skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are other languages you could make it small in, but those languages probably aren't among them.

Haskell: Hugs 98 is 723K, but it depends on /usr/lib/hugs, which is 7.3M. GHC can almost do it; I compiled a "hello, world" program with GHC and it "only" came out to 366K, which is 84K bigger than μTorrent's reported size. With UPX, however, it packs to 130k. (ocamlopt's tax is in the same range.) Maybe Haskell would be an option? Or does it bloat up when you include the libraries you'd need for this?

Erlang: My Erlang install is 97M. I don't know how much of that is minimally necessary to run things, but /usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.6.3 is 3.6M, 12 times the size of μTorrent. Stand Alone Erlang (http://www.sics.se/~joe/sae.html) is 1.5MB compressed.

Common Lisp: All the Common Lisp implementations are pretty big (SBCL, say, is 53M, of which 25M is the image sbcl.core), and they can't produce a standalone executable without including most of the environment. So you're starting at 25M.

Java: The JRE on my system is 98 megabytes, so a Java application to run on Win32 will be 98 megabytes plus the application code. Even if you compile your app with GCJ, libgcj is 33 megabytes.

Now, you could argue that the size of this stuff isn't relevant because it isn't specific to your hypothetical Common Lisp implementation of BitTorrent, but could also be used by whatever other Common Lisp programs the user has installed. But you would be treating a very-low-probability event as if it were normal.

Languages — or rather, language implementations — that could make a 300k runnable BitTorrent client include not just C and C++, but also Forth, assembly, Pascal, Eiffel, and any number of other fatally flawed niche languages that don't require hundreds of kilobytes of libraries just to initialize a process and exit. There are probably also Scheme implementations that would work.

Just about anything that has a reasonably small bytecode interpreter and lets you package the rest of your program as bytecode would probably win. x86 code is pretty grossly bloated by comparison to a good compact bytecode. (But compressible. See comment above about UPX.)

The only other practical alternative I know of would be Lua, which only costs you about half of your space budget for the interpreter itself. Lua's "bytecode" is actually wordcode, but presumably UPX or something similar would squeeze it down to a reasonable size.

It's my understanding that μTorrent does not need to ship with any shared libraries to run; the <300k of the executable alone is sufficient. You may think this is unimportant but I think that is an unconcern based in unusual wealth: you probably own your own computer to install software on persistently, probably several of them, you probably have several hundred kilobits per second of bandwidth to download software with, so you probably don't care how long it takes to download something or how much of a 256MB USB pendrive it takes up.

It's certainly true that there are any number of languages you could write a BitTorrent client in that would be just as fast.
Such a distinction between good and bad parts is much more difficult to define for C++ than Javascript. Javascript hasn't had the problem of programmers using separate subsets of the language. The bad parts of Javascript are design/implementation mistakes. The bad part of C++ is the overabundance of language features/complexity.

However, I think it would be great for someone to design a sensible subset of the language. Provide a lint tool (like Crockford's JSLint) which can enforce the subset. Marketing will be the hard part - a buzzword/name will be extremely useful for branding/word-of-mouth to work. A name will make it sellable, and identifiable, as a language of its own.
The article actually mentions the other reasons for collapse of those banks. But the article makes it clear I think that naked shorts did cause the collapse as it happened, otherwise it would have happened much slower.

Also naked shorts allowed many people to profit unfairly, by doing something that is illegal but it is not properly enforced.

Regarding the VW story, were naked shorts even involved in that? I don't think VW trades in US exchanges and I am not sure whether naked shorts are a factor in Germany. NAked shorting should be differentiated from ordinary legal shorting. Legal shorting is not that problematic because there is a natural limit to it. Theoretically naked shorts can crash any company because they can flood the market with an enormous amount of shares.
Debugging Lisp code
C++ Coding Standard and C++ Common Knowledge are both pretty good in that regard.

Although once you know what's going on under the hood you should be fairly safe - it just takes a while, and probably a read of Modern C++ Design or something like it in order to provide the motivation for the effort requried :)
One of the things that Yossi Kreinin points out over and over again in his FQA is that C++ is full of features that you cannot ignore. Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts is made significantly simpler by the fact that Javascript doesn't have the ability to e.g. silently bitslice your objects if you don't write copy constructors at every level, or forcibly pollute your type system with const endlessly, or force you to declare virtual destructors at every level. It's a much simpler language with numerous weird and positively deranged syntactical and library constructs, but you can ignore syntax pretty easy and ignore the library constructs pretty easy, so you can subset it easily.

C++ is much harder to subset, because the various (mis)features lean against each other for support like a tower of cards. It's not stable, but it's even worse if you leave some of the cards out. Even compiling C under a C++ compiler lets the nose of the camel in, as it were, due to const correctness. And (depending on your runtime, but this is required by newer standards) the moment you use new, which you have to use in many ways, you now have a situation where your program can throw an exception.
But let's face it -- micro-optimizing the space of the image on disk is a completely useless optimization these days. You are also not including the shared libraries that the binary uses.

When making my argument in the grandparent post, I did not even consider the size aspect to be worth discussing. If this is somehow important to you, then my argument does not apply.
I agree it is out of date. I haven't worked on that page for over a year I think. I have done so much cool stuff in the industry since then and I keep meaning to document it and share what I've learned but I've just been lazy. I did however document how to do 801q packet tagging in there. I did a lot of that about a year ago at NetApp where I worked with a lot of VLANs and virtual machines.
Tom Watson (British MP) tries to use social media to find his iPhone
"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

That's a touch simplistic. Spread the word where? To whom? How?

The issue of getting customers is so complicated that we are all here, reading, learning and coming up with ideas to be a success.

What is "needed" to get customers varies by market, by demographic, by expected return, by quality of product etc etc.

To be a success, a site needs to serve a customer base and then MARKET TO THAT GROUP. SEO may be imperfect, but what SE have is every demographic, identifying themselves clearly, by the keywords they use. Missing out on that traffic is just crazy.
Books: Powell's Technical Books

Tech meetups: http://calagator.org/

Retro arcade: Ground Kontrol

Nature: 10 zillion wonderful beautiful waterfalls and hikes nearby, I recommend a place called Angel's Rest for starters.

Coffee: Crema, Extracto, Stumptown

Tea: Townshend's Tea House, Tea Zone, Tao of Tea

Food: Pambiche, Pine State Biscuits, Tin Shed, Screen Door, ... there are too many to list, really. Epic food all over.

Dessert: Sahagun Chocolates, Cacao, Rimsky-Korsakoffee, Pambiche again

Employment: GOOD LUCK... Portland is already oversaturated with talent.
Overstock.com CEO:

"This really isn't about my company," Byrne says. "I mean, I've made my money. My initial concern, of course, was with Overstock. But the more I learned about this, the more my real worry became 'Jesus, what are the implications for the system?' And given what happened to Bear and Lehman last year, I think we ended up seeing what some of those implications are."
Perian: QuickTime plugin for codecs
For those OSX'rs out there -- this is useful.
I was talking about building them. You switch to coal prices.

Mining uranium is cleaner than coal? We had mines here in Germany and they were definitely environmentally very dangerous. Mining in western Europe has mostly stopped, the environmental damages are now transported to other countries. Let's see how the US deals their abandoned Uranium mines. Probably not at all. In Germany we have to deal with former mine. We already have invested almost five billion Euros into controlling the damages.

This makes a good read on the work needed to close these mines here in Germany:
http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/NEFW/documents/RawMaterial...

For fun calculate the cost of above into the world-market price of Uranium.

Surprise for you: coal prices are not the same in the world. The types of coal are different, the mining is different, labor costs are different.

The IEEE article is not accurate. The current actions in Germany show the opposite.

Reprocessing does not multiply the waste? Wow.

Why would you excluded hydro power from renewables. Germany has started to invest in renewables in the last two decades and the trend is clear. The goal is to reach 30% in a few years. That France does not export much energy from renewable sources is no surprise, they have betted all their money on nuclear power plants.

So with the backlog of processing in France, they ship the stuff to Siberia? I wonder if they know what they are doing? Probably not, France just managed to find a bunch of Plutonium in Cadarache. 39 Kilograms of Plutonium dust, instead of the 8 Kilogram the officials knew about.

A Blockheizkraftwerk will be run on gas and later on biogas. Sure that solves a lot of problems: it decentralizes energy production, allows easy reuse of heat energy, the energy production can be fine tuned to actual usage, gas is much less environmentally dangerous than nuclear materials or coal, ...
It is estimated 100000 of those will allow us to get rid of two Nuclear Power Plants. 100000 homes with those 'Blockheizkraftwerke' is a moderate goal in a country of 80 million people.

Germany already has high energy prices. It is still number one exporter in the world. The German industry is constantly modernizing to lower the demand for energy during production. Countries like China are far behind. It shows in their environment also.

The goal for Germany is not to have cheap energy, the goal is to reduce energy consumption, create new technologies and get rid of the old energy wasting industries.

That's what the article says, Germany is forward looking and has already started a change that will take many years, with the goal to produce most of the energy in a modern clean fashion and without nuclear power. Some other countries have similar goals. France and the UK don't. Let's see when they wake up.
Oh yeah, and they are already making gazillions of dollars and are profitable.

Didn't Facebook only achieve profitability a month or so ago? Or have I missed something?
I wonder what fraction of the Treasuries sold at auction are purchased by the banks engaging in this behavior?

If it's a decent but not overwhelming amount, it could be causing the auctions to be priced hire and thus overall increase the government's take.

So it's not necessarily clear what's happening here...
i did audience acquisition at a large established media company and in the span of about a year helped increase their traffic from natural(as opposed to paid) search over 90%.

now i'm a web analyst at a large retail site and at least 1/8 of orders is directly attributed to natural search traffic on a last touch and many more on a less direct attribution window.

if you don't think natural search is a marketing channel that needs attention, great- it'll leave more opportunity for the the rest of us.
It might and it might not.

That's the thing -- sure, perhaps all good ideas get great publicity and links simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all good business ideas make their owners lots of money simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all articles get referenced and linked based on their degree of usefulness to the world.

But in the real world, somebody has to go out and peddle ideas. That's marketing, sales, networking -- whatever you want to call it. Nowadays google is forcing us to go comment on other people's blogs, link-trade, and lord knows what else.

Good ideas simply don't always become popular simply because they're good and you tell a few people. It takes a lot more work than that.
In the same way that marketing exists to game people into buying things? A one word argument, "game", lacks substance.

The goal of SEO, good SEO, is to build a site that caters to both users AND SEs. After all, users make you money, and ignoring one over the other is silly.

A classic example is AJAX. SEs can't pass it, and neither cana lot of users. A "good" designer may know this and buid a site to cater for these users, but how? Will it use forms (invisible to SEs) or an alternate structure?

Sure, a great web designer may "get" all this, but can you be sure? Given that SEs provide the largest, ongoing form of traffic online, why take the risk?

"I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO."

Fallacy of dosage: ranking for a service with little competition is pretty easy. Capturing the whole raft of traffic available on a topic: difficult!!
They just went cash flow positive about a month ago:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-mi...
It's disallowed because it can cause failures to deliver if a borrow can't be located. Lots of fails can lead to systemic problems.
Actually, to get $3b in return, consider how many billions of dollars they'd have to buy of Treasuries. (1yr are paying .37% through 4% on 30yrs, which they probably aren't buying.)

Anyone know offhand how much the banks did borrow?
Evil maid is modifying the boot record with a hook to their own code. If the boot record where this function is located is hashed and verified at the next boot, couldn't truecrypt alert the user to the compromise?
> The broker buys 250 of the shares to sell to the person who wants to short the stock.

No. The entity that wants to short will locate (or get their PB to locate) shares to borrow that they will then sell, in order to short. They will pay interest on that borrow, and it can get quite expensive if that stock hard to borrow. They have to return the shares at some point - either when they decide to cover their short, or the lender recalls them.

Either way, the lender is still "betting" on the price going up, as they will get the shares back at some point in the future.
OpenSolaris is not really ready for a server, plus about one in four builds breaks something useful. If the features you need are in Solaris 10, it's probably worth the time to learn the grumpy old UNIX rather than be distracted by the new shiny.
Facebook Users get their Voice from TringMe App
India is still far behind in terms of infrastructure( bandwidth, payment, IT penetration ), very few people have made business of into fullfilling indian market, one of the few who made it were tally( indian accounting ) and naukri( job site )

IIT and IIM alumnis mostly prefer to go with business plans and want easy money fro VC's which does not happen very often

Most of the other so called products,services are either have US focus or try to clone existing products for Indian market

We at RailsFactory / Sedin Technologies would like to be in product space, but we are into consulting to build our expertise and network with people and understand end user usage for various services and products we build for our clients
I will agree that the Web 2.0 version of an acoustic coupler is much smaller than the 1970s version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
Hum but isn't that in essence how the government is able to make deficits? I mean, without this process the gov wouldn't be able to fund itself other than by taxes.

So the federal reserve creates money by loaning at ridiculously low rates (currently it's not a bad idea if there really is a threat of deflation), banks then use that money to fund the government by buying treasuries and in such we just inflate the money supply? So banks are like facilitators for this to happen and get 2% back for it?

I dunno, I mean yes they make awe full amounts of money but can you really go about cutting out the middle men completely here?
Sure, but it won't work with any phone, because Apple uses a proprietary TRRS connector that allows data to be sent to the iPhone/iTouch (used by Apple for an external mic and remote on standard earphones).
Perhaps its position is not constant. If so, we should understand how it changes over time before attempting to intercept it.
The STL is just a marvel and AFAIK C++ is the only language providing such a generic library.

Every time I tell someone about how marvelous the STL is I hear "yeah we have lists and maps in X language as well, C++ sucks".

The list I read in:

http://www.yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html

I realize the guy thinks "object oriented" too much. IMHO 2009 C++ is tailored for generic programming and meta programming. If you try to do C#/Java in C++, yes, you're going to bleed.

C++ is a multi-paradigm language, but it shines when you go generic. You can do incredible things.

And then I stumbled upon this:

"For example, overloaded operators have to return their results by value"

Wrong. The author doesn't understand the difference between, value, reference and pointer in C++. He doesn't understand copy elision. He doesn't understand operator overloading as well and when he talks about smart pointers he says you have to rely on defective (?!) meta programming features (?!). How, I thought I simply had to use std::shared_ptr.

C++ is hard. Because it's made to solve very hard problems.
And yes, you can solve these problems in C, you can also solve them in assembly while you're at it.

C++ bad reputation comes from people who should never have been in contact with the language in the first place.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but I imagine a mass spectrometer to measure its make up and magnetometer to measure the magnetic field would be at the top of the list.
http://github.com/blog/308-compojure-clojure-web-framework
Ruby on Rails, PHP, and JavaScript are three of the most awful languages out there. I'm horrified, but not suprised, that they are singled out as being important for making Facebook applications here. But this article stops at that useful advice and transitions into plugging something called AppBank, which appears to be the Facebook equivilent to YoYo Games Gamemaker. Yes, someone made a Facebook application that will make Facebook applications for you without requiring any development on your part. It goes without saying that this is goddamn retarded.
Hahahahahahah @ OS X
Desktop, laptop and an iphone.

BUT. The thing I use most is my Lightscribe Pulse pen. I'm an OCD note taker (I have an entire 12x12 wall full of notebooks), and I have shitty short term memory. Being able to record audio with my notes during meetings, cab rides, etc. has saved my ass countless times. More so than any other device I currently use.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13038258/Auditory-visual-and-physi...
Life lessons from an ad man
> 5. Too Much Bureaucracy

This is plain wrong today. As a person who started a company in Hyderabad, India, I know that the state governments of both IT Hubs of India(Hyderabad, Banglore) try very hard to be non-beurocratic. To register a pvt ltd company, I gave my CA, 25000 INR (~500USD). I never had to go to any govt office, they bought in some papers which I signed, and that was all it needed to get all required paperwork etc. My bank sent a representative to my office to open a bank account, and I didnt even have to go to my bank to open an account. Admiteddly all this took about 2 weeks, but I never felt it was bureaucratic.

Anyway this point is moot if you are talking why no product companies, as this impacts any type of company equally.
This is very true on the technical end of things. Where we (and by we, I mean the human race) are lacking is on the political end. I have come to the sad conclusion that there are not enough hackers in the political system. By a political hacker I mean people who are willing to experiment, to tinker, to say "I don't know if this will work, but let's try to find out", people who are empirically-minded and data- rather than poll-driven. I don't know how to solve this problem, either, as those of us of this mind-set tend to be more technically oriented than politically oriented.
That the USD is increasingly worthless in the world economy.
Its capital - Gangtok - government offices, banks, university, communications and infrastructure.
Anyone here using Nexenta?
This article is complete crap! At 3.6 Billion per quarter. Let say JP Morgain makes 10.8B a year. To make that with 2% yielding T-Bills the govt would of need to lend JP Morgan well more than 5.4 trillion.
pld-linux: 3 machines

Windows: 1 (one above is dual system, windows last boot in spring)
I don't have anything to add here. I just find it kinda awesome that the founder of Zoho is chiming in.
This is unfortunately correct, there is not built in unit testing in C++, you have to use an external library such as Boost.Test.
Can they not be profitable for a bit and then invest a bunch until they become profitable again?
Larry is also the author of my son's favorite history book: The Cartoon History of the Universe[1]

1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cartoon_History_of_the_Univ...
Reading comprehension problems can really mess up snarks, can't they. His "anti-to do list" was of things he DID that day.
Ah. I don't use the built-in Iphone headphones, so that's why I missed that...
How's it treating you? Sounds like a good distro for learning a little about Linux.

And welcome to HN. :)
Ousterhout and gang are credible guys, but this is completely back of the envelope vaporware. Some numbers are a bit dubious as well, like 1M request/s per server. Let's say the requests is simple messages like twitter with average length of 200 bytes (including message overhead), it would need cross sectional switch bandwidth of 2Gbit/s on small frames; anything more interesting say 20KB web pages, would need 200GBit/s switch bandwidth, which is not gonna happen any soon. It's no big deal to do 1M/s in process, but I'd love to see a real implementation that can do that over a commodity network.

Real RAM clouds already exist, as Bigtable etc have durable in-memory table that can take advantage of SSD as well.
I see a significant difference between the .Net and Java developer cultures. It would be hard for me to believe that a Java shop would behave according to your description.
I've lived here in Portland for about 9 months, and I can safely say this is an excellent list. It should keep you busy for a while.
That has nothing to do with the security of a US government bond.
Ask YC: Hacker Communnity in China (Beijing)
Anyone familiar with the "scene" there? Are there any meetups I should be aware of? Interested in meeting folks, especially Rails developers.