming from the marketing world, this is all too true. Marketers think that everyone cares as much about fads as they do, so they think that when they spew about them everyone knows what the hell they mean.
That's still hard. There's a trade-off between accuracy and performance.
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A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write.

Succinct and insightful.
Twitter is good for feeling like you're taking action. Every tweet can be its own mini-protest. Only I expect that a bunch of people chatting on the Internet is a lot less menacing than picketers, rallies and demonstrations.
That's my fault - I wanted to highlight what I thought would be interesting to HN readers, the passages of tech-speak, eg:

"If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent."

This gave me a horrible feeling of recognition, he completely captured the rhythm and sound of a lot of my attempts at technical explanation. Substituting nonsense words for some of the real terms gave me a feel for how they must sound to other people, hence the title.
Actually, this is what I hear when non-geeks try to fake "techie."
I wonder if there is value to be had in migrating users to increase social graph locality.

The probability of (B fr C) is greater than the mean if (A fr B) and (A fr C). That's useful information.

Off the top of my head, I wonder how an algorithm like:

- I have N shards

- pick the top N most-connected users

- assign them each to a shard

- assign their immediate friends to the same shard

- randomly fill in other users

would work.

Possible refinements:

- if the %age of shared friends between two users in the top N is > X, put both users in the same shard + add the N+1th user at a new shard-seed

- chase more than one level of immediacy from the shard-seed users to fill the shard

- if a shard is full, don't drop to random allocation for 1st- or 2nd- level friends, but instead put them all onto shard+1

The idea here is that for pull or push you win if you need to contact fewer shards. i.e. the queries and updates needn't be per-user but per-shard. i.e. you can query/update for all users on a shard in one sql statement.

If you somehow manage to keep all of ashton's friends on 10 shards instead of 100, then that's a big win, surely?
I wish there was a way to offer an article without the ability for people to comment.

This article is sure to cause unnecessary argument -- for that, I'm sorry. But this was part of many conversations over the past year on this board and I thought the people who had those conversations might be interested in this information. I know I haven't seen it elsewhere. So it was definitely stuff that interested hackers, as evidenced by all the previous conversation.
For haskell I would recommend Xmonad. The code is short, lots of interesting functionality including a well written plug-in system.

http://xmonad.org/